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Asian American mixed-media and installation artist and cultural activist. Ken Chu came to the United States from Hong Kong in 1971, settling in California where he received a BFA in film studies from San Francisco Art Institute (1986). Relocating to New York City after graduation, his encounters with local Asian American artists, activists and cultural organizations supported his artistic efforts, in which he often drew upon subjects that emerged organically from personal experience in the US as a gay Asian man. Adopting popular cultural idioms from film and comics, while also drawing upon symbols and motifs from Chinese and other Asian cultures, his imagery from this pivotal period featured Asian men cast as prototypically American masculine figures, such as California surfers and cowboys, who populate colorful, imaginary scenarios of cross-cultural contact, mixing and desire. In Western societies, where the dominant norms are non-Asian and few viable role models for Asian men exist, Chu’s art strongly asserted their collective presence and place. His socially inspired work has since also engaged matters of anti-Asian violence, internalized racism, stereotyping, homophobia and the impact of AIDS on Asian diasporic communities....

Japanese, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1946, in Kagawa Prefecture.

Sculptor, painter, draughtsman, engraver.

Haraguchi Noriyuki studied at Nihon Uni­versity until 1970. His style can be described as Pop Art and he mainly uses heavy materials such as concrete, steel, copper and tar. Work by him was shown at the following: the seventh Exhibition of Contemporary Japanese Art (...

Japanese, 20th century, male.

Born 1944.

Painter.

Neo-Pop Art.

Hayashi Takashi graduated from the municipal art college in Kyoto in 1968. His work forms part of the Pop Art trend in Japan. He has shown his work at group exhibitions since 1968, including at Japanese Art Today...

Japanese, 20th century, male.

Born 1923.

Painter.

Pop Art.

Yoshikuni Iida was awarded the prize at the exhibition Contemporary Japanese Art organised by the Mainichi newspaper in Tokyo in 1968, and in 1969 the Grand Prix at the first Suma open air exhibition of sculpture. In ...

Japanese, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1962, in Tokyo.

Painter, sculptor.

Neo-Pop Art.

Takashi Murakami trained for many years in nihonga, traditional Japanese-style painting, at the prestigious Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, receiving his PhD in 1993. Although he received rigorous training in traditional techniques, Murakami more closely identifies with the Japanese geek subculture of otaku which emerged in the 1980s surrounding anime (animation) and manga (comic book) art. Murakami’s entire body of work is a melding of the high and low aspects of Japanese culture, using comic book conventions to construct an elaborate private narrative as well as articulate postwar national identity. Although closely aligned with the trajectory of American Pop Art, Murakami’s practice advances the work of Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons by addressing concerns specific to Japan in the face of global cultural influence.

In the late 1990s, Murakami put forth the theory of Superflat, which later became the title of a group exhibition he organised for the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles, in ...

Japanese, 20th century, male.

Born 1935, in Tokyo.

Sculptor.

Pop Art.

Haireddo Senta group.

After studying painting at the fine arts university in Tokyo from 1954 to 1958, Nakanishi Natsuyuki began teaching in primary schools.

He started showing work at group exhibitions in 1959, including ...

Japanese, 20th century, male.

Born 1936, in Yokohama.

Painter.

Like many young Japanese artists of the 1960s and 1970s, Ono Masuho was not an adherent of Pop Art or Conceptual Art; indeed, his work remained austere and demanding, and was a manifestation of Geometric Abstraction and Constructivism....

Japanese, 20th century, male.

Active in France since 1967.

Born 1945, in Morioka (Iwate Prefecture).

Painter.

Neo-Pop Art.

Isao Utsumiya graduated from Musashino Fine Arts University, near Tokyo, in 1967, and moved to France, where he has lived ever since. He has a spontaneous, loaded technique. His work is dense and expressionistic and his colours are intense. Figures and objects, often defined by a single trait, seem to propose a symbolic vision of existence....