A pioneering look at an immensely creative period in Japanese art that developed amid the Cold War.
 
Alicia Volk brings to light a significant body of postwar Japanese art, exploring how it accommodated and resisted the workings of the American empire during the early Cold War. Volk’s groundbreaking account presents the points of view of Japanese artists and their audiences under American occupation and amid the ruins of war. Each chapter reveals how artists embraced new roles for art in the public sphere—at times by enacting radical critiques of established institutions, values, and practices—and situates a range of compelling art objects in their intersecting artistic and political worlds.
 
Centering on the diverse and divisive terrain of Japanese art between 1945 and 1952, In the Shadow of Empire creates a fluid map of relationality that brings multiple Cold War spheres into dialogue, stretching beyond US-occupied Japan to art from China, Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and demonstrates the rich potential of this transnational site of artmaking for rethinking the history of Japanese and global postwar art.
 

"For those whose exposure to Japanese art is primarily to works of premodern Japan—temple bells, ukiyoe prints and such—the book should be a revelation. . . . Volk shows us that Japanese artists in the turbulent period from the 1930s to the 1950s produced works of art worthy of our consideration." - Asian Review of Books

"'All Japanese art after 1868 is rubbish!,' the art historian Sherman Lee once told the author of this book. Undeterred, Volk made modern Japanese art her specialism. Here she looks at how the cold war initiated a fertile period in Japanese visual culture." - Apollo, "Off the Shelf" column