Asato Ikeda

Associate Professor of Art History

Dr. Asato Ikeda headshot

Faculty Memorial Hall 440
Fordham University-Rose Hill Campus
441 E. Fordham Road
Bronx, NY 10458

Phone: 718-817-0119
Email: [email protected]

Office Hours: by appointment
Make appointment here

Education

B.A. University of Victoria, 2006; M.A. Carleton University, 2008; Ph.D. University of British Columbia, 2012

Specialization

Asian Art, Japanese Modern Art, War Art, Fascism, Museum

Biography 

Originally from Tokyo, Japan, she earned post-secondary degrees in Canada. Her research interests lie in modern Japanese art in particular and Asian art in general, and the topics of imperialism/colonialism, war, fascism, museums, sex, gender, sexuality, and transnational exhange.

Her primary research is about Japanese paintings produced during the Second World War. Her first monograph on the topic, The Politics of Painting: Fascism and Japanese Art during the Second World War, was published by the University of Hawai’i Press in 2018. The book presents a study of non-battle Japanese paintings produced in the 1930s and early 1940s, using the concept of Japanese fascism as an interpretive framework to understand the political nature of seemingly unproblematic paintings with traditional icons such as Mount Fuji, historical figures, beautiful women, and rural landscapes. She has also co-edited the first English-language anthology on the topic of Japanese war art, Art and War in Japan and its Empire, 1931-1960 (Leiden, Brill, 2012).

She has also been active as a curator, and has been keen to engage with the public about important social and political issues through art. Most recently, with Joshua S. Mostow, Ikeda curated the exhibition A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada (2016) and Japan Society (2017) which focused on the social and sexual role of male youths in Edo-period Japan. She was involved with the exhibition Japanese Inspiration: Early Printmaking in the Canadian Arctic installed at Takamado Gallery in Tokyo, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Burnaby Nikkei Center, and Carleton Art Gallery between 2011 and 2014

Ikeda is currently writing her second monograph, Japan in Canada: The Art and Visual Culture of Transpacific Crossings, which will be the first in-depth art historical study to look at the emergence of a new culture in Canada that reflects the increased transpacific crossings of people and objects to and from Japan before the Second World War. The book not only investigates the collection, circulation, and production of photographs, prints, posters, postcards, and art exhibition catalogues across the Pacific, but also complicates the binary between “white racists” and “Japanese victims” by illuminating the diversity of both white and Japanese populations.

  • ARHI 1100: Introduction to Art History
    ARHI 1102: Intro to Art History: Asia
    ARHI 2225 Japanese Modern Art and Contemporary Visual Culture
    ARHI 2228 Japanese Woodblock Prints
    ARHI 2223: Art and War in Japan and its Empire
    ARHI 4562: Art & Fascism

  • Books

    Japan in Canadian History: The Art and Visual Culture of Transpacific Crossings (book manuscript in progress).

    The Politics of Painting: Fascism and Japanese Art during the Second World War. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018.

    Reviewed in

    • Impressions: The Journal of the Japanese Art Society of America 42 (2021) [by Stephanie Su]
    • Sequitur (Spring 2019)[by Sara Stepp]
    • Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review (June 2019)[by Alicia Volk]
    • RACAR (2020) [by Victoria Nolte]
    • CAA Reviews (October 11, 2019)[by Hannah Slater]
    • Monumenta Nipponica 74.2 (2019): 312-315 [by Maki Kaneko]

    Kaiga no seijigaku: Dainiji sekaitaisen ka no fashizumu to nihon bijutsu. Tokyo: Seidosha. 2020. (Japanese translation of The Politics of Painting)

    Edited Volumes

    Art and War in Japan and its Empire, 1931-1960. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Co-editor with Ming Tiampo and Aya Louisa McDonald (double-blind peer review).

    My contribution includes:

    • “Introduction,” co-authored with Ming Tiampo and Aya Louisa McDonald
    • “Modern Girls and Militarism: Japanese-style Machine-ist Paintings, 1935-1940”

    Reviewed in:                                                                                                             

    • The Art Bulletin 97.4 (December 2015) [by Alicia Volk]
    • Impressions: The Journal of the Japanese Art Society of America 35 (2014) [by Catherine Bae]
    • Journal of Military History (April 2014) [by Hal Elliott Wert]

    Exhibition Catalogues

    A Third Gender: Beautiful Youth in Japanese Prints. Co-authored with Joshua Mostow.  Toronto; Leiden: Royal Ontario Museum Press; Hotei Publisher, 2016 (peer reviewed).

    Reviewed in:

    Articles and Chapters

    “Modern Art.” Laura Hein, ed., The Modern Japanese Nation and Empire (1876-2011), vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Forthcoming in 2022.

    “The Tokyo Olympics: 1940/2020” The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus. Vol 18, Issue 4, Number 11. February 15, 2020

    “Curating A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 5.4 (November 2018): 638-647 (double-blind peer review).

    “The Japanese Art of Fascist Modernism: Yasuda Yukihiko’s Arrival of Yoshitsune/Camp at Kisegawa (1940-41).” Modernism/modernism: The Journal of Modernist Association Print Plus (approximately 10,000words) May 20, 2016 (double-blind peer review).

    “Ikeda Manabu, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, and Disaster/ Nuclear Art in Japan.” The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus. Vol. 11, Issue No. 13, No. 2, April 1, 2013.

    “On Uranium Art: Artist Ken + Julia Yonetani in Conversation with Asato Ikeda.” The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus, Vol. 11, Issue 11, No. 1. March 18, 2013.

     “The Transnational History of Japanese Woodblock Prints,” co-authored with Ming Tiampo, exh. cat. Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2011.

    "Twentieth Century Japanese Art and the Wartime State: Reassessing the Art of Ogawara Shū and Fujita Tsuguharu," The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus, 43-2-10. October 25, 2010. (double-blind peer review) 

    “Japan’s Haunting War Art: Contested War Memories and Art Museums,” disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory 18 (2009): 5-32 (double-blind peer review).

    “Fujita Tsuguharu Retrospective 2006: Resurrection of a Former Official War Painter,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 21 (2009): 97-115.

    Book/Exhibition Reviews

    Review of The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Culture of Transwar Japan, written by Charlotte Eubanks) published by Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020) for Journal of Asian Studies 79.4 (November 2020): 1008-1010.

    Review of Mirroring the Japanese Empire: The Male Figure in Yoga Painting, 1930-1950, by Maki Kaneko (Leiden: Brill, 2015) for Impressions: The Journal of the Japanese Art Society of America 37 (2016): 200-207.

    Review of The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in Nineteenth-Century Japan by Maki Fukuoka (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012) for CAA Reviews, 2014.

    Review of the exhibition The Fascination of Europe: Western-style Paintings in Modern Japan (the National Museum of Korea) for Modern Art Asia 1 (2009).

    Translations

    Translated from Japanese to English. Kira Tomoko, “Images of the Home Front in War Art Exhibitions (2011).” Bunka-cho Art Platform Japan, 2022.

    Translated from Japanese to English. Miyazaki Hayao, “Constitutional Amendment is Out of the Question,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 36 No.1, September 8, 2014.

    Translated from Japanese to English. Hirase Reita, “War and Bronze Sculpture,” Art and War in Japan and its Empire, 1931-1960. eds. Asato Ikeda, Ming Tiampo, and Louisa McDonald. Leiden: Brill, 2012.

    Translated from Japanese to English. Kim Hyeshin, “The Visual Representations of War in Korea, 1937-1945.” Art and War in Japan and its Empire, 1931-1960. eds. Asato Ikeda, Ming Tiampo, and Louisa McDonald. Leiden: Brill, 2012.

    Translated from Japanese to English. Yomota, Inuhiko, “Tennō Hirohito no shōzō: Sokurofu, Taiyō [The Portrait of Emperor Hirohito: Sokurov’s The Sun (2005)], Review of Japanese Culture and Society 21 (2009): 71-81.

    Other

    “War Art in Japan,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. Ed. Stephen Ross. London: Routledge. 2016.

    “Tattoos: Japan,” ROM Magazine, Spring 2016. p.4. (300 words)

    “The Japanese Woodblock Collection at the Royal Ontario Museum,” Friends of East Asia: Newsletter of the Bishop White Committee, Spring 2015. 2-3.