May 6 Henry Smith

Friday, May 6, 4:30 to 6:30pm, CWAC156

Making Meiji Red: Materiality vs Meaning in the Changing Colors of 19th-century Ukiyo-e

Henry Smith
Professor Emeritus of Japanese History, EALC, Columbia University

Two decades ago, I postulated a “Blue Revolution” in ukiyo-e woodblock prints that began in 1829 with a sudden increase in the use of imported Prussian blue, a versatile pigment that quickly dominated landscape prints in particular. I further argued that this bright new blue came to express a new awareness of the world across blue oceans under blue skies into which the Japanese were increasingly drawn. I hypothesized finally that a similar process would be repeated four decades later in the 1860s with the import of a new generation of imported colorants, but now the principal hues were purple and red. With the Meiji Restoration of 1868, I proposed, “Red became the modal color of another era with other priorities: where late-Edo blue was the color of expanding space, Meiji red was to become the color of accelerated time.” This talk is a report on an ongoing research project in which I have been engaged for two years in cooperation with the Department of Scientific Research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to identify these new colorants and trace their history. The results force a thorough reconception of the materiality of Meiji ukiyo-e colorants and their artistic possibilities, and in turn a new look at the diverse and changing meanings embodied in “Meiji Red.”

Friday, May 6, 4:30 to 6:30pm, CWAC156
Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact xizh@uchicago.edu

April 8 Sandy Lin

Friday, April 8, 4:30 to 6:30pm, CWAC156

The Hōōden (Phoenix Pavilion) Screens from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition: An Object Biography

Sandy Lin
Ph.D. Student, Art History, University of Chicago

In Summer 2015, a group of three screens were discovered in a storage facility of the Chicago Park District and later acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago. Photographs of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and contemporary sources suggest that the screens were painted by Hashimoto Gahō for the Hōōden (Phoenix Pavilion), a building commissioned by the Japanese government and erected in Jackson Park for the fair. Their discovery makes an exciting addition to the four ranma (transom) panels (now on display at the Art Institute of Chicago) as the only surviving architectural elements from the Hōōden, which burned down in 1946. Nevertheless, a close examination of the screens has revealed some material discrepancies and historical incongruities. In an effort to clarify the confusion, this presentation outlines the object biography of the screens, following their footsteps through their (1) material birth in 1892, (2) career in the 1893 World’s Fair, (3) neglect after the conclusion of the fair, (4) second career from 1936 to 1942 in a Japanese teahouse that was converted from the Hōōden, and (5) provisional death in 1943, when they were removed from the teahouse and sheltered in storage. Throughout the different stages in their life, the screens developed numerous relationships with various communities of people and objects, accumulating a biography that exemplifies their anachronic ability to embody multiple temporalities.

Friday, April 8, 4:30 to 6:30pm, CWAC156
Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact xizh@uchicago.edu

Jan 29 Miriam Wattles

Friday, January 29, 4:30-6:30pm, CWAC 153

Defining Manga Anew in 1928: Ippei, a Book, and History

Miriam Wattles
Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture, UCSB

It wasn’t until the explosion of mass media in the 1920s that the word “manga” began to be used for comics and cartoons in Japan. Reformulations of the past were integral to the redefinition of the word. Okamoto Ippei (1886-1948), hugely popular with the public and head of a newly formed manga circle, wove a new historical sensibility into his prescriptions for the future of manga in his book Shin manga no kakikata (How To Make New Manga, 1928). The larger genus he employed was “minshûga,” or “pictures of the people.” In proposing this term at this particular historical moment, Ippei was responding to deep underlying tensions between elite and popular culture, individualism and collectivism, and nationalism and cosmopolitanism. This talk counters present amnesia around Ippei and his definition of manga and gives a surprising history of public ownership of one particular copy of Shin manga no kakikata.

Friday, January 29, 4:30-6:30pm, CWAC 153
Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact xizh@uchicago.edu

January 15 Federico Marcon

Friday, January 15, 4:30 to 6:30pm, CWAC156

Money Talks: Monetary Disputes in Early Eighteenth-Century Japan

Federico Marcon 

Professor of Japanese History at Princeton University

koban

AT THE TURN OF THE eighteenth century, as the lavish splendor of the Genroku era waned into a decade of economic stagnation and social unrest, two scholars debated on the nature of money and its proper administration. The dispute revealed not only the extent of the monetary integration of Japanese society only after a century of Tokugawa rule, but also the sophistication of samurai’s understanding of financial dynamics. The story of the clash of the two views of what money is, the bullionism of Arai Hakuseki and the contractualism of Ogiwara Shigehide and Ogyū Sorai, bespeaks a turning point in the economic politics of early modern Japan—a turning point of transnational relevance, as in contemporaneous England economic thinkers were debating analogous issues. 

Friday, January 15, 4:30 to 6:30pm, CWAC156

Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact Ben at benjamin2@uchicago.edu or Xi at xizh@uchicago.edu

April 10 Tessa Handa

Tessa Handa, Ph.D. Student

The Department of Art History, University of Chicago

The Postcard: Negotiating Modernity, Mediality, and Aesthetics in Late Meiji Japan

Screen Shot 2015-04-01 at 8.46.47 AM

 

Fujishima Takeji. Geisha and Biwa, from series Bijin to Ongyoku. Color woodblock print and stencil; organic colorants and inorganic colorants, metallic pigment on Japanese paper adhered to card stock. 13.8 x 8.8 cm. 1905.

Fujishima Takeji’s (1867-1943) wood-block printed postcard, Geisha and Biwa, features a geisha, clad in a boldly patterned kimono, set against a backdrop of silver metallic waves and dancing triangular shapes. This 1905 postcard is addressed, stamped, and postmarked to Meridan, New Hampshire. Now residing in the Boston Museum of Fine Art’s collection, this postcard has traversed vast distances of time and space and bears witness to a story of emerging communication networks and changing visualities in turn of the century Japan. In this paper, I argue that the artist postcard was a medial point of contact between emerging technology, aesthetic negotiation, and the masses. Through this point of contact we can access dimensions of the artist postcard’s role in late Meiji period. Specifically the artist postcard was a site for producing and seeing ideas about new Japanese aesthetics. Further, the ensuing debate over whether or not the postcard was fine art reveals the deep-seated anxiety over the recent formulation of the field of aesthetics and the boundaries of fine art. Postcards such as Fujishima’s series offered a distant and fantastic idea of modern Japan to the foreign and domestic audience that could be inscribed, sent, and ultimately possessed.

Cochrane-Woods Art Center (CWAC) Room 156 4:30-6:30pm

Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact tingtingxu@uchicago.edu

Friday Feb 27th Sinéad Vilbar

Sinéad Vilbar, Curator of Japanese and Korean art

Cleveland Museum of Art

Site Specific: A Kumano Mandala Painting at the Cleveland Museum of Art

This event is sponsored by CEAS Committee on Japanese Studies

1953.16_w

The Three Sacred Shrines at Kumano: Kumano Mandala. Japan, Kamakura period (1185-1333), ca. 1300. Hanging scroll; ink, color, and gold on silk and color on silk
The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund 1953.16

Shinto-Buddhist combinatory art elucidates visually the medieval Japanese Buddhist theory of honjisuijaku, literally “original ground, flowing traces”, in which Buddhist deities manifest themselves as Shinto deities (kami) in order to communicate the Dharma to residents of Japan. The corpus of paintings comprising sacred site mandalas includes shrine mandalas (miya mandara), honjisuijaku mandalas, and pilgrimage mandalas (sankei mandara). Each has a number of pictorial conventions for conveying the combinatory nature of kami and Buddhist deity veneration. In many cases, natural or manmade features specific to particular sacred sites drive the compositions of the mandalas. This workshop presentation focuses on understanding representations of Kumano and its associated deities within the larger corpus of sacred site mandalas. Special attention is given to the composition of the Kumano Shrine Mandala in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Persons with concerns regarding accessibility should please contact tingtingxu@uchicago.edu

 

Friday Nov 14 Stephanie Su

Stephanie Su

Ph.D. Candidate, University of Chicago, Department of Art History

The 1933 Chinese Art Exhibition in Paris: Constructing New Canons for European Audience

Exhibition entrance

Abstract:

This paper explores the formation of canons in art historical writing and exhibition through the lens of the Sino-Japanese relationship in the early twentieth century. Opened in June 1933, the Exposition de la Peinture Chinoise was the first large-scale exhibition on Chinese art in Paris, surveying its development from the Han dynasty to the early 1930s. It created a sensation in the Parisian art world, attracted unprecedented numbers of viewers and was widely covered by both French and Chinese media. Its significance, however, extended beyond its popularity. Motivated by the success of earlier Japanese art exhibitions in Paris, Xu Beihong (1895-1953), the curator of the Chinese exhibition, collaborated with French art museums, private collectors and Chinese artists to organize an exhibition that aimed to not only reclaim the cultural supremacy of China but also reconstruct new canons for European audience.  This paper examines Xu’s curatorial, rhetorical and visual strategies to engage overseas audience and historicize his own works within that narrative of Chinese art.  _________________________________________________

Stephanie Su is a Ph.D. candidate in the art history department. Her research interests include 20th century Chinese and Japanese art, Sino-Japanese relationship, the cultural exchange between Europe and East Asia, historiography, history of collecting and display, etc. She’s currently writing her dissertation on the visual representation of the past in the early twentieth century Japanese and Chinese painting.

Friday, Nov 14th, 4:30-6:30pm, CWAC 156
Persons with disability who may need assistance, please contact Tingting Xu tingtingxu@uchicago.edu.

Friday Nov 7th Shaoqian Zhang

Shaoqian Zhang

Professor, Oklahoma State University, Department of Art, Graphic Design and Art History

 The Making of Harmony and War, from New Year Pictures to Propaganda Posters during China’s Second Sino-Japanese War

ja 54

Abstract:

Historically, Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges were dominated by a China-oriented mentality. This relationship shifted abruptly in the late nineteenth century with Japan’s rapid westernization and industrialization, which coincided with the cultural and political implosion of the Qing Dynasty, and was further inverted as Japan became a world power and China struggled to reassemble itself. It was thus with a sense of justification that the Japanese advertised themselves as the legitimate protector of East Asian culture, and key Chinese cities under their occupation became a battleground for what Japan called the New Order in East Asia. Some Japanese and Chinese were able to agree on a working relationship under a new structure of political authority, and a number of propaganda posters were produced to reflect these negotiations. After 1938, the Chinese Guomindang also began to pay attention to propaganda art. Based on original archival research of primary historical documents and visual analysis of important icons in those propaganda images, this article examines the subsequent war of propaganda prints between the Guomindang and the Japanese militarists during the 1930s and 1940s, and demonstrates how the Chinese were able to utilize a variety of signs, symbols and art techniques to create their own propaganda prints in the effort to break from New Order in East Asia.

_____________________________________________

Prof. Shaoqian Zhang specializes in East Asian art and architecture, and teaches courses in Chinese and Japanese art and architectural history at OSU. She received her BA in traditional Chinese architecture from Beijing University, and MA and PhD in art history from Northwestern University. She joined the OSU faculty in 2011.

Zhang’s research and teaching interests focus on the history of Chinese printmaking and propaganda art, particularly in relation to representations of modernity, party-state and body politics. Her dissertation, “Visualizing the New Republic: Pictorial Construction of the Modern Chinese Citizen (1895-49),” examines how consistent, ubiquitous themes in traditional Chinese New Year prints evolved into a modern political propaganda language. She has published “The Supremacy of Modern Time: How Shanghai Calendars Reshaped the Image of China” in Modern Art Asia (Mar. 2011), “New Configuration of Gendered Development in Chinese Modern Movies (1930-40),” in Parnassus (March 2008) and “Comparative Analyses of Capital Cities in the Tang and Song Dynasties,” in Kaogu yu wenwu [Archeology and Culture Relics] (2002: Supplementary Issue).

Her current project centers on the war of propaganda art between China and Japan during World War II. She is intrigued by the historical interactions between China and Japan through the spread of print technologies, graphic design and modernization. Her other interests include the relationship between architectural representation and nationalism in China and Japan during the 1920s – 30s, the idea and visual embodiment of “Pan-Asianness” and post-1949 Chinese landscape paintings.

Zhang has been the recipient of research and writing grants, including Northwestern University Dissertation Year Fellowship, Mickenberg/Sosin Graduate Student Fellowship and Barbara Smith Shanley Graduate Travel Fellowship. Before coming to OSU, she worked as a visiting instructor at the University of Kentucky (2010-11) and Denison University (2009-10).

Friday, Nov 7th, 4:30-6:30pm, CWAC 156
Persons with disability who may need assistance, please contact Tingting Xu tingtingxu@uchicago.edu.

Friday Oct 10th Ken Tadashi Oshima

Prof. Ken Tadashi Oshima

University of Washington, Department of Architecture

Nihon no toshi kūkan: Approaches to the City Invisible

 Untitled

This talk examines the conceptualization of Japanese urban space at the crossroads of the 1960s World Design Conference, with trajectories leading to both metabolic mega-structures and the preservation of indigenous villages.

Professor Oshima teaches in the areas of trans-national architectural history, theory, representation, and design. His publications include Architecturalized Asia (University of Hawa’ii Press/Hong Kong University Press, 2013), GLOBAL ENDS: towards the beginning (Toto, 2012), International Architecture in Interwar Japan: Constructing Kokusai Kenchiku (University of Washington Press, 2009) and Arata Isozaki (Phaidon, 2009). Currently 1st Vice President of the Society of Architectural Historians, he curated “Tectonic Visions Between Land and Sea: Works of Kiyonori Kikutake” (Harvard GSD, 2012), “SANAA: Beyond Borders” (Henry Art Gallery 2007-8), and co-curator of “Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noémi Raymond” (University of Pennsylvania, UC Santa Barbara, Kamakura Museum of Modern Art, 2006-7).

Friday, Oct 10th, 4:00-6:00pm, CWAC 156
Persons with disability who may need assistance, please contact Tingting Xu tingtingxu@uchicago.edu.

 

Dec.13 Micah Auerback

Friday, December 13, 4-6 pm, CWAC 152

Joint-session with East Asia: Transregional Histories (EATRH)
Paper will be available shortly on the website:
http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/eastasiahistory/

Painting the Biography of the Buddha in Meiji Japan

Micah Auerback
Assistant Professor
University of Michigan, Asian Languages and Cultures

Discussants:
Helen Findley (Ph.D. candidate, EALC)
Nancy Lin (Ph.D. canditate, Art History)

TBA

 

Friday, December 13, 4-6 p.m.  CWAC 152
Persons with disability who may need assistance, please contact anf@uchicago.edu