Dr. Reiko Tomii is an independent art historian, who investigates post-1945 Japanese art in global and local contexts. Her research topic encompasses “international contemporaneity,” collectivism, and conceptualism in 1960s art, as demonstrated by her contribution to Global Conceptualism (Queens Museum of Art, 1999), Century City (Tate Modern, 2001), and Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art (Getty Research Institute, 2007). She has worked closely with numerous artists including Yayoi Kusama, Xu Bing, and Ushio Shinohara. In 2003, She co-founded PoNJA-GenKon (www.ponja-genkon.net), a listserv group of specialists interested in contemporary Japanese art, and organized a number of symposiums and panels in collaboration with Yale University, Getty Research Institute, UCLA, Guggenheim Museum, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Asia Society Museum, University of Southern California, and Japan Society. Her book, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan, is forthcoming from MIT Press in Spring 2016.
In this segment of the theme “Global Conceptualism Reconsidered,” the curators of the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s reflect upon their experiences organizing the exhibition. They address in the following interviews the origins of the exhibition’s concept, the challenges faced in defining and presenting the variety of conceptualisms across the exhibition’s many international subsections, and…
