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- Convenor:
-
Eriko Tomizawa-Kay
(University of East Anglia)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Eriko Tomizawa-Kay
(University of East Anglia)
- Discussant:
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Jaqueline Berndt
(Stockholm University)
- Section:
- Visual Arts
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 25 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel examines the relationship between visual representations, racial discourse, and gender in the Japanese Empire. By using previously overlooked case studies from Manchuria, Taiwan, Okinawa, and Japan, it aims to provide a critical trans-national/regional perspective on modern Japanese art.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores how concepts of race, ethnicity, and nationalism intersected with the visual representations of the female body in the Japanese Empire from the 1920s to the 1940s. On the one hand, the representations of women engaged with the contemporary racial and nationalist discourses, often endorsing Japan's military expansion in East Asia and normalizing political aggression through the trope of the subjugated female. On the other hand, the exhibition context of these works destabilized their meanings, due to viewers' diverse political ideologies, social classes, and ethnic backgrounds. The exhibition space became a site of collaboration, negotiation, and resistance.
This panel reevaluates the visual culture of the Japanese empire from a trans-national/regional perspective. We consider the following key questions: How did political, gender and racial discourses interact with the representation of women in the Japanese Empire? How did female artists transform the gendered body to support or question Japan's modernization project and the political ambitions of the Great Prosperity Sphere? How did artists struggle to reconcile the contradictions between modernism and colonialism, and alliances and conflicts between Japan and other countries?
This panel brings together a group of scholars whose case studies deal with Japanese colonies of Taiwan, Okinawa, and Manchuria. The first presenter discusses the aspiration and illusion in Pan-Asianism discourse by examining female artist Uemura Shōen's work. The complex visual references of Buddhism and artistic styles from China, Japan, and Europe created an ambiguous female body that allowed for multiple readings of her identities. The second presenter focuses on the Taiwanese female artist Chen Jin's paintings at official salons in Tokyo, exploring the shifting iconography of women in a Chinese dress in the early 1940s, as the Japanese Empire celebrated the tenth anniversary of Manchukuo. The third presenter investigates how representations of the Okinawan female body were appropriated to express the relationship between subjugated Okinawa and mainland Japan, and to justify the discrimination against Okinawan people. Through closely analyzing images of the female body and the role of women artists, this panel complicates the relationship between racial discourse and visual representation, and contributes to current scholarship on modern Japanese art.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 25 August, 2021, -Magdalena Kolodziej (Toyo Eiwa University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws attention to the shifting and ambiguous iconography of a woman in a Chinese dress at the official salon in Tokyo by focusing on a Taiwanese painter Chen Jin's works, their critical reception, and the cultural diplomacy between the Japanese Empire and Manchukuo.
Paper long abstract:
Art historians have discussed the Taiwanese female artist Chen Jin's (1907-1998) paintings of women in a Chinese dress (qipao, or cheongsam) as part of the debates on the so-called "local color" issue. Chen's works are interpreted as representations of Taiwan or as reflections of the artist's own struggles to perform Taiwanese-ness for the imperial audiences. However, little attention has been paid to the shifting context for Chen's works in the early 1940s at the time of Japan's total war in East Asia. Between 1938 and 1946, Chen Jin lived in Tokyo and exhibited regularly with two art societies, Seikinkai and Nihon Joshi Bijutsuin. Her works won recognition and were exhibited at the Ministry of Education Fine Arts Exhibition from 1941 to 1943. All of her works from this period depicted young fashionable women in a Chinese dress. Many of these works can appear on the surface as timeless pictures of beauties. However, a closer investigation suggests that these representations had in fact strong contemporary resonances to daily life in wartime Japan and current politics. By examining the painting and reception of Chen's work "Orchid" from 1942, and comparing it with other salon paintings at the time, I argue that this work participated in the imagination of Manchukuo. In fact, the year of 1942 marked the tenth anniversary of the founding of Manchukuo, providing a timely topic for the artist. Also, the work may have been inspired by the visits to Japan of a famous China-born Japanese actress, Ri Kōran, also known as Yamaguchi Yoshiko. The long lasting presence of the image of a woman in a Chinese dress in salon paintings in Japan belies the shifting iconography of the dress, its ethnic ambiguity, and trans-regional associations.
Stephanie Su (University of Colorado Boulder)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the aspiration and illusion in Pan-Asianism discourse in female artist Uemura Shōen's work, Yōkihi (1922). Shōen reconceptualized the genre of bjinga (beautiful women) to combine Buddhism and complex visual references that evoked fluid identities of the female body.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the shifting artistic and political discourse in 1920s Japan , and the paradoxical role of women artists through a case study of the female nihonga artist Uemura Shōen's (1875-1949) 1922 painting, Yōkihi (Ch: Yang Guifei). The 8th century Chinese beauty Yang Guife has been a popular subject in Japanese literature, noh drama and painting, who was imagined not only as a beautiful woman, but also as a local Shinto deity and a bodhisattva. Understanding the challenge of renewing a thousand-year old subject, Shōen intentionally depicted Yang in nudity, which was the first time in this subject. In this work, Yang's upper torso was naked, whose sensuality was enhanced by the translucent fabric wrapped around her. The erotic evocation, however, was undermined by her calm facial expression, the posture, and the jewelry accessories, which closely resembled the Yōkihi kannon sculpture in Kyoto. The intension between eroticism and divinity makes this work a visually complicated and ideologically ambiguous work. In the 1920s, Yang became a popular subject again, signaling a broader interest in constructing an East Asian beauty on par with Venus in Europe by using Yang as an example. This new artistic pursuit went hand in hand with the historical fascination with the Tenpyō era and the emergence of Pan-Asian identity. This paper considers the following questions: Why did Shōen renew the image of Yang Guifei with a Buddhist icon? How did this image respond to the increasingly polarized perceptions of China in Japan? This paper addresses the above questions by investigating how artists visualize a national and transnational body during the interwar period.
Eriko Tomizawa-Kay (University of East Anglia)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores how the Okinawan female body has been appropriated not only as a trope of the relationship between subjugated Okinawa and its ruler, mainland Japan, but also as a site where intricate issues of discrimination, gender, power and Okinawan identity converge.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses pre-War paintings of Okinawan women - particularly labourers and those of the Tsuji Pleasure District - created by Okinawan and mainland Japanese artists, focussing on both the defiant rhetoric of tradition and communal identity, and the conflicting practice of the exoticizing gaze of the colonizer.
Up until WWII, mainland Japanese painters turned to the theme of Okinawan women as a means to express subordinate identities through the trope of the de-politicized exoticized other. It was only in the wake of the war that Okinawans began to explore their cultural heritage and issues of communal identity on their own terms, embedding their subjects within discourses of tradition in a move designed to celebrate, in the face of political subordination, indigenous identity.
Yet these differences were crucially mitigated both as a result of the mainland formation of many male Okinawan painters, and through the machinery of official art exhibitions, which brought together diverse political audiences. Thus, for example, whilst depictions of Okinawan women wearing traditional apparel played to the desire to celebrate indigenous identity, the imagery was simultaneously available as a symbol of the exotic other, an ambivalence aimed at satisfying the demands of local and mainland audiences.
The deliberate invocation of 'local colour' became a requirement of Okinawan art, one that Okinawan painters found expedient to follow. Yet local colour, expressed through dress, was more subtle than it might seem, where under Japan's administration, only élite Okinawan women were permitted to wear kimono: the depiction of traditional clothing thus spoke to Okinawan audiences of the imposition of colonial dress-codes; similarly, the absence of Western dress, symbol of mainland modernization, raised the thorny issue of Japan's economic subordination of Okinawa.
The paper explores ways through which the Okinawan female body became a site where intricate issues of discrimination, gender, power and Okinawan identity converged. Examining the socio-cultural complexities of Okinawan identity against the backdrop of the rise and fall of the Japanese Empire, it enlists visual culture not simply as a documentary source but as a means of accessing the often murky intersection of art, politics, and gender.