Center for Arts, Design and Social Research

A precise history of Japan’s agriculture-based communitarian projects and the utopian theories that have motivated the country’s social changes

As a part of his research series on the historical practices of communitarian utopias in different countries, Ou Ning’s new book, The Agritopianists, focuses on the labor experiments of intellectual groups in 20th-century Japan’s rural areas. From the collective Atarashiki-mura (New Village) Movement initiated by Mushakoji Saneatsu, through many other individual semiagricultural life practices of Japanese writers and artists, the book traces the emergence of a shared agricultural fundamentalism that informed and evolved into the active political interventions of later years. Ou Ning combines original field investigation with a close reading of the historical archives to construct a narrative spanning period and geographies that is always attentive to specific detail. The Agritopianists takes the reader to the historical scene and asks them to consider its relevance to today’s urgent questions of ways of living and planetary thinking. Among the many histories of utopian thought and experiments, this is a unique rethinking of environmental possibilities through geographical and cultural differences.
Ou Ning (born 1969) is a poet, writer, curator, filmmaker, editor, researcher, activist and founder of the utopian villages Bishan Commune and School of Tillers. In 2004 he cofounded the Alternative Archive with artist Cao Fei. He has edited several journals including The Voice, Modern Chinese Poetry, Filmakers and Chutzpah!. He taught at GSAPP, Columbia University, and worked as the chief curator of the 2009 Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture.