AMHERST, Mass. -- On Sunday, Oct. 21, at 4 p.m., in conjunction with the exhibition Reinventing Tokyo: Japan's Largest City in the Artistic Imagination at Amherst College's Mead Art Museum, visiting Japanese printmaker Motoda Hisaharu (b. 1973), whose work is featured in the exhibition, will offer a slide lecture about his art in Pruyne Lecture Hall in Fayerweather Hall at Amherst College. Immediately after the lecture, he will give a gallery talk in the exhibition at the Mead.

Both the lecture and the gallery talk are free and open to the public. This event is co-sponsored by the 2012-2013 Copeland Colloquium at Amherst College, "Art in Place / the Place of Art."

Motoda offers an ominous view of the Tokyo of the future in his meticulously rendered and visually powerful lithographs and mixed-media paintings. His subjects are most often familiar locales-well-known neighborhoods of the city, such as Asakusa, Shibuya and Ginza-but all have experienced some undetermined traumatic event. Motoda completed the prints before the tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, but they are even more compelling now that these futuristic dangers to Tokyo are, in fact, a reality. Motoda received an award from the Japanese Ministry of Education to study in Australia and California in 2009. Thus, his bleak vision of the future now extends to sites as varied as the Sydney Opera House and AT&T Park, the home of the San Francisco Giants. A graduate of Kyushu Sangyō University and Tokyo University of the Arts, Motoda is the recipient of numerous awards and has exhibited throughout the world.

"We're thrilled to have Motoda Hisaharu at Amherst College. His compelling prints are among the highlights of the exhibition Reinventing Tokyo," remarked guest curator Samuel Morse, the Howard M. and Martha P. Mitchell Professor of Art History and Asian Languages and Civilizations. "I invite everyone to take advantage of the opportunity to hear the artist discuss his work and to experience its contemporary relevance."

Motoda's works are reproduced in a richly illustrated scholarly catalogue, published by the University Press of New England and featuring essays by Morse, Trent Maxey, Timothy Van Compernolle, John W. Dower and Yamashita Yuji, that accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue is available from the museum's  bookshop, the University Press of New England and other booksellers.

The third and last artist's lecture in conjunction with Reinventing Tokyo will feature Yamaguchi Akira on Thursday, Dec. 6, at 4:30 p.m. For a complete list of events accompanying the exhibition, please visit the museum's event calendar. 

Reinventing Tokyo remains on view through Sunday, Dec. 30, 2012.

Image detail: Motoda Hisaharu, Indication-Ginza 4-chome Intersection, 2005. Lithograph. Courtesy of the Artist.