Post-1945 Transformations in East Asian Art
From the ideological charge of Socialist Realism to the meditative abstraction of Dansaekhwa, postwar East Asian art unfolds as a constellation of reinvention. Through movements such as Gutai, Mono-ha, and the Xingxing Group, artists challenged both political orthodoxies and aesthetic boundaries, forging practices that turned the postwar condition itself into a site of philosophical and material exploration.
This lecture explores artistic production across East Asia in the decades following World War II, tracing how artists responded to rapidly changing political and cultural landscapes. In Maoist China, it examines Socialist Realism as an instrument of ideological formation, highlighting artists who shaped its visual language and those who later challenged it through independent experimentation, including members of the Xingxing (Stars) group. In Japan, the discussion considers the socially engaged Reportage painters of the 1950s alongside the Gutai Group’s radical investigations of material and performance, and the Mono-ha movement’s philosophical explorations of matter and space. In South Korea, the lecture addresses the emergence of Dansaekhwa, a form of minimalist abstraction rooted in meditative process, and situates it within a broader context of conceptual and experimental practices that questioned artistic and social conventions. Through these case studies, the lecture traces converging but distinct trajectories of postwar modernism in East Asia, showing how artists in the region redefined the relationship between art, society, and material experience.
February 14, 2026 - from 3 PM to 5 PM CET.
