Topic: Exploring Gender, Artistic Censorship, and Global Knowledge Circulation from Contemporary Japanese Visual Art
Presenter: 阮斐娜 Faye Yuan Kleeman（Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Colorado Boulder）
Moderator: Shu-Wen Fan (Professor, Department of Japanese Language, National Taiwan University)
Time: November 2, 2020 (Mon) 10:20-12:20
Venue: Conference Hall, College of Liberal Arts, NTU (1st floor, College of Liberal Arts)

(This event is a physical lecture, so there will not be a simultaneous online stream. The recorded video will be uploaded to our YouTube channel and NTU's lecture website about a month after the event, and we will announce the video upload on our Facebook page to let our audience know about it!)

Organizer: Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Science
Co-organizer: Department of Japanese Language and Literature, National Taiwan University

Presenter: 阮斐娜Faye Yuan Kleeman, PhD. Graduate from the Japanese Department of Soochow University, an M.A. in Japanese Literature from Ochanomizu University, Japan, and a Ph.D. in East Asian Literature and Culture from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently a professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Colorado. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Japanese literature and culture, visual arts, East Asian colonial literature, and transnational culture. She is the author of Under an Imperial Japanese Colonial Literature and the South, In Transit: Formation of an East Asian Cultural Sphere (English), The Creole Language of Great Japanese Empire (Japanese)”, "The Empire Under the Sun" (in Chinese), and many other journal articles. Professor Yuan has been awarded the Folbright Scholarship, the Japan Foundation, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology(MEXT), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the German Advanced Research Program Fellowship, and is a recipient of the 2020 Taiwan Fellowship from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has been invited to serve as a scholar at Tokyo University, Chuo University, Tokyo Metropolitan University, National Chengchi University in Taiwan, Southeast University in China, and Erlangen-New York University in Germany. He has also been invited as a visiting professor at Tokyo University in Japan, Chuo University in Japan, Tokyo Metropolitan University, National Chengchi University in Taiwan, Southeast University in China, and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.

Abstract:
The 2019 triennial art exhibition, "Expressions of Unfreedom", was forced to close one week after its opening in Nagoya. Several of the works in the exhibition were protested by some members of the public for their political and gender-specific interpretations. As the ironic title of the exhibition suggests, the exhibition itself was an attempt to find alternative means of expression for writers and works that had been marginalized by the traditional mainstream art world. The entire closure has led the Japanese art world, academia and the mass media to reflect on the current state of consensus and inclusiveness of Japanese contemporary art.
This presentation explores the impact of animation and manga on Japanese visual art through several visual art controversies in the past decade or so. Using the works of the world-renowned Super Flat artists Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara and the highly controversial Japanese artist Seiji Aida as examples, the presentation explores how Japanese society has shaped artistic expressions of gender, consumption, and aesthetics through the mechanism of consensus building and self-seriousness. She also considers the knowledge gap and the gains and losses in the process of accepting these visual products as they circulate in Japan and abroad.