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Professor Ken Tadashi Oshima, Chair of Japan Studies, Co-curates Major Exhibitions in New York and Tokyo

January 31, 2018

Professor Ken Tadashi Oshima, Chair of Japan Studies and UW Professor of Architecture, has co-curated two major exhibitions in New York and Tokyo.

At the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Professor Oshima featured Frank Lloyd Wright’s legendary Imperial Hotel (1923) in “Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive” (June-October 2017). This section highlighted the hotel’s dynamic history through the 20th century — from the influence of ukiyo-e on Wright, its opening on the day of the 1923 Great Tokyo Earthquake, and the impact of WWII and rapid development in the 1960s. The exhibition’s curatorial video can be seen online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4zjmMDENO0 and a full essay is published in Bergdoll, B., Wright, Frank Lloyd, Gray, Jennifer eds. (2017). Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking the archive. New York, New York: The Museum of Modern Art.

Professor Oshima’s curation of the international context of Japanese architecture will be displayed at the Mori Art Museum’s exhibition “Japan in Architecture: Genealogies of its Transformations” (April 25-September 17, 2018). Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the museum’s founding, this major exhibition is one of the first to present traditional and contemporary projects together along with large-scale installations such as the home of Tange Kenzō.


For more information about the exhibitions, see:

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1660?locale=en

https://www.mori.art.museum/en/exhibitions/japaninarchitecture/index.html