During the Asia-Pacific War, Japan mobilized women in support of the Japanese Empire by capitalizing upon decades of patriarchal and nationalist ideas that had been embedded within society and these women. Japanese women were drafted into volunteering for women’s defense organizations, most prominently the Greater Japan National Defense Women's Association (Dai Nihon Kokubo-fujin) in the 1940s, and they were tasked with being mothers not only to the families they were supposed to form and grow but to the nation as a whole. The role of Japanese women in the war was rarely focused upon in traditional discussions of the war until Japanese feminist artist Shimada Yoshiko decided to probe into the unique manipulation and mobilization of Japanese women into enthusiastic fascists. Her artistic oeuvre includes etchings, installations, collage, and performance works, all of which focus on some aspect of the Asia Pacific War as related to Japanese women and most often Korean ‘comfort women’. A key component of many of her artworks is the usage of politically charged clothing to illustrate the banalities of everyday nationalism. This thesis focuses upon her usage of the Japanese kappōgi, a white apron that became conflated with motherhood, and the iconic kimono in an analysis of how clothing was positioned as a (false) liberator for Japanese women while other Asian women suffered at the hands of the Japanese Imperial Army. Dealing with positionality and memory, Shimada’s artworks illustrate how the Japanese state and society capitalized upon the seemingly innocent nature of clothing to construct and enforce nationalist divisions between Japanese women and other Asian women and appeal to Japanese women’s desire for a larger sense of freedom and importance within the Japanese Empire.

This dissertation analyzes photographic practices in Tokyo, Kobe, Kyoto, Yokohama, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area, paradoxically illustrating the materiality of photographed objects through images presumed to be immaterial. I examine how photography was used to investigate the material operation of busshitsu––the Japanese term meaning “matter” in English. Busshitsu was examined in the artistic discourse developed between the mid 1950s and the early 1970s in Japan as the external material reality of things that unsettled modernist anthropocentrism. The dissertation analyzes the international emergence of conceptual photography, which illustrates the medium’s potential to produce ontological shifts by breaking down the hierarchy of relationships in the world and liberating artists from the limitations of their eyes, preconceptions, and languages that impose fixed meanings on the material environment. By investigating the visual and conceptual parallels between the less-studied photographic practices of Japanese artists, such as Takamatsu Jirō, Kinoshita Kazuyo, and Nomura Hitoshi, and American artists, such as Bruce Nauman, Jay DeFeo, and Judy Chicago, the dissertation aims to expand the scope of the study of the history of contemporary photography and shift the focus from the center-versus-periphery paradigm to the mapping of multiple localities. I contend that their works challenged the image-saturated world that embodied the domination of the American hegemonic-capitalist order that followed the Second World War. Ironically, this was accomplished through photography, the same medium that created that world.

This dissertation analyzes a selection of photomontages by contemporary artists Tomie Arai (b. 1949-), Yong Soon Min (b. 1953-), and Ann Le (b. 1981-) that reimagine 20th-century U.S. wars and militarism in the Asia Pacific Arena. These artists use forms of collage to look back on the Cold War and to disrupt U.S. Cold War historical narratives of U.S. rescue and liberation of Asia. Using feminist epistemological approaches, they reveal diasporic memories of survival, resistance, and futurity. Their artworks reinterpret and reclaim public and private photographs through the artistic strategy of photomontage, which entails the juxtaposition and reconfiguration of photographic materials. I argue that Arai’s, Min’s, and Le’s artworks serve as alternative sites of remembrance that critique the Japanese American incarceration during World War II and U.S. militarism in Asia during the Cold War, Korean War, and the Vietnam War. In this project, I offer the concept of “ethical memory works” to describe how such Asian diasporic cultural productions engage in the complex politics of memory and the ethics of care - for the past, one’s community, and other communities. I suggest ethical memory works are defined by ethical remembering, speculative storytelling, and feminist acts of care.

Shigeko Kubota and Yoko Ono are two Japanese diasporic artists that use video art to engage with the natural world. Kubota’s Soho SoAp/Rain Damage (1985) and Ono’s Sky TV (1966) utilize elemental properties to create video landscapes that derive from both the topographical earth as well as their personal narratives. Using third space theory and the third mind construct, I examine the ways in which these transnational artists embrace nature in order to create transcendent spaces within their respective artworks.

This thesis is a survey of four Vietnamese-American artists, whose queer identifications and disidentifications trouble easy categories of identity. The Vietnamese refugee and the queer figure have largely been overdetermined by minoritizing forces, which is to say that the refugee has been understood as a consequence of United States military intervention, and the queer figure has been understood as a corrupting, infectious monster. These identities themselves are not inherently challenging to the dominant mode of history, in which the heterosexual white male imposes his will on the world and contains these racial and sexual others in their categorical confines. However, it is in the mobilization of these identities in tandem that the works of Mimi Thi Nguyen, Hanh Thi Pham, Nguyen Tan Hoang, and Viet Le endeavor towards truth’s undoing. These artists and creators utilize convolutions of pop-cultural signs and signifiers, looking towards their respective stars, divas, and outlaws to embody an aesthetic of affect, rather than straightforward auto-ethnography. Mimi Thi Nguyen’s 1997 zine evolution of a race riot weaponizes Hanh Thi Pham’s unflinching self portrait, Misbegotten No More (1991-2) as the publication’s cover. This serves Nguyen not as an academic citation of queer Vietnamese women, but rather as a borrowing of Pham’s affective power recontextualized as a de-individualized punk feminist icon. This mobilized Pham’s rejection of gender and the state from the fine art sphere into the subcultural networks of D.I.Y. punk publication, where her iconography as a racial, gendered, and sexual outlaw was virally popular. Nguyen Tan Hoang’s auto-ethnographic documentary PIRATED (2000) on VHS tells the story of his departure from Vietnam at the age of 7, getting attacked by Thai Pirates, and ultimately saved by German Sailors. The film rips clips and music from the popular Vietnamese-American direct-to-video variety show Paris By Night, and intermingles it with pirated footage of The Crimson Pirate, Querelle, and his own self-made gay Asian pornography to make the trauma-porn of his narrative all the more erotic, and as a result, unbelievable. Finally, Viet Le’s photo series boy bang/gang band (2008) and his self-made music video loveBANG! (2008) explore the viral modes of popular media in the context of a post-Đổi Mới, or liberalized Vietnam. Boy bang specifically flirts with the repressed desire of the Vietnamese state and local audiences for metrosexual cosmopolitan Asian boy band masculinities. loveBANG! is a saccharine pop cultural spectacle through which its audience is invited to be distracted from traumatic Southeast Asian histories of Cold War conflict, interrupted development, and state censorship which nonetheless haunt the video’s backdrop. Though each of these artists are also active academics whose scholarly work otherwise builds histories of Southeast Asian, queer, and diaspora subjects, it is in their artistic work that queerness works beyond the gaps in the archive to produce pleasurable fantasies wherein history might be contested, rewritten, or forgotten.

My dissertation traces the life of Japanese oil painter Kazuki Yasuo (1911-1974). One of postwar Japan’s most significant oil painters, he is not well-represented in English Language scholarship on the period, a lacuna this dissertation seeks to help rectify. The introduction presents a brief history of oil painting (Yōga) in Japan, the problems of representing war experiences in postwar Japan, and the cultural climate to contextualize Kazuki’s corpus. The subsequent chapters recount Kazuki’s life and work chronologically. Chapter One begins with his family background and early interest in art, particularly painting, culminating in his study at Japan’s premier art academy. Chapter Two picks up with his graduation and chronicles his early career struggles, followed by his conscription and culminating in his capture by the military forces of the USSR. Chapter Three describes the conditions of the time spent by Kazuki, as well as hundreds of thousands of other Japanese POWs, in the infamous “Gulag Archipelago” of labor camps in Siberia. This time would go on to inform his most significant body of work, the Siberia Series. I also recount his repatriation after two grueling years in Siberia, and the eight- year interregnum that followed, during which he could not bring himself to represent his Siberia experiences. Chapter Four then focuses closely on the Siberia Series, which, after breaking through his extended representational silence, dominated his artistic output for the remaining years of his life (and continues to define his posthumous legacy). Here I also focus on the analysis of paintings of the series and the broader meaning and implications of it, both in relation to Kazuki’s oeuvre as well as significant postwar Japanese artists and postwar Japanese art more generally. Additionally, I triangulate Kazuki’s position in postwar art, and his commonalities and divergences from significant war-related artists of his times. The Conclusion traces Kazuki’s final days, as well as his postwar and posthumous legacy.

As the devastating effects of the Anthropocene become ever more acute, contemporary artists are increasingly concerning themselves with ecology: the study of relations between organisms and their environments. In this thesis I examine several projects that address these critical issues. Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba and Jae Rhim Lee are two artists who focus on the excremental body by which I mean the vulnerable, mortality of the body through its excretions in life and after death. In their works they confront various dimensions of death and transmute the excremental body in order to expose neo-liberal necropolitics and remediate disembodiment. Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s film Memorial Project Waterfield: The Story of the Stars (2006-2014) and Lee’s Infinity Burial Project (2008-Present) both utilize substances that are considered taboo, such as urine and corpses, in order to transgress boundaries of purity and danger. Through a transdisciplinary analysis, I will examine how each artist approaches US necropolitics affecting Vietnamese and American bodies through ecological, psychological, and cultural lenses.

At the height of his career, Keith Haring sought to visualize his philosophy, “art for everyone.” This paper aims to focus on his philosophy and artistic message through the establishment of the iconic Pop Shop. The artist-run store is a testament to his philosophy of democratizing art. Situated at the epicenter of New York City’s vibrant art scene during the 1980s, the Pop Shop established a form of artistic communication between diverse audiences as an art installation and store. Unlike traditional art spaces, it connected individuals from different socioeconomic backgrounds and encouraged engagement in the artistic space. Haring’s creative development is surveyed for a contextual understanding of his art and the decision to commercialize it through his formal art training, artist influences, and daily life. It focuses on his specific artistic communication, audience reception, and the creation of his legible aesthetic. This paper explores the multifaceted nature of the Pop Shop that emphasizes the visualization of Haring’s message. The audience engagement and interaction were the focal points that led to unforgettable aesthetic experiences, visual engagement, and substantial art product consumption. The democratization of Haring’s art is attributed to his artistic persona and message that aided the success of his career and, subsequently, the Pop Shop. As a visualization of his “art for everyone,” the shop's legacy serves as evidence of his life’s work. It is a reminder that art lies not only in its creation but also in the dynamic relationships it fosters with its diverse audience, inviting them to explore, engage, and embrace the transformative power of art, unlike before.

Almost sixty years after Duchamp completed Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2) in 1912, Japanese American artists, Yayoi Kusama and Shigeko Kubota implicitly and explicitly appropriated Duchamp’s work in Traveling Life (1963) and Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase (1976). Several decades after Kusama and Kubota completed their works, a Japanese-Samoan artist based in New Zealand, Shigeyuki Kihara, explicitly appropriated Duchamp’s Nude as well in Maui Descending a Staircase II (After Duchamp) (2015). The lengthy time span between these works and their striking visual parallels suggest that there is still something suggestive in Duchamp’s nude, especially to artists who have been marginalized from the art world because of their gender and ethnicity. I argue that these artists reworked Duchamp’s nude to provide feminist and postcolonial critiques of the artistic category of the nude.