This literature intended to look into the recent Japanese art historical studies that had made the new art histories by recalling memory of wars and inspiring reflections on Japanese art history. In Japan, there has been an abysmal chasm in two art historical periods between modern art history and post-war art history. This periodical chasm resulted from historical memory of wars and consequently resulted in the effect sealing the memory of wars in Japanese art history.
But in the 1960s, international anti-vietnam war movements and repatriation of Japanese war documentary paintings triggered the reflection on Japanese art history having concealed the memory of wars. Mokuma Kikuhata, Artist of Han-Geijyutsu [Anti-art] was the one of originators that made such streams by publishing The Art of Tenn? [Emperor]: Modern Thought and War Documentary Paintings (1978) and Fujita, Sleep eternally (1978).
In 1989, art critic Noriaki Kitazawa was influenced directly by Kikuhata and published the book The Temple of Eyes: Notes on history receiving fine art (1989). Kitazawa suggested the concept of ‘art as institution’ which defined art from Western world as the technology of governing in modern Japan. Also, Kitazawa emphasized that institutionally received art was the ground of rapid internalizing of art as governing technology by the new-born nation-state Japan. Kitazawa’s book tremendously influenced on the academic world of Japanese modern art history, and D?shin Sat? responded to the problematics of Kitazawa by writing the books such as The Birth of ‘Japanese Art’: ‘words’ and strategies in Modern Japan (1996) and The Nation-state of Meiji and Modern Art: the Politics of Beauty (1999).
Sat? focused on the process that pre-modern art world changed itself under the new concept of Western ‘art’, and intended to explain how such modernized traditional art world agglutinated with the politics of modern nationstate. On the contrary, Naoyuki Kinoshita opposed to the art history of ‘words’ or concepts and paid attention to artists and ‘artistic’ objects marginalized from canonical art history or considered as non-art. Therefore, Kinoshita’s famous book Art as Spectacle seemed like studies on visual culture in modern Japan, but that ‘art as spectacles’ was specified by the nationalistic characteristics. The oppositional approaches between Sat? and Kinoshita was fundamentally triggered by the Kitazawa’s conceptual-institutional point of view about Japanese modern art history, and have made the controversial horizons within the areas of art historical methodologies especially on the relationship between words and objects.
Kitazawa also made the opposition between nation-state and avant-garde, but his oppositional frame has been criticized by some art historians, because Kitazawa made avant-garde the historical principle not historical events or facts. After such critical arguments, there emerged a lot of approaches on the historical avant-gardes in modern Japan, and the studies on Japanese avant-gardes threw the most radical questions towards the canonized Japanese art history. Now, we can observe the horizons of reflexive Japanese art history are expending, but such critical art histories took roots in the memory of wars and the criticism of nationalism, which cannot help denying the complete art history from ancient period to contemporary.