Lillian Wies

Lillian Wies earned a Ph.D. studying modern Japanese art history and visual culture with Dr. Alicia Volk. She received her B.A. in Art History from Wellesley College in 2010 and her M.A. in Regional Studies East Asia from Harvard University in 2017. Her research interests include issues of gender and identity, digital methods and tools, and 20th century Japanese painting, prints, postcards and ephemera.

Her dissertation identifies the “female artist” as an idealized social type in modern Japan (c. 1900-1930) and investigates the role women played in its creation and legacy to illuminate how modern Japanese women painters negotiated oppressive gender structures and pushed for greater personal freedom and artistic status. She investigates how the “female artist” type shaped and was shaped by the activities of four women painters: Shima Seien (1892-1970), Yoshida Fujio (1887-1987), Kametaka Fumiko (1886-1977), and Kajiwara Hisako (1896-1988). How did these once prominent artists negotiate and legitimize their position in the art world, as mediated through the “female artist” figure? How were they complicit in crafting this stereotype, and what strategies did they use to expand its meaning? How does the “female artist” type continue to marginalize women in contemporary scholarship? In answering these questions her dissertation hopes to offer a timely and expansive account of women’s agency amidst system gender discrimination in modern Japanese art.

Lily’s research and language study has been supported by the Japan Foundation, Toshiba International Foundation, the Nippon Foundation, and the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies. She has worked at the Harvard Yenching Library and has held curatorial internships and fellowships at the Davis Museum, the Louvre Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Asian Art (the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M Sackler Gallery).

Lily was an Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellow. From February 2024, Lily will be the Gregory and Maria Henderson Curatorial Fellow in East Asian Art at the Harvard Art Museums.