Keith Whittle is a Fellow at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and The Japan Foundation, and has served as a Director of Research. He has held academic and teaching appointments as a Guest Lecturer at Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai) and a Lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. His research specialises in modern and contemporary Japanese art and encompasses writing, teaching, and curatorial engagement with Japanese and international art histories.
His work examines Japanese pre- and post-war art in relation to international art movements and transnational artistic communities across Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. It encompasses modernity and post-modernity, colonialism and post-colonialism, transnational art, visual culture and spectatorship, performance and the body, and the strategies and politics of curating East and Southeast Asian art. It also addresses biennialisation, globalisation, global curatorial discourse, and contemporary art from the Global South.
This interdisciplinary practice extends through Tokyo Contemporary, an online research platform he founded dedicated to contemporary art in Japan and its wider international contexts. Through the platform, he develops and disseminates critical research and writing on artists, exhibitions, institutions, and curatorial practices, with particular attention to transnational artistic exchange and the circulation of contemporary art and ideas across different cultural and geographical contexts.
His work informs his curatorial, writing, and educational practice, expressed through exhibitions, publications, lectures, conversations, and collaborations with artists, curators, writers, academics, galleries, museums, and cultural organisations internationally.