Ikeda Asato

Education

• BA University of Victoria, 2006;
• MA Carleton University, 2008;
• PhD University of British Columbia, 2012

Specialization

• Asian Art, Japanese Modern Art, War Art, Fascism, Museum

*Biography *

Originally from Tokyo, Japan, she earned post-secondary degrees in Canada. Her research interests lie in modern Japanese art in particular and Asian art in general, and the topics of imperialism/colonialism, war, fascism, museums, sex, gender, and sexuality.

Her primary research is about Japanese paintings produced during the Second World War. Her scholarship, which revisits the question of Japanese fascism, will be published as a monograph Fashioning Fascism: Japanese Paintings during the Second World War from the University of Hawaii Press in 2017. Part of her research has been published as the journal article “The Japanese Art of Fascist Modernism: Yasuda Yukihiko’s Arrival of Yoshitsune/Camp at Kisegawa (1940-41)” in Modernism/modernity (https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/japanese-art-fascist-modernism-yasuda-yukihiko’s-arrival-yoshitsunecamp-kisegawa-1940-41). She has co-edited the first English-language anthology on the topic of Japanese war art, Art and War in Japan and its Empire, 1931-1960 (Leiden, Brill, 2012), which has been reviewed in major scholarly journals (Art Bulletin, impressions, and the Journal of Military History).

She has also been active as a curator, and has been keen to engage with the public about important social and political issues through art. She was involved, as a co-curator, with the exhibition Japanese Inspiration: Early Printmaking in the Canadian Arctic (Takamado Gallery in Tokyo, the Museum of Anthropology University of British Columbia, Burnaby Nikkei Center, and Carleton Art Gallery; 2011-2014), and was the curatorial lead for the exhibition Retell, Rethink, Recover (Irving K. Barber Learning Center at UBC, 2012). Most recently, Ikeda curated the exhibition A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada (May 7-November 27, 2016), which focused on the social and sexual role of male youths in Edo-period Japan. The show was highly acclaimed and received positive reviews from major newspapers including the Toronto Star(https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/2016/05/16/at-the-rom-an-ancient-third-gender-informs-the-present.html) and Japan Times (http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2016/07/30/commentary/japan-ready-lgbtq-revolution/#.V8BQ0xQ14UQ).

Ikeda is embarking on a new monograph-length project which looks at the Japan-Canada exchange through arts and visual culture in the late nineteenth century and twentieth century. It will examine the trajectories of Canadian collector of Japanese art Sir Edmund Walker, photographic collections of Canadian women who lived in Japan, Japanese-Canadian artists who were interned during the Second World War, the Inuit-Japan exchange in the field of print-making, and artistic and cultural remembering of the Second World War in contemporary, multicultural Canada, where the relationship between “perpetrator” and “victim” entails layered and complex ethnic histories in the country.