Jean Ippolito, Professor of Art

Professor Ippolito’s area of expertise is in new media art of Japan and China. Her research explores the nature of non-narrative interactive and performance art in today’s digital media realm. 

Two images: Jean Ippolito and the cover of her book The Search for New Media: Late 20th Century Art and Technology in Japan.
Jean Ippolito and the cover of her book, The Search for New Media: Late 20th Century Art and Technology in Japan, published in 2012. (Courtesy photos)

Posted July 11, 2024

Jean Ippolito is a professor of art at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. She is an art historian with a research focus on new media art of Japan and China.

Ippolito received her bachelor of arts in art history from Arizona State University in 1979, master of arts in art history with a focus on traditional Chinese and Japanese painting from the University of Washington in 1985, and doctor of philosophy in computer graphics and animation from the Department of Art Education at Ohio State University in 1994. She arrived at UH Hilo in 2003.

Professor Ippolito is fluent in Japanese (speaking, reading, writing) and can converse in Mandarin Chinese. While working on her master’s degree program, she studied Mandarin Chinese at Beijing University in the fall of 1983 on a fully-funded study abroad program. She also was a recipient of a Fulbright Dissertation grant to the University of Tsukuba in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan, in 1992-93.

Paying forward her study abroad experiences, Professor Ippolito taught introductory art courses and a class on women in art history during a Semester at Sea voyage in 2023 to India, Kenya, Jordan, Cyprus, Greece, Croatia, Spain, Morocco, and Portugal.

“My first field class excursion with students was to Elephanta, which is an island in the bay of Mumbai, with ancient Hindu cave temples that date from as early as the 2nd century BCE to about 750 CE,” she says. “We also visited some Buddhist cave temples that date even earlier at Kanheri, just north of Mumbai.” She describes these experiences as personally and professionally “enlightening.”

The exploration of new media art

Book cover: The Search for New Media: Late 20th Century Art and Technology in Japan by Jean Ippolito. Images of digital art.
The cover of Professor Ippolito’s book, The Search for New Media: Late 20th Century Art and Technology in Japan (Common Ground Publishing, July 2012), where she discusses “parallels between the process of production in traditional media and the reiterative algorithm in digital media within Japan’s avant-garde of the 1970s.”

In 2012, Professor Ippolito published her book, The Search for New Media: Late 20th Century Art and Technology in Japan (Common Ground Publishing, July 2012), where she discusses “parallels between the process of production in traditional media and the reiterative algorithm in digital media within Japan’s avant-garde of the 1970s.”

In the book, the author explores new materials and processes of the 1960s, and posits this may have sparked the search for new types of media, “an attitude which naturally led to experiments with technology and eventually opened the way toward the digital realm and the use of computer algorithms and interactivity in the fine arts.” Ippolito’s exploration into this historical era gives insight into the nature of Japan’s non-narrative interactive and performance art in today’s digital media realm.

Ippolito’s recent papers include “Time-Space Alterations: A New Media Abstraction of Traditional Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Aesthetics” (Leonardo: Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, Feb. 2020) and “Chinese Characters as Concept and the International Language of Visual Art” (The International Journal of New Media, Technology and the Arts, 2018). A full list of Prof. Ippolito’s published papers can be found on her web page.

The art professor also writes fiction. The Life of Jesse: A Novella (2017) has a protagonist who explores the purpose of existence through meeting several compassionate characters who appear in the form of creatures.

Community outreach

Several of the young pioneering artists that Ippolito interviewed and wrote about in her dissertation are now internationally renowned for their work. One of the artists, Naoko Tosa, a digital video artist in Japan, re-emerged in Ippolito’s life through a student’s research paper in her Arts in Japan class. Through the student’s paper, Ippolito was delighted to become reacquainted with Tosa’s most recent work.

This led Ippolito to reconnect with Tosa and invite her to present her work in Hilo at the East Hawaiʻi Cultural Center. The solo exhibition, curated by Ippolito, was funded through the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation with support from the humanities division at UH Hilo.

The exhibition was a colorful, fluid digital exhibit by Tosa, re-conceptualizing traditional culture from ancient Japan’s performance art and literature.  The show, “Naoko Tosa’s New Media Art: Reconceptualizing Traditional Japanese Theater,” began in early December 2023 and ran through January 2024.

Free form liquid blues and blacks with Moon at the top.
Still image from the exhibit, “Naoko Tosa’s New Media Art: Reconceptualizing Traditional Japanese Theater,” East Hawaiʻi Cultural Center. (Courtesy photo)

“I chose to focus on the works by Naoko Tosa that re-conceptualized traditional culture from ancient Japan’s performance and literature,” says Ippolito. The three works chosen were the Noh Play piece entitled “Izutsu,” the Kabuki play piece entitled “Renjishi,” and a work based on the opening line from a 13th century volume of stories entitled “The Tale of Heike.”

“The first two were the subject of discussion in the UH Hilo Performing Arts Center lobby during Naoko Tosa’s visiting artist residency, and proved to be quite profound in an academic way,” says Ippolito. “The latter piece was based on literature that is often the inspiration for the script of Noh plays since the Muromachi period in Japan.”

Ippolito’s students aided in the setup of the exhibition and participated in lectures and workshops related to the show.

“I would like to write more about Tosa’s work and help her secure an artist’s residency in the U.S.,” says Ippolito. “I also would like to continue to collaborate with the East Hawaiʻi Cultural Center for contemporary and new media art exhibitions.”

In addition to Tosa, Ippolito used monies from the same HCF grant to produce a visit to campus from Hong Kong artist Hung Keung, who showed his 3D video installation in an exhibition titled, Dao Gives Birth to One in October of 2022. Keung also visited with students and delivered a lecture during his visit.

Ippolito published a paper with Keung in 2017 titled, “Time-Space Alterations: A New Media Abstraction of Traditional Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Aesthetics,” and says the Dao Gives Birth to One exhibition was of great interest to art students because it expressed the idea of merging ancient Chinese philosophy and cultural concepts into new media art. She says it showed how artists and art students “can express their own cultural traditions, even in contemporary art media.”

Two images of the artist with black Japanese characters floating through the air.
In a visit produced by UH Hilo Professor of Art Jean Ippolito, an exhibition of visiting artist Hung Keung’s video installation work, Dao Gives Birth to One, depicted above, was on view on campus at Mookini Library during the artist’s residency Oct. 24-27, 2022. (Courtesy photo)

By Susan Enright, a public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of Keaohou and UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.