On November 13, 2008, Postwar Japanese Art: A Panel and Discussion took place in The Museum of Modern Art's Celeste Bartos Theater.

The program, which presented a chronological overview of developments in postwar Japanese art, was organized as part of an exchange between MoMA curators and curators of modern and contemporary art in Japan. The first phase of the exchange saw MoMA curators Cornelia H. Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings; Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography; and Sarah Suzuki, Assistant Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, travel to Japan on a research visit. The follow-up brought four Japanese curators to MoMA for two days of discussion and collection research.

The program panelists included the visiting curators Michiko Kasahara, Chief Curator, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Dr. Midori Matsui, independent curator and scholar; Fumihiko Sumitomo, Senior Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and Akira Tatehata, Director, National Museum of Art, Osaka, in a discussion moderated by Cornelia H. Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at MoMA. Participants explored the work of artists, collectives, and movements in Japan since the 1940s.

This program was co-organized by the Japan Foundation and was generously supported by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art and the Asian Cultural Council.

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Panelist Biographies:

Connie Butler joined The Museum of Modern Art in 2006 as The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings. Prior to her work at MoMA, she was Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles from 1996 to 2005. The exhibition Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave, which Ms. Butler organized as the MOCA Ahmanson Curatorial Fellow and which premiered at MOCA in June, opened at MoMA in December 2008. For MoMA, Ms. Butler has organized Live/Work: Performance into Drawing (2007), Glossolalia: Languages of Drawing (2008), Pipe, Glass, Bottle of Rum: The Art of Appropriation (2008), and Here Is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art (2008). During her tenure at MOCA she organized and co-organized a number of important exhibitions, including WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, which opened at MOCA (2007) and then traveled to other venues, including P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (2008); Robert Smithson (2004); Rodney Graham (2004), co-organized with the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Vancouver Art Gallery; and Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure (2002). Prior to joining MOCA, Ms. Butler held key curatorial posts at a number of museums, including the Neuberger Museum of Art, Artists Space in New York, and the Des Moines Arts Center.

Michiko Kasahara, Chief Curator, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, has organized many exhibitions focusing on contemporary Japanese photography, including On Your Body (2008), On Landscape (2002), and Kiss in the Dark (2001). Her other exhibitions include American Perspectives: Photographs from the Polaroid Collection (2000), Love's Body: Rethinking the Naked and the Nude in Photography (1998), Alfred Stieglitz and His Contemporaries (1997), and Gender Beyond Memory: The Works of Contemporary Women Artists (1996). From 2002 to 2006, she worked for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT), where she organized the exhibition Life Actually: The Works of Contemporary Japanese Women (2005). During her tenure at MOT, she was appointed as the commissioner for Japan at the fifty-first Venice Biennale (2005) to curate Ishiuchi Miyako—Mother's 2000–2005: Traces of the Future. Ms. Kasahara was also a guest curator for the Japan Foundation's international traveling exhibition Out of the Ordinary/Extraordinary (2004) and for the 2003 City-net Asia project (Seoul Museum of Art, 2003).

Midori Matsui, a Tokyo-based art critic and scholar, has written extensively on Japanese and Western art and culture for a wide variety of periodicals and exhibition catalogues, including Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture (Japan Society, 2005), Public Offerings (The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2001), and Painting at the Edge of the World (Walker Art Center, 2001). She is the author of the books Ice-Cream (London: Phaidon 2007) Art in a New World: Post-Modern Art in Perspective (Tokyo: Asahi Press 2002) and The Age of Micropop: The New Generation of Japanese Artists (Tokyo: Parco Publishing 2007), the latter published for an exhibition she curated entitled The Door into Summer—The Age of Micropop (Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito, 2007). Ms. Matsui also served as an advisory committee member for the 2004-05 Carnegie International. She has been a corresponding reviewer for Artforum and Flash Art International, and is currently teaching at Tama Art University and Musashino Art University in Tokyo.

Fumihiko Sumitomo, Senior Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, most recently organized the exhibition Tadashi Kawamata: Walkway (2008) and served as a curator for the third Nanjing Triennial, 2008. He also co-curated the international exhibitions Beautiful New World: Contemporary Visual Culture from Japan ("798" Dashanzi Art District and Guangdong Museum of Art, 2007) and Rapt! 20 Contemporary Artists from Japan (Australia, 2006). Before joining MOT, he worked for NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo, where he organized the exhibitions Art Meets Media: Adventure in Perception (2005) and Possible Futures: Japanese Postwar Art and Technology (2005). Prior to joining ICC, Mr. Sumitomo was a curator at the Twenty-First-Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, organizing the exhibitions Laboratory of Doubt (2003) and Shirin Neshat (2001). His other exhibitions include Out the Window: Spaces of Distraction (The Japan Foundation Forum, 2004) and Christian Moeller (SPIRAL/Wacoal Art Center, 1997). He has contributed to several books, including The Role of Art in the 21st Century (Tokyo: Mirai-sha, 2006), and is also a key member of Arts Initiative Tokyo (AIT).

Akira Tatehata joined The National Museum of Art, Osaka, in 1976, and became its director in 2005. He has organized a number of important exhibitions, including Avant-Garde China: 20 Years of Chinese Contemporary Art (2008); Still/Motion (2008); Cubism in Asia (The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 2005), which traveled to Seoul, Singapore, and Paris; Avangardie Giappoinesie Delgi Anni '70 (Galleria d'arte moderna di Bologna, 1992); Drawing as Itself (1989); and Action and Emotion: Painting of the 1950s (1985). He served as the commissioner for Japan at the forty-fourth and forty-fifth Vennice Biennales (1990, 1993) and as a codirector of the Yokohama Triennale, 2001. From 1991 to 2005, Mr. Tatehata left NMAO to hold positions as professor of contemporary art theory and criticism at Tama Art University in Tokyo, and visiting scholar at The University of Tokyo (1995–2005) and Columbia University (2002–03). He was also a visiting research fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1986). Aside from his critical writings on modern and contemporary art, Mr. Tatehata is known as an award-winning poet, and his anthologies include The Dog of Zero Degrees (Tokyo: Shoshi Yamada, 2004) and Runners in the Margins (Middletown Springs, VT: P.S., A Press, 2003). He is currently planning for the Aichi Triennale 2010 as the General Artistic Director.