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Japanese Painting and National Identity

Japanese Painting and National Identity PDF Author: Victoria Weston
Publisher: U of M Center for Japanese Studies
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
This is the first monograph in English to address the art and philosophy of a group of painters regarded as seminal figures in the development of modern Japanese painting. Lead by the outspoken and widely published art critic Okakura Tenshin, a group of mostly Tokyo-based painters took on nothing less than the modernization of traditional Japanese painting. The painters who looked to Okakura Tenshin as their leader saw themselves not just as artists but as servants of the nation. Their task, they believed, was to give expression to the vitality of Meiji Japan while also helping to shape public opinion at home and abroad. Thus, they chose themes purposefully redolent with what they identified as Japanese cultural values; they experimented with painting techniques based on tradition yet revitalized through innovation. This book details how these artists came to this mission, as well as their training, their philosophical objectives, and their works.

Japanese Painting and National Identity

Japanese Painting and National Identity PDF Author: Victoria Weston
Publisher: U of M Center for Japanese Studies
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
This is the first monograph in English to address the art and philosophy of a group of painters regarded as seminal figures in the development of modern Japanese painting. Lead by the outspoken and widely published art critic Okakura Tenshin, a group of mostly Tokyo-based painters took on nothing less than the modernization of traditional Japanese painting. The painters who looked to Okakura Tenshin as their leader saw themselves not just as artists but as servants of the nation. Their task, they believed, was to give expression to the vitality of Meiji Japan while also helping to shape public opinion at home and abroad. Thus, they chose themes purposefully redolent with what they identified as Japanese cultural values; they experimented with painting techniques based on tradition yet revitalized through innovation. This book details how these artists came to this mission, as well as their training, their philosophical objectives, and their works.

Visual Genesis of Japanese National Identity

Visual Genesis of Japanese National Identity PDF Author: Ewa Machotka
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9789052014821
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
This volume offers an entirely new view of the concept of constructing nation-states. It inquires into the nature of national identity constructs produced in pre-modern Japan through examining two aspects of its cultural production, the sphere of fine arts and the sphere of literature.

The Politics of Painting

The Politics of Painting PDF Author: Asato Ikeda
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824872126
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 165

Book Description
This book examines a set of paintings produced in Japan during the 1930s and early 1940s that have received little scholarly attention. Asato Ikeda views the work of four prominent artists of the time—Yokoyama Taikan, Yasuda Yukihiko, Uemura Shōen, and Fujita Tsuguharu—through the lens of fascism, showing how their seemingly straightforward paintings of Mount Fuji, samurai, beautiful women, and the countryside supported the war by reinforcing a state ideology that justified violence in the name of the country’s cultural authenticity. She highlights the politics of “apolitical” art and challenges the postwar labeling of battle paintings—those depicting scenes of war and combat—as uniquely problematic. Yokoyama Taikan produced countless paintings of Mount Fuji as the embodiment of Japan’s “national body” and spirituality, in contrast to the modern West’s individualism and materialism. Yasuda Yukihiko located Japan in the Minamoto warriors of the medieval period, depicting them in the yamato-e style, which is defined as classically Japanese. Uemura Shōen sought to paint the quintessential Japanese woman, drawing on the Edo-period bijin-ga (beautiful women) genre while alluding to noh aesthetics and wartime gender expectations. For his subjects, Fujita Tsuguharu looked to the rural snow country, where, it was believed, authentic Japanese traditions could still be found. Although these artists employed different styles and favored different subjects, each maintained close ties with the state and presented what he considered to be the most representative and authentic portrayal of Japan. Throughout Ikeda takes into account the changing relationships between visual iconography/artistic style and its significance by carefully situating artworks within their specific historical and cultural moments. She reveals the global dimensions of wartime nationalist Japanese art and opens up the possibility of dialogue with scholarship on art produced in other countries around the same time, particularly Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Politics of Painting will be welcomed by those interested in modern Japanese art and visual culture, and war art and fascism. Its analysis of painters and painting within larger currents in intellectual history will attract scholars of modern Japanese and East Asian studies.

Becoming American? The Art and Identity Crisis of Yasuo Kuniyoshi

Becoming American? The Art and Identity Crisis of Yasuo Kuniyoshi PDF Author: ShiPu Wang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
"A few short days has changed my status in this country, although I myself have not changed at all." On December 8, 1941, artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953) awoke to find himself branded an "enemy alien" by the U.S. government in the aftermath of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The historical crisis forced Kuniyoshi, an émigré Japanese with a distinguished career in American art, to rethink his pictorial strategies and to confront questions of loyalty, assimilation, national and racial identity that he had carefully avoided in his prewar art. As an immigrant who had proclaimed himself to be as "American as the next fellow," the realization of his now fractured and precarious status catalyzed the development of an emphatic and conscious identity construct that would underlie Kuniyoshi’s art and public image for the remainder of his life. Drawing on previously unexamined primary sources, Becoming American? is the first scholarly book in over two decades to offer an in-depth and critical analysis of Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s pivotal works, including his "anti-Japan" posters and radio broadcasts for U.S. propaganda, and his coded and increasingly enigmatic paintings, within their historical contexts. Through the prism of an identity crisis, the book examines Kuniyoshi’s imagery and writings as vital means for him to engage, albeit often reluctantly and ambivalently, in discussions about American democracy and ideals at a time when racial and national origins were grounds for mass incarceration and discrimination. It is also among the first scholarly studies to investigate the activities of Americans of Japanese descent outside the internment camps and the intense pressures with which they had to deal in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. As an art historical book, Becoming American? foregrounds broader historical debates of what constituted American art, a central preoccupation of Kuniyoshi’s artistic milieu. It illuminates the complicating factors of race, diasporas, and ideology in the construction of an American cultural identity. Timely and provocative, the book historicizes and elucidates the ways in which "minority" artists have been, and continue to be, both championed and marginalized for their cultural and ethnic "difference" within the twentieth-century American art canon.

Parting the Mists

Parting the Mists PDF Author: Aida Yuen Wong
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824829520
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
In Parting the Mists, Aida Yuen Wong makes a convincing argument that the forging of a national tradition in modern China was frequently pursued in association with rather than in rejection of Japan. The focus of her book is on Japan’s integral role in the invention of "national-style painting," or guohua, in early-twentieth-century China. Guohua, referring to brush paintings on traditional formats, is often misconstrued as a residual conservatism from the dynastic age that barricaded itself within classical traditions. Wong places this art form at the forefront of cross-cultural exchange. Notable proponents of guohua (e.g., Chen Hengke, Jin Cheng, Fu Baoshi, and Gao Jianfu) are discussed in connection with Japan, where they discovered stylistic and ideological paradigms consonant with the empowering of "Asian/Oriental" cultural practices against the backdrop of encroaching westernization. Not just a "window on the West," Japan stood as an informant of China modernism in its own right. The first book in English devoted to Sino-Japanese dialogues in modern art, Parting the Mists explores the sensitive phenomenon of Japanism in the practice and theory of Chinese painting. Wong carries out a methodologically agile study that sheds light on multiple spheres: stylistic and iconographic innovations, history writing, art theory, patronage and the market, geopolitics, the creation of artists’ societies, and exhibitions. Without avoiding the dark history of Japanese imperialism, she provides a nuanced reading of Chinese views about Japan and the two countries’ convergent, and often colliding, courses of nationalism.

Critical Perspectives on Classicism in Japanese Painting

Critical Perspectives on Classicism in Japanese Painting PDF Author: Elizabeth Lillehoj
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824826994
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
In the West, classical art - inextricably linked to concerns of a ruling or dominant class - commonly refers to art with traditional themes and styles that resurrect a past golden era. Although art of the early Edo period (1600-1868) encompasses a spectrum of themes and styles, references to the past are so common that many Japanese art historians have variously described this period as a classical revival, era of classicism, or a renaissance. How did seventeenth-century artists and patrons imagine the past? Why did they so often select styles and themes from the court culture of the Heian period (794-1185)? Were references to the past something new, or were artists and patrons in previous periods equally interested in manners that came to be seen as classical? How did classical manners relate to other styles and themes found in Edo art? In considering such questions, the contributors to this volume hold that classicism has been an amorphous, changing concept in Japan - just as in the West. Troublesome in its ambiguity and implications, it cannot be separated from the political and ideological interests of those who have employed it over the years. The modern writers who firs

The Stakes of Exposure

The Stakes of Exposure PDF Author: Namiko Kunimoto
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452953767
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 431

Book Description
How would artistic practice contribute to political change in post–World War II Japan? How could artists negotiate the imbalanced global dynamics of the art world and also maintain a sense of aesthetic and political authenticity? While the contemporary art world has recently come to embrace some of Japan’s most daring postwar artists, the interplay of art and politics remains poorly understood in the Americas and Europe. The Stakes of Exposure fills this gap and explores art, visual culture, and politics in postwar Japan from the 1950s to the 1970s, paying special attention to how anxiety and confusion surrounding Japan’s new democracy manifested in representations of gender and nationhood in modern art. Through such pivotal postwar episodes as the Minamata Disaster, the Lucky Dragon Incident, the budding antinuclear movement, and the ANPO protests of the 1960s, The Stakes of Exposure examines a wide range of issues addressed by the period’s prominent artists, including Tanaka Atsuko and Shiraga Kazuo (key members of the Gutai Art Association), Katsura Yuki, and Nakamura Hiroshi. Through a close study of their paintings, illustrations, and assemblage and performance art, Namiko Kunimoto reveals that, despite dissimilar aesthetic approaches and divergent political interests, Japanese postwar artists were invested in the entangled issues of gender and nationhood that were redefining Japan and its role in the world. Offering many full-color illustrations of previously unpublished art and photographs, as well as period manga, The Stakes of Exposure shows how contention over Japan’s new democracy was expressed, disavowed, and reimagined through representations of the gendered body.

Since Meiji

Since Meiji PDF Author: J. Thomas Rimer
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824861027
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 554

Book Description
Research outside Japan on the history and significance of the Japanese visual arts since the beginning of the Meiji period (1868) has been, with the exception of writings on modern and contemporary woodblock prints, a relatively unexplored area of inquiry. In recent years, however, the subject has begun to attract wide interest. As is evident from this volume, this period of roughly a century and a half produced an outpouring of art created in a bewildering number of genres and spanning a wide range of aims and accomplishments. Since Meiji is the first sustained effort in English to discuss in any depth a time when Japan, eager to join in the larger cultural developments in Europe and the U.S., went through a visual revolution. Indeed, this study of the visual arts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suggests a fresh history of modern Japanese culture—one that until now has not been widely visible or thoroughly analyzed outside that country. In this extensive collection, which includes some 190 black-and-white and color reproductions, scholars from Japan, Europe, Australia, and America explore an impressive array of subjects: painting, sculpture, prints, fashion design, crafts, and gardens. The works discussed range from early Meiji attempts to create art that referenced Western styles to postwar and contemporary avant-garde experiments. There are, in addition, substantive investigations of the cultural and intellectual background that helped stimulate the creation of new and shifting art forms, including essays on the invention of a modern artistic vocabulary in the Japanese language and the history of art criticism in Japan, as well as an extensive account of the career and significance of perhaps the best-known Japanese figure concerned with the visual arts of his period, Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913), whose Book of Tea is still widely read today. Taken together, the essays in this volume allow readers to connect ideas and images, thus bringing to light larger trends in the Japanese visual arts that have made possible the vitality, range, and striking achievements created during this turbulent and lively period. Contributors: Stephen Addiss, Chiaki Ajioka, John Clark, Ellen Conant, Mikiko Hirayama, Michael Marra, Jonathan Reynolds, J. Thomas Rimer, Audrey Yoshiko Seo, Eric C. Shiner, Lawrence Smith, Shuji Tanaka, Reiko Tomii, Mayu Tsuruya, Toshio Watanabe, Gennifer Weisenfeld, Bert Winther-Tamaki, Emiko Yamanashi.

Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field

Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field PDF Author: Joshua S. Mostow
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824825720
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
In this, the first collection in English of feminist-oriented research on Japanese art and visual culture, an international group of scholars examines representations of women in a wide range of visual work. The volume begins with Chino Kaori's now-classic essay Gender in Japanese Art, which introduced feminist theory to Japanese art. This is followed by a closer look at a famous thirteenth-century battle scroll and the production of bijin (beautiful women) prints within the world of Edoperiod advertising. A rare homoerotic picture-book is used to extrapolate the grammar of desire as represented in late seventeenth-century Edo. In the modern period, contributors consider the introduction to Meiji Japan of the Western nude and oil-painting and examine Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) and the role of one of its famous artists. The book then shifts its focus to an examination of paintings produced for the Japanese-sponsored annual salons held in colonial Korea. The post-war period comes under scrutiny in a study of the novel Woman in the Dunes and its film adaptation. The critical discourse that surrounded women artists of the late twentieth-century - the Super Girls of Art - i

Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State

Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State PDF Author: Dōshin Satō
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606060597
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Book Description
This is an insightful and intelligent re-thinking of Japanese art history & its Western influences. This broad-ranging and profoundly influential analysis describes how Western art institutions and vocabulary were transplanted to Japan in the late nineteenth century. In the 1870-80s, artists and government administrators in Japan encountered the Western 'system of the arts' for the first time. Under pressure to exhibit and sell its artistic products abroad, Japan's new Meiji government came face-to-face with the need to create European-style art schools and museums - and even to establish Japanese words for art, painting, artist, and sculpture. "Modern Japanese Art" is a full re-conceptualization of the field of Japanese art history, exposing the politics through which the words, categories, and values that structure our understanding of the field came to be while revealing the historicity of Western and non-Western art history.