Yuko Kikuchi (PhD) is Head of Academic Programmes at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and also teaching the V&A/RCA History of Design MA course. In her positions as Professor of Craft History and Studies at Kanazawa College of Art Japan, and Reader and founding member of TrAIN research centre at the University of the Arts, she has developed an interest in decolonial transnational strategies in relation to ‘crafts’. Her monograph, Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory: Cultural Nationalism and Oriental Orientalism (2004) has recently been refreshed through a Korean translation (2022).
Throughout her academic career she has focused on the postcolonial conditions and sustainability of crafts in East Asia, marked by works such as Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan (2007), and ‘The Craft Debate at the Crossroads of Global Visual Culture: re-centring craft in postmodern and postcolonial histories’, World Art, 5-1 (2015). In Japan, she’s been writing and lecturing about the issues of gender and sustainability in Japanese ‘crafts’, as well as writing about the current British ‘black art’ movements including Theaster Gates’ ‘Afro Mingei’.
