Academic Associate
Bert Winther-Tamaki is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine, specializing in modern and contemporary Japanese art history. Recent courses taught include Japanese Art and Disaster; Postwar Japanese Photography; Modern and Contemporary Japanese Ceramics. He is currently working on a book titled Promethean Excesses of Contemporary Japanese Art in the Bubble, an ecocritical view of Japanese art during the 1980s and 1990s.
Selected Publications
Books
- Tsuchi: Earthy Materials in Contemporary Japanese Art. University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
- Maximum Embodiment: Yōga, the “Western Painting” of Japan, 1910-1955. University of Hawai’i Press, 2012.
- Art in the Encounter of Nations; Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years. University of Hawai’i Press, 2001.
Recent Articles and Chapters
- “Conversations Across the Pacific: Artists Between Japan and the United States in the Early Postwar Years,” In Japan / America, eds. C.Kim and K.Kuramitsu. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Forthcoming: 2026.
- “Liberating Fire from the Kiln: Noyaki by Fujita Akiko, Koie Ryōji and Nagasawa Nobuho,” in A Global History of Japanese Ceramics. eds. M.Jones, A.Maske, M. Pitelka, S.Sang. Forthcoming: Routledge, 2026.
- “Transposed, Eroded, and Fragmented Grounds Underfoot,” In Yukinori Yanagi, ed. Mika Yoshitake. Los Angeles: Blum & Poe: 2025), 116-133.
- “An Appetite for Flames in the Japanese Art World During the 1980s,” Archives of Asian Art (Duke University Press) Vol. 75, no. 2. (Oct. 2024): 169-195.