My research explores interdisciplinary contemporary art practices and visual culture from the 1960s onward, focusing on the aesthetic frameworks embedded in the technical, historical, and practical aspects of postwar artist-writers in English and/or Japanese language.
More broadly, I am interested in the engineering of interdisciplinary practices across various intellectual fields, including art education and applied-learning in modern and contemporary universities.
“Translation” in Donald Judd’s Interdisciplinary Practice of Art and Philosophy (2025)
– Master’s Thesis, Hokkaido University, Graduate School of Humanities and Human Sciences
In his dual practical quest of artmaking and art writing, American artist Donald Judd (1928-1994) expressed a life-long aphasic attitude when it comes to talking or writing philosophically on his own artworks. In this paper, by analyzing the specific cases which explain the artist’s verbal reluctance from the 1960s to the 1980s, along with the 1983 lecture draft “Art and Architecture,” we sought to understand the relationship between art, philosophy, and architecture as a translation media in the interdisciplinary creative practice of Judd.
“Improving winter life in Sapporo: Proposals by Nitobe College graduate students and collaboration with the City of Sapporo” (2025)
Co-authored by Marina LOMAEVA, Eman H.E. TOULIBAH, Chinatsu IGARASHI, Atsuko INOUE, Emmilce A. MORILLAS, Taejun SON, Seralathan DILUSHI
– Proceedings of the 39th International Symposium on the Okhotsk Sea & Polar Oceans 2025, pp. 42-46
This paper describes the background and process, with analysis of the results of the projects undertaken by the Hokkaido University Nitobe College (NC) graduate students during the fall/winter term of AY 2024. Students developed proposals to enhance the quality of winter life in Sapporo, focusing on accessibility, transportation, and health. They presented a summary of their proposals at the plenary session of the Mayors Conference of the World Winter Cities Association for Mayors (WWCAM), organized by the City of Sapporo on 17–21 December 2024. The paper concludes by exploring potential topics and platforms for further collaboration between NC and the City of Sapporo, which align with the glocal approach. The approach involves addressing global challenges through diverse perspectives while collaborating with local agents to account for local factors. It enables NC students to harness their multicultural, multidisciplinary team potential to develop skills in project management, problem-solving, and problem-finding, as well as the competence to share and apply knowledge for societal benefit.
Representation of Photography in Katsuhiko Otsuji’s Short Story “Father’s Disappeared” (2024)
– the 18th conference of Association for Studies of Culture and Representation, Kwansei Gakuin University, Nishinomiya, Hyogo
The short story “Father’s Disappeared” (Dec. 1980) by Japanese interdisciplinary artist Genpei Akasegawa (under the pseudonym of Katsuhiko Otsuji), along with “The Season of Oyster” (May 1980) and “Refrigerator” (Jun. 1980), adopts motifs of photography and memorial portraits for the dead to refer to a father’s illness and death while exposing the narrator’s verbal breakdowns. This presentation examines the short story’s integration of photographic images and techniques, analyzing literary metaphor as a creative device and tracing the transformation of the memorial portrait across the three works.
Chinatsu Igarashi 