Paper short abstract:

Deshima is almost always discussed in conjunction with Western-style depictions showing it cut off from the city of Nagasaki. However, the greater variety of visualizations of Deshima, in Japan and the West, exemplifies co-existing and non-hierarchical forms of early modern spatial epistemology.

Paper long abstract:

The artificial island Deshima in Nagasaki bay is arguably one of the most famous locations of early modern Japan. But the idea of Deshima is as artificial as the island itself. The representation of Deshima is tightly linked to the narrative of Western knowledge trickling into Japanese society through employees of the Dutch East India Company. Because of the prominence of the 'Dutch knowledge' narrative, Deshima is almost always discussed in conjunction with Western-style depictions showing it as fan-shaped and cut off from the city of Nagasaki. Behind that visual monopoly is the implicit assumption that certain Western forms of spatial representations are superior due to the accuracy of their rendering of topographical features.

However, there was a far greater variety of visual representations of Deshima, both in Japan and in the West, which are nevertheless rarely reproduced and discussed. For example, Japanese sailing charts depict Deshima as round, which makes sense from the point of view of a sailor who had to steer around it. On the other hand, early Western illustrations of Deshima show it as separated but integral to Nagasaki's urban fabric. Additionally, souvenir images of Nagasaki on porcelain or stacked paper show Nagasaki from the waterline, with Deshima fully integrated in the cityscape.

Through close analysis of this expanded visual corpus, this paper reintegrates Deshima within the early modern spatial epistemology, and by doing so it exemplifies a way to conceive that epistemology as plural and non-hierarchical.

Paper short abstract:

This paper shows how Suzuki Risaku’s photographs in Mont Sainte Victoire, entitled after Paul Cézanne’s landscape paintings, offer a space experienced by a human body as Suzuki assumes the position of being-in-the-world or being-with-an-environment, not of one cutting and naming landscape.

Paper long abstract:

Suzuki Risaku’s book Mont Sainte Victoire (Nazraeli, 2004) collects 43 colour photographs taken across the areas of the eponymous mountain near Aix-en-Provence, France, made famous by Paul Cézanne’s paintings under the same title. In the method established in his earlier photo books, such as Kumano, Suzuki traces the French artist’s footsteps rather than representing the iconic views of the mountain after his predecessor’s vision. The Japanese photographer’s frames rarely capture the recognizable shape of the mountain but are instead occupied by the red dirt he is to tread and by pine trees that grow in various directions and block his line of sight. His pictures remind the viewer of the air that flows through and stagnates in the space, and of the sound shoes make on gravel. Although located outdoors, as Cézanne was, Suzuki’s experience is far from that of the painter en plein air—seated at a viewpoint guaranteed to command a perfect view of the object to be depicted—his steps revealing instead the impossibility of finding the ideal vista of the mountain. Whether evoking confusion or hallucination, frustration with the prolonged quest or the delight of distraction, Suzuki’s pictures show moments in a journey not of the eye/mind but of a fully fleshed, multisensorial body with (or as) the prosthesis of the photographic camera. His takes are both as incidental as snapshots and as deliberate as art photographs, vernacular yet designed through studying and remembering Cézanne’s paintings. Neither landscape nor tourism photography, Suzuki’s images do not perpetuate and verify topoi, as do The 53 Stops on the Tôkaidô by Utagawa Hiroshige and The 36 Views of Mount Fuji by Katsushika Hokusai. This paper shows how Suzuki’s photographs, devoid of any sign of a human figure, offer space experienced (Lefebvre) by a human body and invite viewers to immerse themselves in the somatic and ecological space, rather than connoisseurially consuming a codified landscape. Suzuki assumes the position of being-in-the-world or being-with an environment—exploring not conquering, absorbing not piercing, and communicating with space-time rather than cutting and naming landscape.

Paper short abstract:

Fukasawa Takafumi’s collaborative art projects give form to new naturecultures but take place within festivals that reproduce a nature/culture binary. Despite this tension, I will argue that Fukasawa’s projects do contribute to wider changes in systems of meaning towards a survivable future.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation I will explore the work Fukasawa Takafumi, a social art practitioner now entering mid-career. His practice is a valuable focus for study of the tensions between competing naturecultures operative in Japan today.

Each of Fukasawa’s projects explore a single question relating to an aspect of religiosity, spirituality or historical practice that is specific to the locality of that project. They take place over several months, in collaboration with people living in the local area, for whom the central question of the project holds particular importance.

For instance, in 2019 Fukasawa used collective filmmaking and archival processes to explore the contemporary significance of Mount Myōken (a sacred site in Nichiren Buddhism) in the lives of residents of nearby postwar new towns. These towns were constructed as satellites of Osaka, along with transport arteries that positioned the city at the centre of social and economic life. In the intervening decades however, Mount Myōken has disrupted this relationship, leading to new naturecultures that entangle agencies both physical and metaphysical, as well as organic and inorganic. These naturecultures are given form in Fukasawa’s projects.

However, his projects usually take place as commissions within rural art festivals that seek to engage and reproduce a more hegemonic nature/culture binary. This is from a perspective that is broadly either neoliberal (where ‘nature’ is an asset to be leveraged for economic revitalization) or modern, in which that revitalization is performed by metropolitan visitors working alongside local residents – a pairing explicitly promoted as an ideal conjunction of two identities, both exceptional in their respective, complementary forms of immaterial capital: visitors’ expertise in ‘culture’, and locals’ closer relationship to ‘nature’.

In this presentation I shall investigate how the tensions between these competing naturecultures play out in Fukasawa’s projects, within art festivals. I will use sources from across disciplines including contemporary art theory, anthropology, oral history, practice theories and the philosophy of games, and from interviews conducted with the artist. I will argue that Fukasawa’s projects nonetheless contribute to wider changes in systems of meaning that make a survivable future more likely.