We cordially invite you to join us tomorrow, Dec 3, at 4:45-6:45pm CT, CWAC 152 for our fourth VMPEA workshop this fall. Please note the unusual time. This workshop features:
Meng-Hsuan Lee
PhD Candidate, Art History & Archaeology, Columbia University
Lecturer in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Who will be presenting the paper titled:
“Japanese Aryanism for the Tropics: Ide Kaoru’s Round-Arch Style in Colonial Taiwan”
This workshop will take place in hybrid format. For those who would like to join online, please register here.
Please see the abstract and bio for this workshop below.
We hope to see many of you there!
Ide Kaoru, Kenkō Shrine, Taipei, 1928
Abstract:
Since the German architect and theorist Heinrich Hübsch posed the discourse-altering question “In Which Style Should We Build?” (1828), the Rround-Arch Style (Rundbogenstyl), or commonly generalized as the Romanesque Revival, has migrated beyond central Europe and become a global phenomenon. In recent years, scholars have posited the popularity of Romanesque Revival in North America as a function of the myth of the migratory Anglo-Saxons or Aryans. Interestingly, if this style is indeed associated with Aryanism, it has found equal enthusiasm in the Japanese Empire, particularly in the 1910s-1930s.
By focusing on the architect and theorist Ide Kaoru 井手薰 (1879-1944), a champion for the Round-Arch Style, this paper speculates that Ide, along with peers and followers, sought to use the style and associated techniques to evolve the Japanese race into a migratory one that can settle across various climate zones. As the Chief Architect of the Government-General in colonial Taiwan, Ide treated the Round-Arch Style not as an ossified historical style but as a flexible and evolvable technique. For him, it is not only suitable for reinforced concrete construction, but can also be easily hybridized with local styles and help achieve an evolved Japanese race. I argue that under this ideology of evolutionism or even a form of Aryanism, professed by some Japanese race scientists, Ide’s oeuvre in colonial Taiwan ranged from pan-Eurasian hybridity, such as the 1928 Kenkō Shrine 建功神社, to works with more modernist sensibilities.
Bio:
Meng-Hsuan Lee is a PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University. He studies 19th and 20th-century architecture and urbanism. His dissertation, Shop-House, Verandah-Arcade, Decorated Façade: An Excavation of Commercial Architecture in Japanese Colonial Taiwan, examines a dialectical history of planning and vernacular architecture, and the emergence of capitalism in Taiwan since c. 1860. Broadly, he considers planning and regulation techniques, the “contact zones” of colonialism, histories and theories of ornament, and media archaeology.
