Allegories of Time and Space

the long version

"Allegories of time and space" explores efforts by leading photographers, artists, architects, and commercial designers to re-envision Japanese cultural identity during the turbulent years between the Asia Pacific War and the bursting of the economic bubble in the 1990s. This search for a 'cultural home'; was a matter of broad public concern and each of the artists under consideration in this volume engaged a wide audience through mass media.These cosmopolitan dreams may seemuntethered from their Japanese cultural context, and yet, there were threads that linked the 'urban nomad'; with earlier efforts to situate contemporary Japanese cultural identity intime and space. These artists found it necessaryto establish distance from their immediate surroundings temporally or geographically in order to gain some perspective on Japan's rapidly changing society. They all shared an allegorical vision, a capacity to make time and space malleable, to see the present in the past and to find an irreducible cultural center at Japan's geographical periphery. Their work enhanced efforts to redefine tradition in contemporary terms and, by doing so, promoted a future that would be both modern and uniquely Japanese.--Publisher's web page.