The craft debate at the crossroads of global visual culture: re-centring craft in postmodern and postcolonial histories

Abstract

Over the last decade the craft debate has stimulated contemporary visual culture globally. Questions such as ‘what is craft?’, ‘how do we define craft against fine art and design?’, and ‘why is craft important to us?’ have been hotly debated topics. In Anglo-America, in a notable achievement among significant numbers of publications and exhibitions on crafts, Glenn Adamson led the creation of the field of academic craft studies through the launch of The Journal of Modern Craft (2008–) and The Craft Reader (2010). The differing camps of critics and makers have developed a broad range of criticism. In a tantalisingly interesting correlation, visual culture in Japan has also been excited by a craft debate led by Kaneko Kenji, Kitazawa Noriaki and Mori Hitoshi. This debate has excited the public as it involved the national concerns of re-centring crafts in Japanese art history. This paper compares and analyses the scope and nature of craft debate in Anglo-America with that of Japan, and investigates where they converge and diverge. Drawing upon the approaches taken by Murakami Takashi and Grayson Perry, I will further examine how this craft debate impacted on the world of fine art. Through these comparisons, the paper investigates how the craft debate engages with postmodern/postcolonial views on visual cultural history and how it is negotiating histories in Anglo-America and those in Japan.