Renowned designer and art director, Kamekura Yūsaku (1915-1997) is widely heralded as a pillar of the postwar Japanese design field.  As a founding member of the influential Japan Advertising Artists Club in 1951, and key designer for both the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Kamekura's enormous contribution to the public visual sphere is indisputable. But despite the standard emphasis on Kamekura’s postwar triumph, his success was not simply a postwar phenomenon. It was built on a deep foundation of design practice and a professional network developed in the 1930s and 40s, when he worked with some of the most talented designers of the period at Nippon Kōbō design studio. This lecture will explore Kamekura’s work during and after the Asia-Pacific War to excavate the transwar continuities of Japanese design in the service of commerce and the nation.

GENNIFER WEISENFELD is Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University (North Carolina, USA). Her field of research is modern and contemporary Japanese art history, design, and visual culture. Her first book, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 (University of California Press, 2002) addresses the relationship between high art and mass culture in the aesthetic politics of the avant-garde in 1920s Japan. Her second book, Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012, Japanese edition Seidosha, 2014) examines how visual culture has mediated the historical understanding of Japan’s worst national disaster of the twentieth century. Her third book, Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2023), awarded the 2024 Prize for Outstanding Book by the Southeastern Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, explores the anxious pleasures of Japanese visual culture during World War II. She has published extensively on the history of Japanese design, including a core essay for MIT’s award-winning website Visualizing Cultures on the Shiseido cosmetic company’s advertising design and the book The Complete Commercial Artist: Making Modern Design in Japan 1928-1930 (The Letterform Archive, 2024). She has a forthcoming book on the history of Japanese commercial art and design titled The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan (Duke University Press, 2025).

The Jansen Lecture will be followed by a reception.

For the biography of Professor Marius B. Jansen, see https://eas.princeton.edu/people/marius-jansen

For Helen Hardacre's tribute to Professor Jansen, see https://eas.princeton.edu/tribute-marius-jansen