The Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition, Tokyo: Art & Photography, explores a wide variety of artworks created in Tokyo, a metropolis that has constantly reinvented itself. With new commissions by contemporary artists, loans from Japan and treasures from the Ashmolean’s own collections, the show provides an artistic insight into the development of Tokyo into one of the world’s most creative, dynamic and fascinating cities.

The Japan Society is delighted to invite a small group of members to explore Japan’s capital city through the vibrant arts it has generated over 400 years in a private view guided by Dr Lena Fritsch, Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art and Clare Pollard, Curator of Japanese Art at the Ashmolean Museum.

This event is an exclusive opportunity to view the works with the guidance and insights of its curators.

About the contributors:

Dr Lena Fritsch is Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Recent exhibitions and publications include Tokyo: Art & Photography (2021), A.R. Penck: I Think in Pictures (2019) and Ibrahim El Salahi: A Sudanese Artist in Oxford (2018). One of her main research areas is Japanese art and photography, with monographs including Ravens & Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography since 1945 (Thames & Hudson/Seigensha, 2018). Before joining the Ashmolean she was a curator at Tate Modern, co-curating Giacometti (2017) and Agnes Martin (2015). Before coming to the UK, she worked at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum of Contemporary Art, Berlin. Fritsch holds a PhD in Art History from Bonn University, Germany, and also studied at Keio University, Tokyo.

Dr Clare Pollard is Curator of Japanese Art at the Ashmolean and an associate member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies. After gaining her doctorate at Oxford University in 1996 on the subject of Japanese potter Miyagawa Kozan (1842–1916) and the development of Meiji ceramics, she worked for seven years as Curator of the East Asian Collections at the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, with a Monbukagakusho visiting research fellowship at Tokyo National Museum in autumn 2000. At the Chester Beatty Library she worked on the redisplay of the collections in a new museum building in Dublin Castle, which was awarded the Gulbenkian/Heritage Council Irish Museum of the Year Award 2000 and European Museum of the Year Award 2002. In 2004 she became Curator of Japanese Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, before returning to the Ashmolean in April 2006 to start working on the Ashmolean’s redevelopment project. She is responsible for two permanent galleries of Japanese art and has organized a number of temporary exhibitions highlighting aspects of the collections.