In 2021 the Sainsbury Centre held the first UK exhibition by the Japanese-Swiss artist Leiko Ikemura. The installation of her large work Usagi Kannon in the University of East Anglia Sculpture Park towards the end of the exhibition and the forthcoming publication of a new book presenting a larger selection of her works offer the opportunity to further reflect on Ikemura’s work and its place in contemporary art, in Japan and elsewhere.

This January the Third Thursday Lecture will bring together three specialists on contemporary art for a live discussion of Leiko Ikemura’s work, interwoven with a new interview with the artist by Simon Kaner and film footage by Felix van Boehm. The book Leiko Ikemura: Usagi in Wonderland will be published by the Sainsbury Institute in March 2022.

About the speakers

David Elliott is a British cultural historian, curator, writer and teacher who has been the director of modern art museums in Oxford, Stockholm, Tokyo and Istanbul. He has taught art history at the University of Oxford, the Humboldt University, Berlin, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and has been the artistic director biennales of contemporary art in Sydney, Kyiv, Moscow and Belgrade. A specialist in contemporary Asian art, as well as in the Soviet and Russian avant-garde, he is currently Chairman of Judges for the Sovereign Asia Art Prize in Hong Kong and Chair of the Advisory Board of MOMENTUM Worldwide in Berlin. His most recent publication is Art & Trousers: Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Asian Art (2021).

Adrian Favell has been Professorial Academic Associate at SISJAC since 2015. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Chair in Sociology and Social Theory at the University of Leeds, UK, and directs the Bauman Institute there. A 2006-7 Japan Foundation Abe Fellow, he is the author of Before and After Superflat: A Short History of Japanese Contemporary Art 1990-2011 (2012), and has also published essays in Art in America, Bijutsu Techo, Impressions, Artforum, and ART-iT online, as well as in art catalogues, such as the Ashmolean 2021 exhibition, Tokyo: Art and Photography. He has a special interest in “post growth” urban and rural social art projects, and the work of younger generation art collectives and activists.

Tania Moore is the Joyce and Michael Morris Chief Curator at the Sainsbury Centre. Publications include Rhythm and Geometry: Constructivist art in Britain since 1951 (co-editor) and Henry Moore: Friendships and Legacies. In 2019 she received the Art Fund’s New Collecting Award to acquire sculptors’ drawings by contemporary women and non-binary artists for the Sainsbury Centre collection. She was co-curator of Leiko Ikemura: Usagi in Wonderland.