Edo Avant Garde |
Los Angeles Premiere Screening
& Panel Discussion

During the Edo era (1603‒1868), Japanese artists innovated many strategies to bring the natural world and its creatures to striking life. To animate trees and puppies, waves and clouds, they used asymmetry, abstraction, stylization, and empty space—techniques that were only later seen in Modern Art of the West. In Linda Hoaglund’s film Edo Avant Garde, she explores the origins of Japanese artists’ elegant originality by filming Edo-era masterpieces in museum and private collections across the U.S. and Japan, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In interviews with scholars, priests, collectors, dealers, and artists, the film traces one source of Edo artists’ ingenuity to their engagement with the spirits they believed to inhabit the natural world – a belief inspired by Buddhism and Shinto animism. The film features interviews with Los Angeles-based artist Joe Goode and LACMA Japanese Art curator Hollis Goodall.

The film’s exquisite cinematography by Japanese Academy Award-winning Kasamatsu Norimichi and outstanding original soundtrack by Satoshi Takeishi and Shoko Nagai present a remarkable, immersive experience of the Edo era’s byobu, folding screens, many outside traditional museum and gallery settings. Simultaneously dynamic and mesmerizing, at its heart Edo Avant Garde offers a unique opportunity to look closely and see differently.

The screening of the film will be followed by an engaging conversation between Filmmaker Linda Hoaglund, LACMA Curator of Japanese Art Hollis Goodall, and Futurist, Journalist, and Japanophile Mark Frauenfelder, who will explore the importance of the film’s artworks and their continued relevance and resonance.

Film running time: 83 minutes

Behind the Scenes

 *To view the flipbook in full screen, please click on the "Fullscreen" icon on the lower right-hand corner from the window above.
 

Program Schedule*

5:30 PM | Doors Open
6:00 PM | Edo Avant Garde Screening
7:30 PM | Panel Discussion
8:15 PM | Networking Reception (until 9:30 PM)

*Note: The venues for the screening, panel discussion (TCL Chinese 6 Theatres) and networking reception (JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles Salon) will all be within Ovation Hollywood, a few minutes’ walk from each other. Parking is available at Ovation Hollywood (enter from N. Highland Ave.). More details here.

About the Speakers

Linda Hoaglund
Linda Hoaglund is a bilingual filmmaker born and raised in Japan. The daughter of American missionary parents, she attended Japanese public schools and graduated from Yale University. She has directed and produced five feature-length films about art and the relationship between Japan and the U.S.: Wings of Defeat (2007), ANPO: Art X War (2010), Things Left Behind (2012), The Wound and The Gift (2014), and Edo Avant Garde (2019).

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In 2022, she created a K-12 Arts Curriculum inspired by Edo Avant Garde with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art.

Hoaglund has also subtitled 250 Japanese films, including Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa and Spirited Away by Hayao Miyazaki. She has translated Kabuki performed at Lincoln Center and essays by Issei Miyake, Ishiuchi Miyako, Tomatsu Shomei, Yokoo Tadanori, Kirino Natsuo, Moriyama Daido, Takashi Murakami, Ando Tadao and other renowned artists and writers. In 2022, Chronicle Books published Just Enough Design, a book featuring designer Taku Satoh's work that she edited and translated.

Hollis Goodall
Curator, Japanese Art | Engaged at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art since 1981, with a two-year hiatus as Research Fellow at the University of Kyoto in Japan between 1986 and 1988, Goodall is now Curator of Japanese Art. She oversees installations in the Pavilion for Japanese Art, planning of exhibitions for the Japanese department, educational programs, web programming, as well as collection management, growth, and research.

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From 1988 to 2018, Goodall has overseen more than 275 installations of permanent collection and special exhibitions. She received her Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Texas with Honors in 1977, then a Master’s Degree in East Asian Art from the University of Kansas.

Mark Frauenfelder
Mark Frauenfelder is a research director at the Silicon Valley think tank, Institute for the Future (IFTF), and is the founder of the technology and culture website, Boing Boing. He was the founding editor-in-chief of Make magazine and Wired.com. He designed Billy Idol's CD covers and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Popular Science, Business Week, The Hollywood Reporter, Wired, and other national publications.