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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Japanese “Oriental art history” (Tōyō bijutsushi) narratives from the 1930s to the 1950s reappraised Dunhuang art, tracing shifts in interpretation, artistic valuation, and its diplomatic significance in early postwar Sino–Japanese relations.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Japanese narratives of “Oriental art history” (Tōyō bijutsushi) from the 1930s to the 1950s reconfigured their understanding of Dunhuang art—both in interpretive methods and in value judgments—and how Dunhuang art came to play a diplomatic role in early postwar Sino-Japanese relations.

From the 1900s onward, Japanese discourse on “Oriental art history” was deeply shaped by Okakura Kakuzō’s (1863–1913) The Ideals of the East, with Special Reference to the Art of Japan (London: J. Murray, 1903). In Okakura’s framework, India serves as the classical source of Asian art; Buddhist art travels from India through China and ultimately reaches Japan. Hōryūji in Nara thus appears as the culmination and great repository of Asian art, and Japan itself is imagined as a kind of comprehensive “museum” of Asia’s artistic heritage.

Against this backdrop, the paper asks how the 1900 discovery of the Dunhuang cave library, together with the subsequent development of Dunhuang studies at Kyoto University, reshaped the basic structure of “Oriental art history” in Japan. By surveying major writings from the first half of the twentieth century, it first outlines how Dunhuang was incorporated into—or resisted by—existing narratives of Tōyō bijutsushi, and what narrative strategies were employed to position Dunhuang within a broader Asian art-historical continuum.

In the early postwar period, Japanese scholars were compelled to rethink and reorganize their approaches to “Oriental art history.” In this context, Dunhuang emerged as a crucial point of reference through which postwar Japan rethought its place within Asia. The paper then focuses on the 1958 “Exhibition of Chinese Dunhuang Art” held in Japan by the Dunhuang Cultural Relics Research Institute. Imbued with clear diplomatic significance, this exhibition provides a lens through which to examine how Japan, in the course of its postwar reconstruction, revised both its understanding and its modes of writing the “Oriental art history.”