AsiaLENS: Edo Avant Garde

Edo Avant Garde is a film revealing the untold story of how Japanese artists of the Edo era (1603 - 1868) set the stage for the "modern art" movement in the West.

During the Edo era, bold artists innovated abstraction, minimalism, surrealism and the illusion of 3-D. Their originality is most striking in images of the natural world depicted with gold leaf on large-scale folding screens. To capture the dynamism, scale and meticulous details of the art, Hoaglund worked with Japan's Academy Award-winning cinematographer Kasamatsu Norimichi to film masterpieces in museum and private collections across the U.S. and Japan.

Linda Hoaglund is a bilingual film director and producer who has subtitled 200 Japanese films and translated works by Japan's most esteemed artists. In 2014, she completed The Wound and The Gift, a film about rescued animals told through an ancient Japanese fable. Previously she created a trilogy of feature documentary films relating to the Pacific War and postwar U.S.-Japan relations: Things Left Behind (2012) explores the transformative power of photographs of clothing left behind by those who perished in Hiroshima, taken by Ishiuchi Miyako, winner of the 2014 Hasselblad Award. ANPO: Art X War (2010) tells the story of resistance to U.S. military bases in Japan, through a treasure trove of paintings, photographs, film clips and interviews with the artists who created them. She also produced and wrote Wings of Defeat (2007), about Kamikaze pilots who survived WWII and tell the truth about a military that could not accept defeat. She recently competed her new film, Edo Avant-garde.