Rate My Professor Ken Yoshida

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.