Friday 17 January 2020
6:00pm – 7:00pm

Ainu Art in Contemporary Life

Drinks reception: 7:00pm – 8:00pm

13/14 Cornwall Terrace, Outer Circle (entrance facing Regent's Park), London NW1 4QP

Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation and Hokkaidō Prefecture

Fully booked

The Ainu are an indigenous people in Japan native to the regions of Hokkaidō, Northern Tōhoku, and Karafuto, among others, that have developed their own original identity, culture, and language over the past centuries. Despite their ancestral roots, the Ainu people have historically suffered from various forms of discrimination and disputes with the rest of Japan, being officially recognised as indigenous to the country only as recently as 2008. Their unique language and traditional culture are at serious risk of being lost and only a few Ainu artists remain.

In this talk, Mr Kohei Fujito, an emerging Ainu artist from a young generation based in Akan, Hokkaido, gave a talk along with a small demonstration of his artworks. He spoke about the history and future of Ainu art based on his recent artworks.

This event was organized in collaboration with Hokkaidō Prefecture in order to promote the NATIONAL AINU MUSEUM, which will open in April 2020 in Shiraoi, Japan.

About the contributors

Kohei Fujito

Kohei Fujito is an Ainu artist, born in 1978 in Akan, Kushiro-city (Hokkaidō). He is a son of Takeki Fujito, who is highly respected both domestically and internationally as a woodcraftsman representing Hokkaido and as an artist who passes on the traditional sculpting techniques of the Ainu. Fujito runs a local folkcraft shop “Kuma no Ie” (House of the Bear) in the hot spring town Akanko Onsen on Lake Akan. He is also in charge of the product design for the project “Utilization of Timber from Hokkaido”, run by Kushiro city and various cities across Hokkaidō. Fujito was commissioned to create a symbolic monument for the International Festival of Indigenous People (Italy) in 2017 and his work Ikupasuy (an Ainu’s ritual tool) was added to their collection. Fujito’s works, including iphone case and Yama Katana (an Ainu mountain knife), are on display at National Museum of Japanese History and National Museum of Ethnology. In 2018, he took part in LEXUS NEW TAKUMI PROJECT as a representative from Hokkaidō, and he created sunglasses frames out of wood.

Professor Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere

Professor Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere (moderator) is Professor of Japanese Art and Culture at the University of East Anglia, and was the founding Director of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 1998. She has been the Research Director of the Sainsbury Institute since 2011. She was until recently the IFAC Handa Curator of Japanese Arts in the Department of Asia in the British Museum. Her translation of Tsuji Nobuo’s History of Art in Japan was published by Tokyo University Press in 2018 and won the special cultural translation prize from the Japan Society of Translators. In 2010 she helped facilitate and translate the British Museum’s first manga, Hoshino Yukinobu’s Professor Munakata’s British Museum Adventure.