Section 4, Visual and Performing Arts | Session 5B
Daisuke Nishihara (Hiroshima University)
Takahashi Yuichi, the pioneer of Western-style painting in Japan, visited Shanghai in 1867. Since then, thousands of modern Japanese painters represented non-Japan Asia in their works. In this presentation, I would like to analyse the representation of Asia in modern Japanese paintings by adopting Edward Said's theory of Orientalism.
In Orientalism, Said scarcely referred to the Orientalism of 19th century French paintings. It was Linda Nochlin who explored the politics of exoticism displayed by great masters like Delacroix or Gerome. She found Enro-centrism in Orientalist paintings and pointed out discriminatory representations of the Orient.
Fujishima Takeji traveled around the Korean peninsula in 1913. In his essay on Korea , he introduced French Orientalist paintings to his readers and suggested that Japanese artists should exploit the new colony for their artistic purposes. Referring to the French colony of Algeria, he also compared Japan 's newly acquired territory to North Africa. Another example of the influence of French Orientalism on Japanese art can be found in the odalisque theme displayed in some portraits of Asian women. Umehara Ryuzaburo wrote in an essay that bright colors belonged to Asian colonies, and not to Japan. These instances illustrate the influence Japan received from Western Orientalism. The representation of Asia in modern Japanese paintings, however, cannot be fully explained by the Orientalist model. Unlike Western Orientalist paintings, a number of artistic works, including one by Wada Sanzo, emphasized the similarity between Japan and its Asian colonies. Japan, a non-Western country, identified herself as the East through the process of self-Orientalization, which was well displayed in some works of Kojima Torajiro. The Japanese Empire tried to justify the act of colonial rule by emphasizing the cultural similarity between Japan and non-Japan Asia. This representational tactic was abundantly present in modern Japanese paintings.
Antje Papist-Matsuo (FU-Berlin)
Some of the most compelling art objects in Japanese art belong to the category of lacquer ware. As a matter of fact, the entire history of Japanese art is steeped in by the use of the material urushi in its different materialities. This manifoldness of the treated material urushi availed the historical development of lacquer wares becoming a distinguished art genre in Japanese art history by its own.
Particularly since the Fujiwara period (900 to 1200) urushi objects determined the interior decoration of residences and lodgings of aristocrats (kuge). As is well known, lacquer wares have been used by these aristocratic men and women alike, in a society that otherwise was coined by its marked preference for overall classifications and polarizations in life. Due to these conditions the entire period is perceived as one in which gender difference and gender awareness figured prominently as the organizing force of culture (keywords here: the masculine-public-Chinese sphere/the feminine-private-native sphere).
As lacquer wares were important transmitters of cultural alignments, they should reveal contemporary gender ideologies. Even if they seem to deny gender difference at first glance (foremost being luxury utensils pointing at hieratical status and rank of ist owner), the inner-courtly boundaries that defined gender during the Fujiwara period and later, must have taken effects on their imageries as well. In my paper I will emphazise following questions. Helped gender construction to mould a specific lacquer culture with clearly visible gender classifications? Have lacquered utensils been employed in gendered space and situations to emphasize gender differences? Do vessel types found in lacquer art, their functions, decors and symbols, tell something about gendered identities and related aesthetic sensibilities?
Moreover, with the arising of the new political class of the warriors (buke) in the 13th century, the previous feminized courtly culture of the Heian aristocrats lost its cultural leading position. Gender structures shifted towards a seemingly pronounced masculine culture with a highly invisibility of women as producers and recipients of literacy and art. In terms of a spatial analysis of warrior mansions and their decoration, the amalgamation of courtly traditions with warrior aesthetics fostered this shift towards the visible space being a male environment. How do lacquer objects relate to these changed gendered conditions on a meta-level? At first glance, contemporary lacquer wares, being highly important parts of the material culture of interior decorations for both the aristocratic (feminine) and the warrior (masculine) spheres, reveal a surprising continuity of images, motives and themes which seem to be unaffected by changed gender structures.
One crucial question arises: as the repertory of the imagery substantially remained the same, may it be that its levels of meaning altered? Therefore I will articulate the thesis that the former feminized subject of desire (sphere of privacy in which cultural pastimes were accomplished by male and female aristocrats as part of the kuge world) has been thus transformed into a feminized object of desire (courtly aesthetic traditions, the world of the kuge as symbols of literacy and power, not (yet!) being part of the buke world), whose materialized symbols were the lacquered utensils displayed.
Josef A. Kyburz (CNRS, Paris)
Among the numerous recorded works of Maruyama Ôkyo (1733-1795), there is one that has remained to this day shrouded in mystery. It is a realistically coloured ink painting of a near lifesize human skeleton, sitting in meditation in the Lotus posture, levitating above an ocean of waves. Now mounted as a hanging scroll, it belongs to the Daijô-ji of Kasumi (Hyôgo Pref.), a monastery of Shingon affiliation on whose decoration Ôkyo spent the last years of his life, from 1787 to his death.
There is little doubt that it is a work of Ôkyo, painted while the old master was living in at the temple, plagued by an eye ailment. The experts, however, are at a loss as to its meaning, beyond supposing it to be vaguely religious.
In the history of Japanese pictorial representations, the painting is unique, by any standard. No other realistic description of the bones is known until well into the 19th century, the then prevailing Sino-Japanese medicine being in fact unconcerned by osteology. The few dissections that had taken place since the 1750s had focused on the inner organs and viscera, and had not gone as far as laying free the bones. Yet Ôkyo's rendering can only result from the observation of an actual skeleton, an articulated one at that.
Considering the above context, the painting may be assumed to represent an esoteric meditation ritual that the Shingon School recommends in the face of death. But why would Ôkyo depict this scene at all?
The answer might well be that the old master thus wrote down his reply to a painting he had seen that must have had intrigued and deeply impressed him, and which he had succeeded in "reading" in spite of the fact that it was expressed in a very different language. The picture may well have been one of the most beautiful illustrations of the Anatomy of Vesalius (1543), attributed to Titian, showing a skeleton standing, elbow propped on a plinth, the right hand resting on a skull, death reflecting on death (memento mori), on the impermanence of things and on the ultimate truth. This hypothesis is not as far-fetched as it seems, and if irrefutable proof in its favour is not to be found, there are quite a few arguments to lend it serious support.
If the hypothesis could be confirmed, Ôkyo's "Skeleton meditating above the waves" would be a testimony of one of those rare flashes of insight up to the Meiji "enlightenment", of a man penetrating to the innermost depth of another, paradigmatically different culture.