Professor for Japanese Arts and Cultural Heritage
Toshio Watanabe is Professor for Japanese Arts and Cultural Heritage at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, University of East Anglia, and Emeritus Professor of History of Art and Design, University of the Arts London.
He is a researcher and university professor based in England since 1977 and completed his doctorate at the University of Basel, Switzerland in 1984. He was the founding director of the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) at the University of Arts London (2004-11). He was among others Chair of Association of Art Historians, President of Japan Art History Forum, Vice-President of Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) Bureau and the Chair of the Advisory Board for Tate Research Centre: Asia.
His current projects include ‘Gardens and the Memory of Asia Pacific War’ and ‘Modern Japanese Gardens and China’. Other research interests include history and reception of modern Japanese garden, the theory of modern landscape in Japan (1880s – 1940s), Tokyo as a transnational city, changing images of Musashino, construction of Japanese Art History, and 20th Century East Asian taste.
Selected publications
Books
- (Ed. with Tomizawa-Kay, E., Ikegami, H., and Machida, M.), Sainsbury Institute Occasional Papers No. 2 – Okinawan Art in its Regional Context: Historical Overview and Contemporary Practice. Norwich: Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, 2023 [e-book].
- (Ed. with Dénes, M., Fajcsák, G., and Spławski, P.), Japonisme in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. 2020. Budapest: Ferenc Hopp Museum of Asiatic Arts.
- Sainsbury Institute Occasional Papers 1 – Collected Papers by Toshio Watanabe: Interpreting Japan. 2020. Norwich: Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures [e-book].
- (Ed. with Tomizawa-Kay, E.), East Asian Art History in a Transnational Context. 2019. Abington, Oxon and New York: Routledge.
- (Gen. Ed.), Ruskin in Japan 1890-1940: Nature for art, art for life. 1997. Cogito: Tokyo. [Winner of 1998 Japan Festival Prize and of 1999 Gesner Gold Award].
- (Ed. with Sato, T.), Japan and Britain: An Aesthetic Dialogue 1850-1930. 1992. Barbican Art Gallery: London. Japanese edition 1992.
- High Victorian Japonisme. 1991. Berne: Peter Lang. [Winner of the 1992 Prize of the Society for the Study of Japonisme: Tokyo]
- Paul Klee. 1981. Tokyo: Kodansha; revised second edition 1996.
Articles
- ‘Nude art, censorship and modernity in Japan: from the “Knickers Incident” of 1901 to now’. In Quinn, M. et al (eds.), The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life after Bourdieu. 2017. Abingdon, Oxon & New York: Routledge, 206-221.
- ‘A Kyoto garden renewal? From Meiji to early Showa period’. In Pitelaka, M. and Tseng, A. Y. (eds.), Kyoto Visual Culture in the Early Edo and Meiji Periods. 2016. London and New York: Routledge, 163-181.
- ‘Modern Japanese Garden’. In Rimer, T. (ed.), Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868-2000. 2012. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 340-360.
- ‘Japanese Landscape Painting and Taiwan: Modernity, Colonialism and National Identity’. In Kikuchi, Y (ed.), Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan. 2007. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 67-81.
- ‘Japanese Imperial Architecture: From Thomas Roger Smith to Itō Chūta’. In Conant, E.P. (ed.), Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of Nineteenth-Century Japanese Art. 2006. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 240-253.
Selected projects
- Gardens and the Memory of Asia-Pacific War
- The Art History of Third Force 1890-1920 – Study of the Japanese Network in Britain
- Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation
- Modern Japanese Gardens and China
- Ilse Watanabe and the Post-war Knitwear Design in Japan