This thesis investigates the explicit interconnection of radical art and politics in Japan in the 1960s and early 1970s through an in-depth study of the alternative art school Gendaishicho-sha Bigakko (1969-75). Founded in 1969 in Tokyo in the aftermath of the student movement by the radical publishing company Gendaishicho¬sha, Bígakko was the brainchild of the director Ishii Kyoji, the editor Kawani Hiroshi, and art critic Imaizumi Yoshihiko. Although some of the most important Japanese artists of the 1960s such as Nakanishi Natsuyuki and Akasegawa Genpei (of Hi Red Center), the painters Nakamura Hiroshi and Kikuhata Mokuma (of Kyushu-ha), and Matsuzawa Yutaka - who is regarded as a forerunner of Japanese Conceptualism - were among the teachers there, this is the first detailed study of Bigakko. Based upon extensive primary research, including interviews with the founders, administrators, teachers and students, and the recovery of significant original material from several personal archives, I establish and assess both the school's significance in the history of Japanese art and the part it played in the country' s socio-political history, which have hitherto been largely ignored. As part of the re-construction of Bigakko's history and teaching methods, the PhD includes practice based components: a visual chronology of Gendaishicho-sha Bigakko as a supplement to the thesis ; the documentation of my-re-enactments of Nakanishi Natsuyuki's drawing class exercises at Kyoto Art Center in 2010, at Bigakkö in 2011, and in London in 2012, and documentation of two exhibitions I curated and installed : the Bigakko section of the 'Anti-Academy' exhibition (realized between Novomber 2013 and January 2014 at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, UK) and 'World Uprising'(April 2014 at Bunpodo Gallery, Tokyo), an exhibition of mail art originally conceived and realized by Matsuzawa Yutaka and his Final Art Thoughts workshop at Bigakko in 1971- 1973. This includes the documentation of Matsuzawa's 'Psy Room' at Suwa, Nagano. Through this body of PhD research, I argue that the various experiments conducted by the artists/teachers at Bigakko - with their emphasis on the revival of handwork and communal, physical experience - had the potential to bring about the new artistic language for communication and changes. Although the Bigakko experiment was prematurely terminated in 1975, I propose that the fundamental questions it raised are still relevant today, and their notion of embracing contradictions presents an important agency in confronting the stagnation that Japanese society faces today.

This thesis is an art historical study focussing on contemporary Japan, and in particular the artists Murakami TakashL Mori Mariko, Aida Makoto, and Nara Yoshitomo. These artists represent a generation of artists born in the 1960s who use popular culture to their own ends. From the seminal exhibition 'Tokyo Pop' at Hiratsuka Museum of Art in 1996 which included all four artists, to Murakami's group exhibition 'Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture' which opened in April 2005, central to my research is an exploration of contemporary art's engagement with the pervasiveness of cuteness in Japanese culture. Including key secondary material, which recognises cuteness as not merely something trivial but involving power play and gender role issues, this thesis undertakes an interdisciplinary analysis of cuteness in contemporary Japanese popular culture, and examines howcontemporary Japanese artists have responded, providing original research through interviews with Aida Makoto, Mori Mariko and Murakami Takashi. Themes examined include the deconstruction of the high and low in contemporary art; sh6jo (girl) culture and cuteness; the relation of cuteness and the erotic; the transformation of cuteness into the grotesque; cuteness and nostalgia; and virtual cuteness in Japanese science fiction animation, and computer games.

This thesis chronicles the development of Polish Japonisme between 1885 and 1939. It focuses mainly on painting and graphic arts, and selected aspects of photography, design and architecture. Appropriation from Japanese sources triggered the articulation of new visual and conceptual languages which helped forge new art and art educational paradigms that would define the modern age. Starting with Polish fin-de-siècle Japonisme, it examines the role of Western European artistic centres, mainly Paris, in the initial dissemination of Japonisme in Poland, and considers the exceptional case of Julian Fałat, who had first-hand experience of Japan. The second phase of Polish Japonisme (1901-1918) was nourished on local, mostly Cracovian, infrastructure put in place by the ‘godfather’ of Polish Japonisme Feliks Manggha Jasieński. His pro-Japonisme agency is discussed at length. Considerable attention is given to the political incentive provided by the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war in 1904, which rendered Japan as Poland’s ally against its Russian oppressor. The first two decades of the 20th century are regarded as the ‘Renaissance’ of Japonisme in Poland, and it is this part of the thesis that explores Japanese inspirations as manifested in the genres of portraiture, still life, landscape, representations of flora and fauna, erotic imagery, and caricature. Japonisme in graphic and applied graphic arts, including the poster, is also discussed. The existence of the taste for Japanese art in the West after 1918 is less readily acknowledged than that of the preceding decades. The third phase of Polish Japonisme (1919-1939) helps challenge the tacit conviction that Japanese art stopped functioning as an inspirational force around 1918. This part of the thesis examines the nationalisation of heretofore private resources of Japanese art in Cracow and Warsaw, and the inauguration of official cultural exchange between Poland and Japan. Polish Japonisme within École de Paris, both before 1918 and thereafter, inspired mainly by the painting of Foujita Tsuguharu, is an entirely new contribution to the field. Although Japanese inspirations frequently appeared in Polish painting of the interwar period, it was the graphic arts that became most receptive to the Japanese aesthetic at that time. The thesis includes a case study of Leon Wyczółkowski’s interbellum Japonisme, and interprets it as patriotic transpositions of the work of Hiroshige and the Japanese genre of meisho-e. Japonisme in Polish design and architecture is addressed only in the context of the creation of Polish national style in design (1901-1939). Art schools in Britain and America became important centres for Japonisme at the beginning of the 20th century. The thesis considers the case of Cracow Academy of Fine Arts, which due to radical changes introduced by its new director Julian Fałat, became an important centre for the dissemination of the taste for Japanese art in Poland.