In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan

A pioneering look at an immensely creative period in Japanese art that developed amid the Cold War.

Alicia Volk brings to light a significant body of postwar Japanese art, exploring how it accommodated and resisted the workings of the American empire during the early Cold War. Volk’s groundbreaking account presents the points of view of Japanese artists and their audiences under American occupation and amid the ruins of war. Each chapter reveals how artists embraced new roles for art in the public sphere--at times by enacting radical critiques of established institutions, values, and practices--and situates a range of compelling art objects in their intersecting artistic and political worlds.

Centering on the diverse and divisive terrain of Japanese art between 1945 and 1952, In the Shadow of Empire creates a fluid map of relationality that brings multiple Cold War spheres into dialogue, stretching beyond US-occupied Japan to art from China, Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and demonstrates the rich potential of this transnational site of artmaking for rethinking the history of Japanese and global postwar art.

Alicia Volk is professor of Japanese art at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement and In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art, a recipient of the Phillips Book Prize. She has been a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellow, an Ishibashi Foundation-Japan Foundation Fellow, a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow at the University of London, and a Fulbright Research Scholar at Waseda University in Tokyo.