Online-Gespräch: Fotografie und Puppentheater aus Japan und Europa im Dialog

In der Ausstellung "(K)ein Puppenheim. Alte Rollenspiele und neue Menschenbilder" werden unter anderem auch Fotografien und Bunraku-Puppen aus Japan ausgestellt, um europäische Stereotype, Eigen- und Fremdwahrnehmung sowie, die europäisch-japanischen Beziehungen im Spiegel von Puppen und Fotografien zu hinterfragen. Im Gespräch geben Dr. Madoka Yuki und Dr. Yoko Yamaguchi einen Einblick in die vielfältigen kulturellen Verflechtungen zwischen Japan und Europa.
Hin und weg – im Rahmen des Abschiedsprogramms des Münchner Stadtmuseums ist der Eintritt frei.

Madoka Yuki:
Photographing dolls and the Japanese visual artist Mika Kan
In her paper, Madoka Yuki will explore the function of photographing dolls and cultural translation, using as an example the photographic works of Mika Kan (*1988), a Japanese artist who photographs sex dolls and reborn dolls, to question the boundary between humans and non-humans. In particular, she will focus on how she deals with Western artworks and how Japanese and Western cultural elements work in her œuvre.

Madoka Yuki is associate Professor at the Faculty of Design, Kyushu University. The Art historian is specializing in the history and theory of photography. Since finishing her dissertation at the University of Duisburg-Essen -- Ich-Fotografie: Kommunikationsformen der japanischen Fotografie seit den 1990er Jahren (2013, Kadmos Verlag) – she has held curatorial fellowships in photographic collections at the Kupferstichkabinett Dresden, the Municipal Museum in Munich, the Folkwang Museum Essen, and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, under the auspices of the “Museum Curator for Photography” program run by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Foundation. Between 2013 and 2016 she has worked as an Assistant Professor in the Institut Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

 Yoko Yamaguchi:
The impact of German artistic puppet theater on the birth of Japanese contemporary puppet theater
The year 2023 is said to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of modern puppetry in Japan, since in 1923 a group of young people between the ages of 19 and 25 performed Maurice Maeterlinck's "Aglavaine et Sélysette“ with, for the first time, Western-style marionettes in Japan. They said that they had studied the „Marionettentheater Münchner Künstler“ and prepared for this performance. In fact, the Munich theater was well known to Japanese cultural figures at the time. In this presentation, I will discuss the impact of German artistic puppet theater on the birth of Japanese contemporary puppet theater.

Yoko Yamaguchi is Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and Lecturer at Waseda University and Seijo University. She also serves on the editorial board of the Japan Unima Yearbook and is the director of Shimokitazawa International Puppet Festival in Tokyo. She earned her Ph.D. in Aesthetics from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2017 and received research fellowships from Klassik Stiftung in Weimar in 2019 and from Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich in 2022. Her current research focuses on the evolution of the discourse on puppet theater (ningyo-geki/ ningyo-shibai) in Japan since the 1900s as well as the the formation of modern Japanese puppetry beginning in the 1920s under the influence of European puppetry.