At the Institute of East Asian Studies
“Lord It’s the Samurai: Socially Engaged Art and the Cultural Production of Orientalist Hysteria”
DATE: Tuesday, March 9, 2010
TIME: 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
PLACE: IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor (Fulton/Oxford @ Kittredge: map)
FORMAT: Lecture
SPONSORS: Center for Japanese Studies
Majime Sugiru serves as communications director for the Asians Art Museum, a guerrilla art collective that creates public and online ‘cultural interventions’ as a means of challenging dominant (mis)representations of Asian visual culture in the Bay Area. Their latest project integrates Japanese Studies scholarship with art in a parody of last summer’s blockbuster “Lords of the Samurai” exhibition at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.
Generating joyful laughter and impassioned debate across a broad spectrum of constituent communities while garnering media attention, critical acclaim and wide-ranging scholarly approval, this deft cultural counterpunch succeeded at raising awareness of the retrograde cultural politics that continue to play out in the exhibition of Japanese art in this country today.
Majime Sugiru is a Berkeley-born, Cal-educated contemporary artist based in San Francisco. His provocative art has been shown in New York and San Francisco, most recently at the de Young Museum where much of his work was ordered taken down shortly before the exhibition was about to open.
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