At a time when rethinking feminism was gaining momentum in Japan, what set out to be a single exhibition was split into two: Feminisms and Countermeasures Against Awkward Discourses: From the Perspective of Third Wave Feminism, which were notable for their focus on third-wave feminism. Takahashi Ritsuko, then a curator at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, initially proposed an exhibition that examined Japanese contemporary art since the 1990s from a feminist perspective. Takahashi was impressed by the attempt to reconstruct girly culture from feminism in photographer Nagashima Yurie’s “Bokura” no “onnanoko shashin” kara watashitachi no gārī foto e (From their “onnanoko shashin” to our girly photo, Daifukushorin, 2020) and engaged Nagashima to supervise the exhibition’s theoretical framework. Onnanoko shashin (girls’ photography) was a category assigned by male critics, such as Iizawa Kotaro, and by media outlets to the works of women photographers (mainly in their twenties), including Nagashima, in the early 1990s. The book is a well-reasoned dissent to this categorization. Questioning the social norms that influence women, Nagashima took up feminist studies while continuing photography. Her book builds on her master’s thesis, which argued that critics disregarded the individuality of women photographers by lumping their work as onnanoko shashin, categorizing them by gender. This categorization marginalized women in Japan’s photographic world and usurped opportunities to come together on their own terms. Investigating the photographic movement led by these photographers within the context of third-wave feminism, Nagashima attempted to construct a discourse around the term “girly photo.”

Third-wave feminism emerged among young women in the West in the late 1980s and 1990s. Building on the first and second waves, it embraced and emphasized the individual experiences of women, encompassing identities anchored in ethnicity, postcolonialism, and queer theory. Many of its practices involved cultural activities characterized by pop culture. It gained broader recognition as “girl power,” but was also linked to consumer culture, as not all its practitioners were self-identified feminists. Thus, it is difficult to define third-wave feminism because of its diverse practices.

Takahashi and Nagashima disagreed on how to approach third-wave feminism. Their differences became clearer when discussing the exhibition plan. Takahashi held her own internalized ideas about girly culture in the 1990s and researched its history (Takahashi, 10), while Nagashima challenged these conventional representations and expressed discomfort with typical girly culture. They also had different views on third-wave feminism and what it meant to be “girly” or to be a “woman” (Yurie Nagashima, Aya Fujioka, Sachiko Kazama, and Ritsuko Takahashi, “Cross Talk: Feminism-Ten Taidan” [Cross Talk: Feminism exhibition] in Bijutsu Techo, August 2021, 128). Though they started from a third-wave feminism perspective and attempted to identify the intersection between feminism and contemporary art, the two had disagreements. This demonstrates that third-wave feminism encompasses multiple approaches to feminist thinking and a diversity of stances, demonstrating the complexity of feminism.

Takahashi’s exhibition, Feminisms, begins with a kitsch pink space. The exhibition features nine Japanese artists, based on the premise that feminism no longer belongs only to women; it explores feminism’s potential to empower actors who feel out of place in society. The first gallery recreates Nishiyama Minako’s two works from “Telephone Project” (1992/1995), the exhibition’s conceptual starting point. “Telephone Project” was Nishiyama’s response to a society where young women realized their bodies had value as sexual commodities, and high schoolers charged for dates (a practice known as enjo kosai), making connections by telephone. Using pink to symbolize femininity or cuteness and incorporating girl graphics, Nishiyama created mockups of “pink leaflets” (sex-service flyers) and pocket tissue advertisements, both of which were ubiquitous in that period. Each sex advertisement carrying the phone number was distributed throughout the city. Men seeking sexual encounters with young women calling the number found exhibition visitors answering their calls. This work demonstrates the dual nature of the color pink—symbolizing the sex work industry and girl culture—and its intersection with consumer culture.

Love Condition, a video work by Endo Mai × Momose Aya, features the artists musing about ideal genitals while molding them in clay. These genitals are detachable, facilitating a free approach to sex and gender without fixating on reproductive function. The two women chat nonchalantly, shaping the clay in response to what the other says, then intertwine their fingers. They listen to each other and let their imaginations run, changing course whenever necessary. The atmosphere is inclusive, suggesting an approach to love that goes beyond gender. The informal method of talking to each other transcends gender and sexuality to create new forms of relationships and new values. This interaction style also appears in the dialogue between Endo and Mori Eiki, the latter being the only male artist in Feminisms, who is also queer. The two create a marriage contract in I Am Not a Feminist! (2017/2021) where the title suggests an irony of Endo, once accepting Japan’s unequal marriage system that prohibits same-sex marriage, by using her husband’s surname.

Some of the exhibits incorporate popular culture, including Kimura Ryoko’s male version of bijinga, Nishiyama’s shoujo manga style, and Yu-Ki YUKI’s work that includes elements from BL (boy’s love: male-male romance) manga. Takahashi’s comments on the changing nuances of joshi as a term referring to women emphasize the role of pink and girly culture in the empowerment of women, as evident in her standardization of pink for her catalog and the venue graphics. This active use of pink represents an attempt to reclaim the color from the social construct that associates it with girls, restoring its place in women’s identity. While the attempt to incorporate girly culture into art history was highlighted by the peculiar artworks that reflected its culture and girly-taste design in the exhibition, the exploration of plural feminisms through contemporary art was compromised by the very taste that dominated this exhibition.

By contrast, Nagashima’s exhibition, Countermeasures Against Awkward Discourses, is inspired by “I am not a feminist, but . . . ,” a phrase often used by women in the third-wave feminist movement who hesitated to call themselves feminists (Nagashima, 166). Nagashima includes works that could be given a feminist interpretation even if the artist does not identify as a feminist. Four of the ten artists in the show are men, which is unusual for an exhibition about feminism. It raises penetrating questions about who feminism targets, and what makes a feminist exhibition. In the curator’s view, the fact that forty percent of the artists are men encourages introspection by artists, particularly men, who are unaware of their contribution to the movement (Nagashima, 164). The exhibition space shares with viewers the awkward discourses on feminism between Nagashima and the artists, sharing what comes after the “but.”

The exhibition begins with Nagashima’s debut Self-Portrait series (1993), which motivated her aforementioned book. After the early 1990s vogue for heanūdo (hair nude: pictures exposing women’s pubic hair), Nagashima started reflecting on how perceived female bodies are often reduced to sexual objects. She shot the Self-Portrait series as a way for women to reclaim their bodies as their own. Nagashima’s photographs featured the artist and her family in nudes at home. Her images raise the question of why people accept sexualized pictures of nude women, but are flustered to see wholesome snapshots of a family (including men) in the nude. The first gallery also featured Kimura Yuki, another onnanoko shashin photographer. Her Hides for Existence (1993/2021) consisted of photos of parts of her body cropped into shapes that allude symbolically to sex. The photographs are painstakingly reproduced as blueprints to avoid association with the trend for pop eroticism. Nagashima and Kimura’s nude images are poignant protests against the availability of images of women produced for sexual consumption by men in Japanese society. Male reviewers and critics failed to recognize the nature of the protest, reinterpreting their “youth” as “immaturity” and their “self-portraiture” as a “desire for recognition,” lumping all such photographs together in a category that they called onnanoko shashin (Shutter and Love—Girls Are Dancin’ on in Tokyo, INFAS, 1996). The two series are joined by Untitled (2006/2021), a self-portrait by Han Ishu, an artist from a younger generation. Covering his face with a red cloth but otherwise nude, he exposes his young male body to the gaze of viewers in a reclined pose traditionally used for the female nude. A tradition which he heard about from his grandmother, where, in a Chinese village, a bride’s face was covered with a red cloth when she was carried in a palanquin to the household she married into, inspired this work. The face is the most expressive part of the body and reflects an individual’s identity; thus, covering a bride’s face objectifies her. Han’s work inverts the male-female power dynamics of the conventional gaze by reversing the roles of male and female, seeing and being seen, which raises questions about the individual’s identity and about who the body belongs to. Presenting Han’s self-portrait alongside those of Nagashima and Kimura encourages viewers to reinterpret the creations of the latter two artists. 

The next gallery presents the works that touch on the relationship between the United States and Japan, showing that feminism is not the sole preserve of women, as locations and peoples have also been feminized by the process of marginalization. The three works by Okinawa-born Miyagi Futoshi include 1970 (2016), taking as its motif the 1970 Tokyo Tower Incident, where an Okinawan man took an American hostage. Okinawa is often seen as a symbol of the firm bond between Japan and the United States, but it has been coerced into bearing the brunt of that alliance as it hosts several US bases. Portraying Okinawa as marginalized and feminized, Miyagi created a work in red wool, a material reminiscent of women’s handicrafts. In the same gallery are embroidery and print works by Miyo Stevens-Gandara, a fourth-generation Japanese American, once an active third-wave feminist. Her work depicts part of her family’s history as migrants. Stevens-Gandara moves away from third-wave feminism when focusing on ethnicity issues, but her exhibits embody the fact that feminist issues transcend international borders and are relevant to other issues, including ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and migration.

In her epilogue and catalog essay, Nagashima explains her attempt to demonstrate from multiple angles the latent third-wave feminist thinking within each of us, irrespective of whether we identify as feminists. The catalog includes each artist’s statement and their correspondence with Nagashima, revealing an ambitious project that challenges viewers and exhibiting artists to think about what makes a feminist exhibition. Notably, the exhibition spaces had few texts or descriptions, perhaps to encourage visitors to focus on the artworks. Although the handout described individual works, it missed an opportunity to communicate the exhibition’s structure, the relationship between the exhibition’s title and the two shows, and the reason why nearly half the artists were men. This approach contrasts with the Feminisms exhibition, where careful thought had been given to the path through the galleries and to the placement of exhibits, but where, despite the broad variety of textures and diversity of media used in the displays, Takahashi’s essay and catalog editing did not clearly depict the broadening of feminism to embrace plurality. Each exhibition demonstrated the difficulty of achieving resonance between the spatial expression of the exhibition, the show’s concept, and the narratives of exhibited works.

Both exhibitions selected artworks based on personal narratives, and both could be manifestations of the feminist slogan, “The personal is political,” including their roots in Nagashima’s book that took a political stance driven by personal feelings of being marginalized by her gender. Moreover, in both cases, the selection of artworks conveyed an orientation toward a more open and diverse feminism. The two curators each had different perspectives on feminism and took distinct approaches, with Takahashi attempting to redefine girly culture in feminist terms and Nagashima questioning feminism itself. Together, they revealed the diversity and complexity of feminisms. Continuing with this practice and adding to the discussion will facilitate the further expansion of feminist thought. The fact that visitors were able to see exhibitions presenting different perspectives on feminism triggered a more engaging debate derived from the two curators’ countermeasures against awkward discourses.