KATO Yukiko

I have been studying art history for the last ten years. For those who interrogate the meaning of life everyday through their own disabilities and traumatized experiences, art history might seem a futile discipline. However, as a researcher at the Center for “Ars Vivendi” – which questions our way of living – I gain the opportunity to interrogate for myself how my research can contribute to an understanding of life.

I have long focused on visual representations of “health” and “balance,”beginning with my work as a doctoral candidate. Today, we are obsessed with ideas such as a “well-balanced character” or “well-balanced meal.” In fact, I argue that the discourses of “health” and “normalcy” are quite violent. I examine this unconscious violence through art history and visual studies. More specifically, I investigate ideas such as “the cooperative relation between complementary color harmony and the idea of health in 19th-century Europe” and the “New-age artists' belief in yoga and organic foods in the 20th century.”

At the Center for “Ars Vivendi,” many researchers focus on disabilities, care, and trauma. My research, which deals with “health,” approaches a similar subject matter only from a different perspective, exposing how the strong fearfully obsess about being healthy.

(April 2011)

Yukiko KATO, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Research Center for Ars-Vivendi
Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan
Visiting Lecturer
Tokyo University of Pharmacy and Life Sciences
Tokyo, Japan

EDUCATION

ACADEMIC EMPLOYMENT

Tokyo University of Pharmacy and Life Sciences, Tokyo, Japan
April 2011 – Present
Visiting Lecturer

Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan
April 2011 – Present
Postdoctoral Fellow

Duke University, NC, USA
Summer 2008: Research Assistant for the MIT NextSource
Spring 2008: Research Assistant for Gennifer Weisenfeld, Ph.D.
Fall 2007: Grader for “Renaissance and Baroque”
Spring 2007: Teaching Assistant for the “Introduction to History of Art”
Fall 2006: Teaching Assistant for the “Introduction to Visual Cultures”
Spring 2006: Grader for “Modernism, Avant-Gardism, Art”
Fall 2005: Teaching Assistant for “Postmodern Architecture”

Keio University, Tokyo, Japan
December 2002 – March 2007: Research Assistant for the Center for the Integrated Research on the Mind (The 21st Century COE Program Keio University Graduate School)
September 2003 – March 2004: Teaching Assistant for the undergraduate seminar on the Modern Western Art

PUBLICATIONS

Theses

• Ph.D. Color, Hygiene, and Body Politics: French Neo-Impressionist Theories of Vision and Volition, 1870-1905 (2010) (Duke University, NC, USA)
• M.A. The Function of Science in the Art Theory of the Cubist, Albert Gleizes (2001) (Keio University, Tokyo, Japan)
• B.A. Art and Science in the Renaissance Perspective (1999) (Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan)

Articles/Essays

(in English)

• “Cubism and Color: An Untold History,” Aesthetics, vol. 15 (May 2011), pp. 76-89.
• “Stereoscopy: Commodified Heterotopia and 'Democratic' Voyeurism,” Toward an Integrated Methodology for the Study of the Mind 2006, Centre for Integrated Research on Mind at Keio University, Tokyo, March 2007, pp.237-246.
• “Invitation to Unknown Pain: The Function of Traumatic Amnesia in Sophie Calle's Self-Narration,” Toward an Integrated Methodology for the Study of the Mind 2005, Centre for Integrated Research on Mind at Keio University, Tokyo, October 2006, pp. 210-225.

(in Japanese)

• “Cubism and Color: An Untold History,” Color and Modernity, ed. Fujio Maeda, Tokyo: Sangensha, 2011
• “Rotation in Life: Function of Time in Robert Delaunay's Color Theory,” Journal of the Science of Art (Geijustugaku), vol. 7, Keio University, 2004.
• “The Color Circle as a Microcosm: The Mural Projects of Robert Delaunay and Albert Gleizes in the 1930s,” Aesthetics (Bigaku), vol. 54, no. 2, September 2003, pp. 56-69.
• “Robert Delaunay,” Encyclopedia of Color Science, ed. by the Color Science Association of Japan, the University of Tokyo Press, 2003, pp. 355-56.
• “An Article Review: Mark Antliff. 'La Cite francaise: George Valois, Le Corbusier, and Fascist Theories of Urbanism.' (Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy. Edited by Mark Antliff and Matthew Affron, 1997), Aesthetics (Bigaku), vol. 52, no. 3, December 2001, p. 88.
• “Partage d'exotismes: the Prospect of the 'Non-western' Art at the 5th Lyon Biennale, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin,” Form & Imagination (katachi-no bunkashi), vol. 8, Tokyo: Kosakusha, March 2001, pp. 212-213.

CONFERENCE PAPERS

• “Art between beauty and health:reconsidering Neo-Impressionist life and letters,”National Conference for the Japanese Society for Aesthetics, at Tohoku University, Japan, October 17, 2002.
• International Symposium：“Color as Cross-Media: John Ruskin and Afterwards,” International Symposium: Multisensory Aesthetics, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan, July 30, 2011.
• “Cubism in Color: An Expression of Modern Fragmental Space,” Graduate Student
• Symposium, at the Department of Art and Art History, Duke University, USA, March 4th, 2006.
• “The Color Circle as a Microcosm: The Mural Projects of Robert Delaunay and Albert Gleizes in the 1930s” National Conference for the Japanese Society for Aesthetics, at Hiroshima University, Japan, October 13, 2002.

FELLOWSHIPS/GRANTS

PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS

• Collage Art Association (CAA)
• International Association for Aesthetics (IAA)
• The Japanese Society for Aesthetics
• The Japan Art History Society
• Mita Society for the Science of Art (Keio University, Tokyo)
• Waseda University Society for Art History, Tokyo, Japan

LANGUAGES

Japanese, English, French, German