During the course of this grant, I pursued research on the intersections between Brazilian and Japanese avant-garde art, concentrating particularly on the work of Hélio Oiticica and Lee Ufan. This project builds on my long-term engagement with transnational contemporary art and aims to shed light on the shared philosophical underpinnings of artistic practices often considered in isolation.

With the support of the grant, I conducted library research at Cornell University and Columbia University, where I accessed important materials related to this ongoing research and presented aspects of this research in international conferences at Cornell University and the University of Chicago. These research activities have directly informed an essay I am currently completing within the context of the project Translating Embodiedness, organized by Prof. Fusako Innami at Durham University. This project is now being considered for publication as a special issue of the journal Representation. 

My article for this project brings Oiticica and Lee into dialogue through their shared engagement with the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It examines Lee Ufan’s critique of conceptual art through phenomenology, arguing for an art grounded in material presence and embodied perception rather than abstract ideas. Drawing on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, I explore Lee’s rejection of the conceptual imposition of meaning, comparing it to colonial domination. The essay reflects on the challenge of translating non-verbal, sensory experience into language, both in art and criticism. Lee’s concept of encounter resonates with Hélio Oiticica’s notion of de-intellectualization, as both artists propose alternative models of thinking through matter, movement, and perception—reconfiguring the relationship between art, theory, and the body.

My essay on Hélio Oiticica’s poetics, which appeared as the postface to the English translation of Secret Poetics, edited and translated by Rebecca Kosick, has received numerous excellent reviews and has been widely cited in recent studies of Latin American art. Additionally, I have continued publishing a series of interviews I conducted in Japanese with prominent figures of the Japanese postwar avant-garde, such as Hariu Ichiro and Akasegawa Genpei, in the weekly cultural newspaper Tosho Shinbun. These interviews have also generated highly positive responses from readers and scholars in Japan. The last interview of this series, with Lee Ufan, has been submitted to the journal and is currently waiting for copyright clearance by the artist. 

The activities supported by this grant—research, travel, writing, and dissemination—have been fundamental for advancing the philosophical depth and international resonance of my work on the transnational avant-garde. I look forward to continuing and expanding this project in future research and publications.