Dr. Yurika Wakamatsu, assistant professor of East Asian art history at Occidental College, will explore Tsukigase, a plum-filled mountain valley in today’s Nara Prefecture that came to be celebrated as a paradisiacal site in 19th century Japan, in a virtual event hosted by The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens on Thursday, June 10.
This is an online event, on Zoom, where Dr. Wakamatsu traces Tsukigase’s transformations during this period. She will examine how poets and painters who worked in the Sino-Japanese mode of literati art constructed a fleeting, utopian realm of reclusion by imbuing this remote landscape with imagery drawn from beloved works of Chinese literature.
Dr. Wakamatsu teaches East Asian art history, including pictorial narratives, woodblock prints, comics and anime, and gender and visual culture. She pursues cross-cultural and interdisciplinary research and teaching in East Asian art history by engaging with the disciplines of art history, literature, history, and gender studies. In particular, her work focuses on the intersections of gender and pre-modernity in 19th century Japanese art.
She is currently preparing a book manuscript, tentatively titled “Painting in Between: Gender and Modernity in the Japanese Literati Art of Okuhara Seiko (1837–1913),” which investigates the aesthetic and conceptual transformations of literati art during the period of Japan’s modernization. Her study seeks to reconceptualize the relationship between gender and literati art.
Simultaneously, she is working on a project that examines the feminization of art and modern conceptions of Japanese womanhood; an earlier version of this essay was awarded the 2015 Chino Kaori Memorial Essay Prize from the Japan Art History Forum.
Dr. Wakamatsu has a BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and obtained her AM and PhD from Harvard.
To reserve your space in the Zoom lecture, which begins at 4 p.m., visit https://tickets.huntington.
For more information, call (626) 405-2100.
