Allegories of time and space : Japanese identity in photography and architecture / Jonathan M. Reynolds

Author:: Reynolds, Jonathan M. (Jonathan McKean)
Published:: Honolulu : University of Hawaiʻi Press, [2015]
Copyright Date:: ©2015
Physical Description:: xxix, 316 pages, 12 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 23 cm

Availability

Finding items...

Contents:

Hamaya Hiroshi's "return to Japan": documenting the folk in snow country -- "Uncanny, hypermodern Japaneseness": Okamoto Tarō and the search for prehistoric modernism -- Ise Shrine and a modernist construction of Japanese tradition -- Paradise lost, paradise regained: Tōmatsu Shōmei's photographic engagement with Okinawa -- "Young female nomads of Tokyo": imagined migration through Tokyo in the days before the bubble burst.

Summary:

"Allegories of time and space" explores efforts by leading photographers, artists, architects, and commercial designers to re-envision Japanese cultural identity during the turbulent years between the Asia Pacific War and the bursting of the economic bubble in the 1990s. This search for a 'cultural home'; was a matter of broad public concern and each of the artists under consideration in this volume engaged a wide audience through mass media.These cosmopolitan dreams may seemuntethered from their Japanese cultural context, and yet, there were threads that linked the 'urban nomad'; with earlier efforts to situate contemporary Japanese cultural identity intime and space. These artists found it necessaryto establish distance from their immediate surroundings temporally or geographically in order to gain some perspective on Japan's rapidly changing society. They all shared an allegorical vision, a capacity to make time and space malleable, to see the present in the past and to find an irreducible cultural center at Japan's geographical periphery. Their work enhanced efforts to redefine tradition in contemporary terms and, by doing so, promoted a future that would be both modern and uniquely Japanese.--Publisher's web page.

Subject(s):

Genre(s):

History

ISBN:

9780824839246 (cloth : alk. paper)
0824839242 (cloth : alk. paper)

Bibliography Note:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

View MARC record | catkey: 14424148