Associate Professor Nozomi Naoi did her graduate work at Harvard University at the Department of History of Art and Architecture where she completed her PhD in 2014 and received her MA in 2009. Before starting her graduate programme, Assoc Prof Naoi worked as a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She received her undergraduate degree from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.

Assoc Prof Naoi’s research interests include Japanese prints and visual culture, Japanese graphic design and department store posters, images of children in modern Japan, the development of new media technologies in modern and contemporary Asia as well as the evolving forms of female imagery in East Asian art and design.

Her first book, Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth Century Japan (University of Washington Press, 2020); awarded the Honorable Mention for the John Whitney Hall Prize 2022; illuminates the work by the hugely popular Japanese artist, Takehisa Yumeji (1884–1934) and situates his graphic art within the emerging media landscape of the 1900s and 1910s, when novel forms of reprographic communication helped create new spaces of visual culture and image circulation. The book addresses Yumeji’s rich and yet unexplored synergy between his leftist and antiwar illustrations in socialist bulletins; wrenching portrayals of Tokyo after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923; and fashionable images of beautiful women—referred to as “Yumeji-style beauties”—in books and magazines that targeted a new demographic of young female consumers. Assoc Prof Naoi was interviewed for a podcast interview by New Books Network about Yumeji Modern and has written a Press Blog reflecting on Yumeji’s Great Kantō Earthquake series and its meaning in our current pandemic times: “What keeps us calm during the chaos: Nozomi Naoi on Yumeji Modern and finding the “moon-viewing” moment.” Assoc Prof Naoi is on the Steering Committee for the Society for the Promotion of International English-Language Scholarship on East Asian Art History and has helped develop the website platform to promote new books in East Asian Art History, which has two feature videos of highlights from Yumeji Modern (Part 1 and Part 2). The impact and contribution of this monograph book have also been internationally recognised, and Assoc Prof Naoi is the recipient of the Early Career Award for the Yale-NUS College Annual Research Recognition Awards (2021) and Yumeji Modern is currently being translated into Chinese.

Assoc Prof Naoi co-curated the first exhibition focused on Takehisa Yumeji outside of Japan, Takehisa Yumeji: Artist of Romance and Nostalgia (Nihon no hanga Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2015). She is also the co-author of the accompanying exhibition catalogue, Takehisa Yumeji, for which she received the first Takehisa Yumeji Research Society Award (March 4, 2017) for contributing to Yumeji studies in the English language scholarship.

Assoc Prof Naoi has published on the development of Japanese posters, “The Modern Beauty in Taishō Media,” in The Women of Shin Hanga (Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2013), which analyses the image of the female beauty in Japanese poster production and addresses issues of advertisement, department stores, consumer culture, and design.

She also co-curated the exhibition, “Made in Japan: 20th-Century Poster Art” at the Poster House Museum in New York (March 2-September 10, 2023), with Associate Professor Erin Schoneveld (Haverford College).  Made in Japan has received significant press coverage, such as from the New York Times, The Japan Times, and the Guardian and the exhibition was chosen as the winner of the 2023 Communications Arts Design Competition in the category of Design/ Environmental/ Art/Design.

Assoc Prof Naoi is currently writing her second book, Modern Design and the Japanese Department Store (under advance contract with MIT Press), which demonstrates how material culture via modern design and visual materials creates the modern Japanese subject through the institution of department stores. This book builds upon her previous work on Japanese poster design to examine the relationship between the rise of department stores and the development of modern design, and how they co-evolve to generate visualizations of Japan’s new lifestyle through the nexus of commercial art and design. In addressing this relationship, this book tells the story of the meeting and negotiation between different worlds: business and art; specialty store and corporation; traditional crafts and modern design; fine arts and commercial design; Western artistic styles and Japanese visual culture; the value of children and nation-building; and Japan and its Empire. Assoc Prof Naoi has received the J Y Pillay Fellowship to further this project.

Books and exhibition catalogues:

Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth Century Japan (University of Washington Press, 2020)

[Chinese translation] Social Sciences Academic Press, expected publication 2024.

 Publication Awards:

• • • Honorable Mention, John Whitney Hall Book Prize 2022, Association for Asian Studies
    • Millard Meiss Publication Fund, College Art Association, 2019 Spring Award
    • JAHF (Japan Art History Forum) First Book Subvention Prize winner (2019)
    • Yale-NUS First Book Subvention Grant (April 2019)
    • Yale-NUS Book Manuscript Workshop Grant (2017-2018)

Reviews:

• • • Adam Rosenbeck, “Examining twentieth-century artist Takehisa Yumeji and the emergence of a new visual culture.” International Examiner. Aug. 26, 2020.
    • Susan Scott (McDaniel College), CHOICE, December 2020, vol. 58 no. 4.
    • Xu Yifan (editor of Paragon Book Gallery Beijing), December 2020. (in Chinese)
    • Kendall H. Brown, Monumenta Nipponica, volume 76, number 1, 2021, 209-215.

Naoi, Nozomi, Sabine Schenk, and Maureen de Vries. Takehisa Yumeji. Leiden: Hotei Publishing/Brill, 2015.

“The Modern Beauty in Taishō Media.” In The Women of Shin Hanga: The Joseph and Judy Barker Collection of Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Prints, edited by Allen Hockley, 23-42. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2013.

Refereed Journal Articles

“Takehisa Yumeji in Modern Japanese Art—Through the Collection of Elise Wessels.” Aziatische Kunst, vol. 52 no. 3 (November 2022), 24-32.

“Designing Japan’s Orient: Department Stores and the Modern Experience.” The Journal Of the Society for Asian Humanities, Vol. 52 (2020-21), 147-153.

“The State and Future of Yumeji Studies: Nihon no Hanga Exhibition and Beyond (欧米における夢二研究の現状とこれから—アムステルダム夢二展を越えて—).” Takehisa Yumeji Research Society Journal (Takehisa Yumeji Gakkai: Gakkai shi), “Takehisa Yumeji Studies (Takehisa Yumeji kenkyū)” vol. 1 no. 1 (Dec. 2017), 43-49. (in Japanese)

“Beauties and Beyond: Takehisa Yumeji and the Yumeji-shiki.” Andon 98 (2015). [Reprint] Arrow Film Blu-ray release of film director Suzuki Seijun’s Taisho Trilogy box set (Zigeunerweisen, Kagero-za and Yumeji), accompanying essay in release booklet.

“Select Annotated Bibliography on Okakura Kakuzō.” With Noriko Murai In The Review of Japanese Culture and Society, vol XXIV (Dec. 2013) “Okakura Kakuzō: New Perspectives,” published by the Jōsai International Center for the Promotion of Art and Science, Jōsai University.

Digital Publications

“Takehisa, Yumeji [Takehisa, Mojirō; Yumeji]” in Grove Encyclopedia of Asian Art, Grove Dictionary of Art (Oxford University Press), Grove Dictionary of Art online (www.oxfordartonline.com) (available online from November, 2021)

“What keeps us calm during the chaos: Nozomi Naoi on ‘Yumeji Modern’ and finding the ‘moon-viewing’ moment.” University of Washington Press Blog (live since July 15, 2020)

Book Reviews

Review of Critical Design in Japan: Material Culture, Luxury, and the Avant-Garde, by Ory Bartal. caa.reviews (February 4, 2022), doi: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2022.10, http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/3931#.Yf1FXS0Rr_9.