Rate My Professor Ken Yoshida

Ken Yoshida is Associate Professor of Art History/Visual Studies in the Global Arts Studies Program within the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts at the University of California, Merced. He received his Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine, in 2011, based on his dissertation titled 'Between Matter and Ecology: Art in Postwar Japan and the Question of Totality (1954–1975),' and earned his B.A. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2004. Yoshida joined UC Merced in 2012, contributing to the university's interdisciplinary approaches in arts and humanities through his teaching and research.

Yoshida's scholarship focuses on the discursive and aesthetic role of 'matter' in postwar avant-garde art, illustrating how Japanese artists from the 1950s to the 1970s critiqued humanism and biopolitics. He is completing a book manuscript tentatively titled 'Between Matter and Ecology: Art in Postwar Japan and the Question of Totality.' His new research project traces the history of macrobiotics, which gained cultural and political traction during the 1930s and 1940s, and its ongoing effects on design and lifestyle in contemporary Japan. Yoshida's academic interests include postwar avant-garde in Japan, contemporary art and visual culture, posthumanism and poststructuralism, 20th-century intellectual history, history of design, politics of ecology and nature, contemporary Japanese art and criticism, avant-garde art, ecology and aesthetics. He has published the article 'The Undulating Contours of Sogo Geijutsu (gesamkunstwerk), or Hanada Kiyoteru’s Thoughts on Transmedia' in the March 2012 issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, with another article forthcoming in positions: east asia critique. Yoshida also worked as a translator for 'Primary Documents: Japanese Art Criticism 1945-1989,' published by the Museum of Modern Art in November 2012.