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- Convenor:
-
Doreen Mueller
(Leiden University)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Fynn Holm
(University Of Tübingen)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Visual Arts
- Location:
- Auditorium 1 Jan Broeckx
- Sessions:
- Friday 18 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel revisits the legacies of the meisho (famous place) paradigm from an ecocritical perspective in the wider field of image production in early modern Japan, from landscape prints to picture scrolls, and from broadsheets to maps.
Long Abstract:
This panel revisits the legacies of the meisho (famous place) paradigm in the visual culture of early modern Japan from an ecocritical perspective. Earlier scholarship has established that the meanings of place produced through its visual and textual representation as meisho were intrinsically polysemic, being derived from multi-layered cultural and historical associations. At the same time, meisho could also be a meaningful conduit for reflecting on the relationship between people and the nonhuman environment, and the historical dynamics this engendered. Taking account of the shifting meanings of place was particularly prescient in early modern Japan where urban and agricultural developments coincided with significant environmental events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Past research has not sufficiently addressed the potential of meisho to accommodate intersecting historical and environmental realities. This panel therefore critically examines to what extent this potential was realised in the wider field of image production in early modern Japan, from landscape prints to picture scrolls, and from broadsheets to maps. Panel presenters will demonstrate how the malleability of meisho which was based on narrative strategies of registering, ordering, and re-arranging the cultural and historical significances of places could be used to obscure but also to foreground historical realities. The first presenter will discuss how the historical and poetic meanings of Uji were negotiated with its growing economic and cultural importance as a productive land of tea in narrative scrolls in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Moving to the late eighteenth century, the second presenter will explore how the poetic image of Mount Asama as “the smoking mountain” was adapted in response to its eruption in 1783 in maps and broadsheets. The third presenter will consider the invisibility of catastrophic environmental events tracing the processes of remediation of the historic idiom of meisho-e in nineteenth century ukiyo-e prints.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 18 August, 2023, -Ewa Machotka (Stockholm University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates the historical and geographical accuracy of ukiyo-e landscape prints produced the nineteenth century. It focuses on the tendency to curate topography and environmental history tracing the processes of remediation of the artistic idiom of meisho-e at the time.
Paper long abstract:
Japanese early modern printed culture at the turn of the nineteenth century saw a flourish of landscape images, often directly or indirectly labeled meisho-e (images of famous places). This trend only intensified in the 1830s with the print series designed by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) effectively linking ukiyo, the world of commoner entertainment, with elite arts and court poetry that saw meisho as utamakura (lit. poem pillows), poetic rhetorical figures that tie seasonal images with particular places (Kamens, 1997) regularly visualized in diverse mediums.
Interestingly, rather than poetic expressions, landscape prints demonstrate an emerging proto-scientific understanding of Japan’s natural and cultural geography (i.e. by also featuring mei no nai or ‘anonymous’ places), and its representation, for example, by introducing (hybridized) Western linear perspective and realism that identifies looking with scientific objectivity. However, these new visual trends did not enhance the historical and geographical accuracy of landscape prints as indicated by a notable tendency in prints to curate topography as well as the curious invisibility of extreme weather events and their disastrous impact on the environment and society at the time.
These phenomena not only call into question the representational paradigm of art but also bring into the focus the processes of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 2000), exposing the role of earlier aesthetic principles in facilitating artistic innovation, and challenging the modernist myth of ‘the new’ as a sole agent of aesthetic change.
Shiori Hiraki
Paper short abstract:
This paper will discuss how a new framework of visualising Uji as a tea production site was created in a scroll by Kanō Tansetsu (1655–1714). The scroll shows the negotiation between the traditional connotations of the symbols of Uji and the historical reality of the development of the industry.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will show how a new framework of meisho was created in a scroll by a Kanō painter. The area in question is Uji, the most famous tea production site in early modern Japan. Originally, Uji was already a historic famous place since ancient times for its poetic resonance of waka poetry and religious institutions such as the Byōdō-in Temple. The flourishment and fame of Uji’s tea production industry since the late sixteenth century, however, demanded this time-honoured framework of the landscape to focus on productivity of the industry. By examining the images of a scroll by Kanō Tansetsu (1655–1714), a Kanō school painter who served the shogunate, this paper discusses how this new framework of Uji was delivered through objectifying and displacing the traditional connotations of the symbols of Uji and through the representation characterised by idealised and harmonious labour of men and women, young and old. The figures in the image are the agents who actively transform Uji into the productive land of tea. Added to this was the visualisation of other local customs possibly learnt from published books, which strengthens the impression that the scroll presents the reality of the local area. The scroll was one of the pioneers that produced a new image of Uji as a famous place of tea production.
Doreen Mueller (Leiden University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates how representations of the eruption of Mount Asama in 1783 in maps and broadsheets expanded its image as the “smoking mountain” in the popular imagination, and how the volcano's historical meanings as meisho were negotiated with its agency as a powerful environmental actant.
Paper long abstract:
This paper investigates how representations of the eruption of Mount Asama in 1783 in maps and broadsheets expanded its existing image as the “smoking mountain” in the popular imagination. The cultural memory of Mount Asama as a mountain emitting smoke and fire was reiterated across time and media – in ancient court poetry as well as in early modern illustrated travel guides, and in reference books such as the Wakan Sansai Zue (Illustrated Sino-Japanese Encyclopaedia of the Three Realms, first published in 1712). At the same time, as Goree (2022) has shown, printed illustrated guides to famous places in the eighteenth century increasingly framed local places as visual spectacles viewed through the leisurely gaze of urban travellers, often from the vantage point of the road or from above. Illustrated travel guides and maps registered Mount Asama within a prosperous landscape bounded by rice fields, villages, and roads. This paper argues that the representation of the volcano in illustrated travel guides and maps added further historical layers of meaning to its image as meisho and that this affected how its eruption in 1783 was registered in maps and in broadsheets. The eruption of Mount Asama brought home the realisation that the “smoking mountain” could not be framed simply as a visual spectacle to be viewed from the road or as an unchanging component of a prosperous landscape. Its secretions – ash, smoke, fire, and mudflow buried rice fields and blocked rivers, demonstrating its agency as a powerful environmental actant affecting tangible change in the land. How was the cultural memory of the mountain which was grounded in historical layers of representation as meisho negotiated with its environmental impact on the land?