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Paper short abstract

This paper will examine how Southeast Asian art was introduced, collected, and displayed in modern Japan. Focusing on the 1920s–30s, it shows how Southeast Asian art was framed as “peripheral” Oriental art. It highlights the roles of collecting and exhibition in shaping this reception.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Southeast Asian art was understood, introduced, collected, and displayed in modern Japan, focusing on the period from the 1920s to the 1930s. During this period, Japanese art history increasingly systematized narratives of Chinese art and ancient Indian Buddhist art as the principal sources of Japanese Buddhist art, constructing a linear historical framework in which Japan was positioned as their culmination. Within this framework, Southeast Asian art—despite being part of Asia—was treated as peripheral in modern Japanese art-historical discourse.

Rather than being incorporated through established academic classification, Southeast Asian art was brought to Japan primarily through concrete practices such as travel writing, collecting, and exhibition. This paper highlights two figures who played key roles in this process: Yamanaka Sadajirō, president of Yamanaka & Co., Ltd., and Miki Sakae. Yamanaka encountered Southeast Asian art through transnational networks of the art market and Western scholarship, where he engaged with French scholarship on Indochina and museum displays of Southeast Asian antiquities. In contrast, Miki encountered Southeast Asian art through direct experience in the region. Dispatched to Thailand as a craftsman attached to the Thai royal court, he engaged with local Buddhist art and sought to introduce Thai art to Japan through exhibitions of his collection.

Exhibitions functioned as an important medium for shaping these understandings. While Miki presented Thai art in a relatively independent manner, exhibitions organized by Yamanaka typically displayed Southeast Asian objects alongside Chinese, Indian, and Japanese works under the broad category of “Oriental art.” In both cases, Southeast Asian art was introduced as a distinctive lineage within Asian Buddhist art, emphasizing stylistic and aesthetic characteristics rather than detailed historical or regional specificity.

Finally, this paper suggests that such modes of seeing Southeast Asian art formed part of a broader, layered Japanese perspective toward the region. From the interwar period into the 1940s, interest in Southeast Asia encompassed scholarly curiosity, commercial practices, cultural representation, and political engagement. By situating the reception of Southeast Asian art, this paper argues that modern Japan’s view of Southeast Asia was characterized by multiple, overlapping perspectives and persistent processes of differentiation and marginalization.