Report on the talk ‘In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan’

Art History, the Archive, and the Case for the Incommensurable

Volk’s research developed from her experience studying art history, where modern art was often associated primarily with Western, and particularly French, art. She became interested in modern Japanese art and sought to challenge this Eurocentric conception of modernism. She argues that art history often relies on concepts such as influence, exchange, and resonance. These concepts make it easier to include artworks that can be connected to familiar Western movements or artistic histories. Other works, however, risk becoming invisible because they cannot easily be translated into these established categories. To challenge this approach, Volk introduces the idea of the “incommensurable.” The term does not simply refer to artworks that are completely isolated or unrelated to other artistic histories. Rather, it draws attention to historical experiences and artistic practices that cannot be adequately understood when they are made legible only through pre-existing categories of comparison, influence, or equivalence. Instead of beginning with an American or Cold War perspective, Volk asks what becomes visible when the period is approached from the perspective of the occupied.

She illustrates this shift in perspective through several artworks. Matsumoto Shinsuke’s depictions of Occupied Tokyo in Tokyo in Ruins (1946) show the destruction of the city and express the agony that he and other Japanese felt. In contrast, Matsugaki Tsuruo’s folding screens The Occupation of Japan (The MacArthur Screens) (1947 and 1948), commissioned by an American officer, present a more harmonious and idyllic image of occupied Tokyo. The screens prominently feature MacArthur’s headquarters while largely leaving out realities such as hunger, protests, and the presence of American military forces. Volk therefore interprets them as representing the privileged perspective of the occupiers. Taken together, these contrasting representations demonstrate how the visual history of the Occupation changes depending on whose perspective structures the narrative.

Volk also discusses explicitly political artworks. Hongo Shin’s Voices of the Sea (1950) commemorates students who died during the war but also functions as a call for political action. During the Korean War, Japanese activists used the sculpture in protests against the possibility of nuclear weapons being used in Korea. The Korean War further transformed occupied Japan into a strategically important site within the emerging Cold War, making questions of militarization, rearmament, and international solidarity increasingly important for politically engaged artists. Another example is the work of Japanese printmakers, who created socially engaged woodcuts dealing with workers, the labor movement, and opposition to the production of weapons for the Korean War. Strongly influenced by Chinese revolutionary printmaking, they used art as a means of political engagement and international solidarity. These works complicate art historical accounts that understand Japanese post-war art primarily through its relationship to Western modernism, since their political and artistic networks extended across Asia and were shaped by anti-imperialism as well as Cold War politics.

Finally, Volk discusses Akamatsu Toshiko and Maruki Iri’s Atomic Bomb Pictures Series (1950). The monumental ink paintings address the destruction caused by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Combining European-style figuration with East Asian brushwork, the artists developed a visual language that cannot easily be understood through a simple opposition between Japanese and Western artistic traditions. The paintings function both as representations of suffering and as appeals for peace and political action. The series was exhibited internationally, although it was not shown in the United States until 1970 and was initially received very negatively by US-American critics. Its transnational reception therefore also reveals how political and historical contexts shaped which forms of artistic expression could become visible and legible within global art history.

The archive is central to Volk’s methodology and to her larger argument about the “incommensurable”. Archival sources do not simply allow her to recover forgotten artworks or add missing information to an existing art historical narrative. They make it possible to reconstruct the political, social, and transnational contexts in which these works were originally produced, exhibited, and understood. In doing so, the archive can reveal connections, voices, and meanings that later art historical categories have obscured. It therefore provides a way of approaching artworks without immediately forcing them into established narratives of Western influence, exchange, or artistic equivalence.

These examples demonstrate Volk’s larger argument: Japanese art during the Occupation cannot be fully understood through its relationship to Western art alone. It was shaped by the specific political and social conditions of occupation, the Cold War, American power, anti-imperialism, and the experience of war and destruction. At the same time, these conditions connected Japanese artists to wider transnational and particularly Asian political and artistic networks. Ultimately, Volk argues that the gaps in art history should not simply be understood as empty spaces or absences waiting to be filled. The “incommensurable” can instead reveal the limitations of established art historical categories and open up new possibilities for understanding modern art. Her book therefore does more than add overlooked Japanese artworks to an existing canon. By combining archival research with a perspective attentive to the experiences of the occupied, Volk questions the categories through which art historical knowledge is produced and asks how different histories might become visible when those categories are reconsidered.