Suturing the Worlds: Tomie Ohtake Between Japan and Brazil

The newly launched Women’s History seminar is proudly housed in Murray Edwards College, one of the two women's colleges of the University of Cambridge. True to the college’s mission, the ultimate purpose of the seminar is to promote the status of women.

This talk is dedicated to the life and work of the Japanese-Brazilian artist Tomie Ohtake (1913-2015). Ohtake (née Nakakubo) emigrated to Brazil from Kyoto in 1936 where she became a prominent artist. She assimilated Japanese and Western visual idioms into the Brazilian modernist paradigm. Her art, however, was informed by the collective history of Japanese migration. To commemorate the complicated experience of the Japanese diaspora in Brazil, Ohtake developed a visual language, based on Brazilian reception of Eisensteinian montage, which gave expression to the "inbetween" diasporic community who understood themselves neither as Japanese nor as Brazilian but as dekasegi (guest workers) bound by a shared language. Like them flouting national alliances, Ohtake developed a sense of local belonging through the process of cultural hybridization, putting an ironic spin on both the Japanese imperial project in the Americas and Brazilian nationalism.