Tag Archives: Master's Program Art Department

Dr. Gennifer Weisenfeld

“Protect the Skies!” Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan
Protect the sky! Regarding Japan's air defense image during the war

July 2019, 7 (Tuesday) 23th period (4:13-45:15)
University of Tsukuba Arts Building B203 Conference Room

Jennifer Weisenfeld, a professor at Duke University in the United States who studies Japanese modernist art, gave a special lecture.The theme is the relationship between Japan's wartime air defense and popular culture.Photographer Masao Horino's 1936 Gas Mask March depicts female students wearing gas masks marching through the city as part of an air defense exercise.Centering on this photo, he talked about the many facets of the image of air defense.The fear of air attack creates the ritualized gesture of air defense drills, and campaigns for air defense fashion and products stimulate consumers' desire to purchase, creating a sense of duty and satisfaction, fear and joy, death and sensuality. , images of monsters and eroticism (as evoked by gas masks), and seem to have created ambivalent desires in times of emergency.Through the lecture, I was able to realize once again that militarism and modern popular culture are two sides that cannot be separated.This special lecture was held as part of the specialized subject ``Art History Seminar A-1'' held by the College of Arts and Sciences, and was attended not only by the 12 students but also by master's and doctoral students as well as students in the doctoral program in the humanities and social sciences. A total of 30 participants attended, including students and art faculty.Furthermore, after the lecture, a question-and-answer session and lively discussion were held, providing an opportunity for participants to exchange information about their research.

GENNIFER WEISENFELD, Professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies and Dean of the Humanities at Duke University, received her Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her field of research is modern and contemporary Japanese art history, design, and visual culture. Her first book Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 (University of California Press, 2002) addresses the relationship between high art and mass culture in the aesthetic politics of the avant-garde in 1920s Japan. her most recent book Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan's Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012, Japanese edition Seidosha, 2014) examines how visual culture has mediated the historical understanding of Japan's worst national disaster of the twentieth century . She is the guest editor of the special issue Visual Cultures of Japanese Imperialism of the journal positions: east asia cultures critique (Winter 2000) that includes her essay, “Touring 'Japan as Museum': NIPPON and Other Japanese Imperialist Travelogues.” She has also written mainly on the history of Japanese design, such as, “'From Baby's First Bath': Kaō Soap and Modern Japanese Commercial Design” (The Art Bulletin, September 2004) and the core essay on MIT's award-winning website Visualizing Cultures on the Shiseido company's advertising design. She is currently working on two new book projects, one titled The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan, and the other, Protect the Skies! Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan.