Bert Winther-Tamaki is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine, specializing in modern and contemporary Japanese art history and visual studies. He is the author of Tsuchi: Earthy Materials in Contemporary Japanese Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), Maximum Embodiment: Yōga, the “Western Painting” of Japan, 1910–1955 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012), and Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001). In 2023, he curated “Return to Earth: Art and Ecology in Japan from the 1950s through the 1980s” at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Forthcoming articles assess open-air clay firing by Koie Ryōji and other artists in the 1980s, the land art of Tonoshiki Tadashi (1942–1992), and the photography of Shibata Toshio (b. 1949). He is currently an Academic Associate at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in Norwich, UK, where he is completing a book on Japanese art of the 1980s and 1990s tentatively titled Promethean Excesses of Contemporary Art in the Bubble.