HAGS Spring Speaker 2025: Dr. Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer

Japanese calligraphy of the twentieth century is frequently celebrated for its avant-garde forms that emerged in the postwar era, granting calligraphers unprecedented international recognition and visibility. This postwar form of calligraphy is often characterized as having been re-envisioned and reinvented in the early postwar decades, following a period of stagnation before and during the war. Thus, biographies of calligraphers typically omit their wartime experiences, and the success of the postwar avant-garde is often attributed to new synergies with Euro-American abstract painting, the global interest in Zen, and Japan’s rapid internationalization during and after the Allied Occupation. In this talk, I will instead emphasize the continuities between the prewar, wartime, and postwar activities of Japanese calligraphers and their visual references. My analysis will focus on two case studies: the Zen visualities often linked to calligraphy and the transnational exhibition activities of Japanese calligraphers during and after the war. The first case study examines the work of modern Zen monk Nantenbo Tōjū (1839–1925), whose eccentric large-scale calligraphies inspired postwar avant-garde artists of the Gutai and Bokujinkai groups, while being embedded within the militarist ideology of the Japanese Empire. The second case study highlights the activities of the Kōa Shodō Renmei (Calligraphy Association of Asian Co-Prosperity) and its exhibitions across East Asia in the late 1930s and early 1940s. While these activities advanced Japan’s imperial agenda on the continent, they also provided significant state support and invaluable transnational experiences for Japanese calligraphers. In this talk I argue that the opportunities offered to calligraphers by the Japanese Empire in the prewar and wartime eras were instrumental in providing the essential training, networks, and experiences that facilitated the later international success of the postwar avant-garde.

 

Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer is an Associate Professor in Japanese Arts, Culture, and Heritage at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, affiliated to the University of East Anglia. She is an art historian specialising in modern Japanese art. Before joining the Sainsbury Institute in 2018, she received her Ph.D. from Heidelberg University and held postdoctoral positions at Emory University, Atlanta, GA and Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington, D.C. Her research interests include postwar art in Japan; modern calligraphy history in East Asia; transcultural studies; abstract art; and the relationship between image and language in modern Japan. She is the author of Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde (Japanese Visual Culture Series 19, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020), and the recently published article “Zen Violence: The Legacy of Nantenbō Tōjū’s Calligraphy in the Postwar Avant-Garde” (The Journal of Japanese Studies (2025) 51 (1): 1–40.). She is currently working on her second book project on the history of calligraphy modernization in East Asia.