Dr Yuko Kikuchi

My role as a design historian includes co-leading the V&A/RCA History of Design Programme, together with Dr Sarah Cheang at the Royal College of Art, as well as managing various research activities at the V&A. I have taught at universities in the UK, Germany, USA and East Asia, and my research spans the Mingei movement, colonial modernities, Cold War design in Asia, and the cultural sustainability of crafts. I have held numerous prestigious fellowships, including the Korea Foundation at Yonsei University, the Terra Foundation at Smithsonian American Art Museum, the British Academy-ASEASUK ECAF at École française d’Extrême-Orient in Phnom Penh, ARI at the National University of Singapore, and the British Academy at the Academia Sinica in Taipei. As a founding member of the Transnational Art Research Centre (TrAIN) at UAL, I have developed transnational approaches as decolonial strategies for Black and non-western visual cultural studies. I welcome students for supervision in the area of global design history (East Asia) and contemporary visual cultural studies. Since 2021 I have led the academic research for the Go for Kogei project and programmes. Following on from the AHRC-funded project Women’s leadership in designing social innovation: mutual learning in the Asia-Pacific, and ‘Towards a Sustainable Culture of Crafts: Kanazawa’s regional perspective and the big picture’ for Jockey Club ICH+ Innovative Heritage Education Programme – Summit 2021 at Hong Kong Arts Centre, I am currently writing a book chapter on ‘Sustainability in “traditional” pottery in Japan: the case of women’s leadership and “Kutanism”’.

Publications

‘Morris, Mingei and Studio Crafts: the transformative idea of the Art of the People’, in Inglesby (ed.), Art Without Heroes: Mingei between Japan and Britain, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2024

Kikuchi, Y. (ed.), ‘Negotiating Histories: Traditions in Modern and Contemporary Asia-Pacific Art’, special issue of World Art, 5-1, 2015.

Kikuchi, Y. and Lee, Y. (eds), ‘Transnational Modern Design Histories in East Asia’, special issue of The Journal of Design History, 27-4, 2014

Kikuchi, Y. (ed.), Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2007

Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory: Cultural Nationalism and Oriental Orientalism, London, Routledge Curzon, 2004