Zao Wou-ki easily mastered traditional Chinese brush calligraphy. But, having immigrated to Paris in 1948 to study, he thought producing ink paintings would peg him as a typical Chinese artist who created chinoiseries. So Zao abandoned ink entirely during his time in France and developed an abstract style influenced by his European counterparts. Squarely accepted as part of the postwar School of Paris, he said in 1964, “Everybody is bound by tradition—I, by two.” A few years later, Zao reached back for his roots and re-adopted ink as a medium. Like so many exiles, his creations were free expressions that straddled heritage and displacement. The monograph produced by the Asia Society, accompanying the first United States retrospective of Zao, features hefty academic contributions by the co-curators. One of the first transcontinental painters of the 20th century, Zao will always be seen as painting with a brush authentic to both his worlds. 

In 1951, art critic Takiguchi Shūzō asked, “How would the current works of Japanese art fare side by side with Western works?” In Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan, Reiko Tomii, an art historian primarily concerned with post-1945 Japanese art, attempts to inscribe Japanese postwar art movements into the grander canon of global art history through studies of Matsuzawa Yutaka (1922–2006), Group Ultra Niigata (GUN) and The Play—an artist and two artist groups most prominently associated with the 1960s avant-garde in Japan. Tomii’s selection was based on her research into what she calls the “Wilderness,” which could be places outside of Tokyo or thinking that rejected institutional and mainstream narratives. The book’s six chapters thus dissect the artists’ individual practices within unexplored islands and landscapes of Japan, and consciously link these practices with their international contemporaries, bringing them from the local periphery into the Eurocentric model.