About

My PhD research has been driven in part by the scarcity of academic research on 1980s Japanese art and its infrastructure, despite the recent global-scale revisionism in post-war Japanese art. With this in mind, my thesis explores the activities of the Tokyo-based alternative space, Sagacho Exhibit Space (1983-2000), an important creative hub at the time, focusing primarily on its formative years up to 1988, with a special emphasis on its initial three years.

Starting with an in-depth analysis of the gallery’s archival materials, my thesis has two principal objectives. Firstly, it explores the gallery from the three perspectives of its space, curatorial projects, and operational activities. Secondly, it contextualizes the gallery’s activities from a further set of three perspectives: the post-war cross-disciplinary and anti-categorization initiatives between 1940s and 1970s, with an extended focus on the cross-section of art and design; the recent discourses on installation and exhibition design; and the current debates on gallery and museum management, especially in relation to Western-style alternative spaces and Japan’s exhibition making traditions. Through these objectives, my thesis proposes analytical and theoretical frameworks where a critical assessment of the gallery can be made in a larger context of post-war Japanese artistic traditions. Ultimately, my research will achieve my aim of linking the relatively new research area of 1980s Japanese arts to those of the previous period with the Sagacho Exhibit Space as its core.

In accordance with the new art history introduced in the 1970s, a social art-historical approach underpins my research, with an empirical emphasis, using archival materials held at Sagacho Archives in Tokyo as the main resource, supported by secondary sources and my interviews with Kazuko Koike (1936-), the founder of the Sagacho Exhibit Space, and others.