AN4AA Talks 2024 | Shoko Yoneyama | Pikachu Meets the Thunder God: Art and Anime for Eco-Empowerment

This talk will be held online only as part of the Australasian Network for Asian Art program in 2024

‘We must rethink and reimagine curricula to instil a fundamentally new way of looking at the place of humans as part of the planet…. We can no longer promulgate human exceptionalism…. This means recognizing that we live and learn with the natural world.’ (Reimagining Our Futures Together, 2021, p.66)

Pikachu Meets Thunder God is proposed as a collaborative project between Dr Shoko Yoneyama and Russell Kelty which investigates the way in which art and culture can offer a paradigm shift in the way that humanity regards and interacts with the natural world. This session will feature a brief introduction of Shoko’s previous project, Tasmanian Tiger Meets Hokkaido Wolf: Australia & Japan Beyond Eco-Anxiety (2022-23), as well as an overview of Misty Mountain, Shining Moon: Japanese Landscape Envisioned (2022-present) curated by Russell Kelty. The session will close with a discussion about how art and culture can lead to new outcomes for humanity as well as the perception and relation with the environment.

Dr Shoko Yoneyama is an Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Adelaide and a sociologist specialising in Japan. She is particularly interested in how Japanese anime/manga can serve as a platform to spread an animistic worldview to help global youth reimagine sustainable futures. Shoko leads two multidisciplinary research teams on eco-anxiety and reimagining higher education and has just completed a DFAT/AFT project, Tasmanian Tiger Meets Hokkaido Wolf, for which her team screened a digitised version of Tezuka Osamu’s manga “Lolo’s Travels” for the first time in English. She is the author of Animism in Contemporary Japan: Voices for the Anthropocene from Post Fukushima Japan and the recipient of a 2024 Foreign Minister’s Award (Japan).

Russell Kelty is the Curator of Asian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, where he has curated and contributed to exhibitions and catalogues including Interwoven Journeys: The Michael Abbott Collections of Asian Art (2023), Pure Form: Japanese Sculptural Ceramics (2022), Samurai (2019), Ever Blossoming: Flowers in the Japanese Landscape (2016) and Treasure Ships: Art in the Age of Spices (2015-2016). He specializes in the art and culture of Japan, with particular emphasis on global trade and the influence of foreign ideas and commodities in painting during the Edo period (1603-1868). He received a BA in Art History from Colorado State University, completed an MA in Art History at the University of Adelaide, with a thesis that examined Vietnamese architectural tiles from the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries found in Indonesia and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney researching the depiction of foreign ships in Japan from c. 1639 to c. 1880.

Image: Takaya Koho, Japan, (c.1870-c.1920), Wind God and Thunder God after Ogata Kōrin [1658-1716] and Tawara Sōtatsu [c.1570–c.1640], 1892, Kyoto, Kyoto prefecture, Japan, pair of six panel screens; ink and pigments on gold and paper, 175.0 x 376.0 cm (each), M.J.M. Carter AO Collection through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 2022, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 20222P2(a&b).

The Australasian Network for Asian Art (an4aa) is a group of researchers including academics and curators from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand working in the field of Asian art and visual culture. The Network and its affiliated listserv serve as a platform to share research, promote events and exhibitions, foster a scholarly community, cultivate interest, and act as a vehicle for advocacy.