"Stratified Modernity: Labor and the Regional Environment in Contemporary Japanese Art "

This talk emerges out of a chapter to be published in the multi-author volume titled Missing  Bodies' Embodied Histories: Extraordinary Lives of Ordinary Women in Postwar Japan. The chapter examines global-facing arts activism as undertaken by women artists in Japan on behalf of communities of workers, women, the Korean diaspora, and displaced and incarcerated Palestinian refugees.

Stephanie M. Hohlios (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Art History at Flagler College, St. Augustine, Florida. She is a scholar of modern and contemporary art in Japan and the world. Her research considers the intersection of labor, gender, and artistic expression. Her recent publications include an article titled "Vipers and Workers Cross the Korea Strait: Mobile Theater at the Chikuhō Botayama," which appears in a special thematic issue of Review of Japanese Culture and Society titled "Empires in Motion, Cultures of Crossing: Creative Production in Japan's Colonial, Postcolonial, and Diasporic Spaces," edited by John Szostak (2024). As a researcher for the Deborah Remington Charitable Trust, she also published an essay related to the artist's time abroad in Japan in the 1950s in the monograph Deborah Remington (Rizzoli, 2024). Her first book project Coal Visualities: Labor, Gender, and Regional Consciousness in Chikuhō examines the role of the arts in a former coal mining community in Japan from the late nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries. It foregrounds the tensions inherent to articulations of ethnicity (namely, ethnic Korean and Chinese identity under Japanese empire), gender, and class within the concentric frames of region and nation.