2025 Theses Doctoral

Adaptive Beings: Japanese American Art and Environment, 1923–1943

Oh, Sehyun

This dissertation recasts the art of immigrants within a place-based, territorialized narrative of diasporic life, through the concept of adaptation. My analysis centers on first-generation Japanese Americans, known as Issei, focusing on Kyo Koike, Iwao Matsushita, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Kango Takamura, who immigrated from Japan to the U.S. and remained ineligible for U.S. citizenship until 1952. Living in the U.S. as foreigners, these immigrants sought better living conditions in a place where life was unfolding anew—an essential element of the diasporic experience that, as this dissertation proposes, is deeply embedded in their aesthetic engagements.

I argue that the art and artistic practices of these immigrants shape their sense of livelihood in the U.S. while fostering a recognition of themselves as resilient and dynamic beings in the world. In my analysis, adaptation involves a transformation in self-perception, marked by the shift from viewing oneself as an outsider to embracing the role of a dweller in a place. The four case studies collectively demonstrate the extent to which these immigrants represented adaptive lives through creative forms of media and artistic expression.

Approaching Asian diaspora and Asian American art history through the interdisciplinary lens intersecting diaspora, environment, and adaptation aims to broaden their historiographies. Scholarship has explored the mediation of origins under the expansive label of "Asia," while emphasizing heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity, claimed by artists and art historians. These perspectives often presume diasporic artists as liminal subjects, perpetually shaped by temporal and spatial dislocation within the conceptual framework of roots and routes in identity politics. While acknowledging living in diaspora as inherently and constantly remediated and repositioned, this dissertation shifts focus to how the sense of place, home, and identity in individual lives is forged and morphed in their relationship with new environments.

Moving beyond conventional inquiries into difference as otherness or minority, my analysis highlights the potential of aesthetic practices to ground immigrants in everyday life in specific locales. By highlighting their desire to settle, stay put, and cultivate a sense of dwelling the present, in pursuit of a sustainable future, this study illuminates an overlooked strategy in identity-building—stability and security as vital components of diasporic life. In doing so, this project reorients the historiographic and methodological framework by foregrounding environment and adaptation in Issei artists’ history.