Japan Boom, 1954, New York

Panel Discussion

Saturday, June 8, 4 PM

In 1954, Japan had an enormous cultural impact on New York City through artists Ruth Asawa, Saburo Hasegawa, Isamu Noguchi, Kenzo Okada, ceramicist and calligrapher Rosanjin and architect Junzo Yoshimura. In this discussion, Mark Johnson (Professor and Gallery Director, San Francisco State University), Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer (Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures), Doryun Chong (Deputy Director and Chief Curator of M+, Hong Kong), and Dakin Hart (Senior Curator, The Noguchi Museum) explore the sensational Japan Boom that occurred before the global 1960s. Moderated by Japan Society Gallery Director Yukie Kamiya.

Tickets: $15/$12 members, seniors & students

Each ticket includes same day, complimentary admission to the exhibition Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s.

Box Office Policy

Mark Dean Johnson is Professor of Art at San Francisco State University. He is the Principal Editor of Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 (2008: Stanford University Press), and co-curator of the exhibition and co-editor of the related catalog Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan, and the related title The Saburo Hasegawa Reader (both 2019: University of California Press).

Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer is an art historian specializing in modern Japanese art. She received her Ph.D. from Heidelberg University in 2016 and since then held positions at Emory University, Atlanta, GA and Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington, D.C. In summer 2018 she joined the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in the UK as a lecturer (assistant professor) in Japanese arts. She is currently working on her book manuscript People of the Ink: Japanese Avant-Garde Calligraphers in Postwar Abstract Art.

Doryun Chong is Deputy Director, Curatorial and Chief Curator of M+, a new museum of visual culture that will open its Herzog & de Meuron–designed building in 2020, in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District. Appointed as the inaugural Chief Curator in 2013, Chong oversees all curatorial activities and programmes, including acquisitions, exhibitions, learning and public programmes, and digital initiatives encompassing the museum’s three main disciplinary areas of design and architecture, moving image, and visual art. Some of the exhibitions he has curated or co-curated at M+ include Mobile M+: Live Art (2015), Tsang Kin-Wah: The Infinite Nothing, Hong Kong in Venice (2015), Samson Young: Songs for Disaster Relief World Tour (2018), and Noguchi for Danh Vo: Counterpoint (2018). Prior to joining M+, Chong worked in various curatorial capacities at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2003–2009) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009–2013).

Dakin Hart is Senior Curator at The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, where he oversees the Museum’s exhibitions, collections, catalogue raisonné, archives, and public programming, and has the daily good fortune of collaborating with Isamu Noguchi in absentia.