Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow 2012 - 2013
PhD, University of Southern California, 2012
Her planned research while at the Sainsbury Institute was ‘Art in to everyday life: Department stores as purveyors of culture in modern Japan’. The goal of her research was to expose the politics of ‘fine art’ which constructed and manipulated the language, categories and values that still structure our understanding of art, through a close examination of department store art practices that have been ignored in the course of the formation of modern Japanese art history.
The research was a continuation of her PhD thesis, which looked at the artistic practices of department stores in Japan, and she now wishes to expand it to include Asia and to produce a book manuscript. Dr Oh will research a new chapter on the colonial branches of Japanese department stores.