Kaneko Tomotaro and Lou Mallozzi

Sonic Speculations in the Documents of Postwar Japanese Art introduces a sound world little known outside Japan: Japanese artists working with sound in galleries and public spaces to interrogate artistic practice and social relations during the cultural and political upheavals of postwar Japan from the 1950s to 1970s. The radical artistic output of this period occurred in the complex context of Japan’s postwar economic boom, the failure of its student uprisings, the Mono-ha movement, Expo '70, and numerous other factors. It is a period that remains virtually unexplored outside Japan, one that offers much to an increasingly global perspective in the field of the sonic arts.

In a public talk on October 7, scholar Kaneko Tomotaro and artist/scholar Lou Mallozzi offer insight to this world, blending research, archival materials, re-enactment, diaristic speculation, and original artworks.

The Japanese Art Sound Archive is a solo research project by Kaneko Tomotaro to investigate sound in postwar Japanese art. He has realized re-exhibitions and the release of editions bringing this history into an immediate present. Informed by a profound understanding of Japan’s postwar cultural and political context, his detailed and ongoing research introduces the distorted sounds of 1970s Japanese art through images and recordings. For Sonic Speculations, Kaneko presents photographic images and rare archival recordings from the 1970s played on CDs to reference a “double history” of listening across the transition from analog to digital technologies in an increasingly consumerist economy. 

Artist and educator Lou Mallozzi has pursued parallel paths of research, writing, and artistic production to develop a personal response to the sounds of postwar Japanese artists. Focused on direct sonic encounters with their work and his own audio-centric interpretations amplified by the generosity of artists, curators, and historians, he has produced intentionally subjective essays and sensitive artworks of his own in response to the work he has experienced. One such project is Sidewalk Standstill for Nomura, created in 2024 as an homage to artist Nomura Hitoshi (1945-2023) and in direct response to Nomura’s 1970 performative sound work Telephone Eyeshot. It is presented for the first time in public in Sonic Speculations.