Yoga in Japan: Model or Exception?' Modernity in Japanese Art 1850s-1940s: An International Comparison

Art History ISSN 0141-6790 Vol. 18 No.2 June 1995 pp.
253-285
Yoga in Japan: Model or Exception?'

Modernity in Japanese art 1850s-1940s:
an international comparison
John Clark
Preface
This paper outlines structural features of the art world and of stylistic changes
characterizing the development of modernity in Japanese art from the 1850s to
late 1930s. It presents an analytical model which may permit explanation of
the main empirical phenomena and methodological problems this development
involved. It identifies discourses of works and discourses of interpretation which
cross the familiar categories of neo-traditional (nihonga) and western-style (yoga)
painting. These are articulated through institutions of cultural transfer,
educational certification and stylistic motivation. The purpose is to clarify a
possible historical model or set of propositions which might constitute such a
model for Japan. The second half of the paper deploys this model comparatively
to assess its heuristic relevance in understanding similar developments in China
(including Taiwan), India, Indonesia and Thailand.
The comparison implied in this grouping of countries arises from a body
of work which views modern art in various Asian countries as re-contextualizing
Euramerican modern art by its transfer, a process which includes styles associated
with modemisml My work sees modernity in Asian art as presenting the need
for a re-definition of modernism itself." Some cases of modernity in given Asian
art cultures indicate what this may involve:
a. A sharp reappraisal of the institutional base in the structuring of

modern art worlds, one in which stylistic discourse is not
autonomous;
b. An end to the sovereignty of origination as the privileging moment

on a trajectory of artistic value;
c. The viewing of modernity as a field of discourses with - or on -

tradition, rather than a separate discourse which is set against
tradition;
© Association of Art Historians 1995. Published by Blackwell Publishers,

108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 I]F, UK and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA. 253
MODERNITY IN JAPANESE ART 18505-19405
d. A re-awareness that styles in modernism are simply discourses of

works within the wider interpretive discourse of the modern;
e. The abandonment of culturally essentialist interpretations in favour

of viewing individual cultures as articulated through a plurality of
interpretive codes;
f. Recognition that the interpenetration and cross-assimilation of

cultural forms means a radical repositioning of their discourses of
interpretation;
g. An awareness that the charateristically modern products of 'Western

Culture' do not exclusively belong to those western countries where
they originated, and that cultural artefacts are as much, or as little
transferable as technology and science.
Discourses
Allow me first to clarify certain terminology derived from semiological

perspectives. Works of art are related both by their formal properties, which
imply structures by which they may be interpreted, and by the structures of those
interpretations. These structures are conceptualized as sign systems; the making
of artworks is understood as the constitution of particular kinds of communication
through the use of particular types of sign vehicles. One may call discourse the
multi-levelled content of a text which represents the result of the coexistence
of many codes." A discourse is a range of contents articulable between a text
and a set of con-texts to which various familiar and unfamiliar (or invented)
codes are applied to provide the interpreter with uni- or pluri-vocal interpretations.
In painting, the text is a constellation of meanings inherent in one work, whereas
the context is a range of other works which are related by their formal properties.
A similar complex of relations is found not only between works as the
vehicles for articulated contents, but also between the codes deployed to interpret
them. Thus I distinguish between two planes of discourse, that of works and
that of interpretations. This allows for a hierarchy of historical relationships
between configurations of image-signs. It allows for those relationships to function
as the subject of a coding procedure understood via semiotic theory. Traditional
art-historical exploration of stylisties is thereby possible, as is a hermeneutics
of the status and function of concrete image-signs in semantic systems. Human
agency exists between the plane of works and the plane of interpretations, and
we do not have to see any system of interpretive codes - or ideology - as
necessarily constraining singular trajectories of interpretation.'
From a meta-level, what now become the sub-discourses of works and
interpretations constitute two special sets of contexts for a discourse which plays
with the very limits of codes themselves. Art is situated between the material
articulation of the work and the discourse of interpretations, thereby having both
material and conceptual potentiality to constitute the field of this meta-discourse.
254 © Association of Art Historians 1995

When we look at the history of modernity in the art of japan with a view
to making structural comparisons later with other Asian countries, it will help
to make a series of propositions about that history which can subsequently be
reformulated in a process of inter-definition with the other Asian histories in
question. Genuine differences and analogies should thus emerge, rather than
slippery and specious cross-projections from a series of essentialist and
monocultural standpoints. This is important, because the procedure will, in a
sense, generate an overall thesis about modern japanese art history. Furthermore,
it may provide a critical flexibility to our categories in an area which has received
little attention in japan itself. 6
I have already examined institutional modernity in Asian art for the
distribution of phenomena in general categories across a number of cultures
including japan." Now let us see what more concrete propositions can be
generated the other way round, by looking at japan first, and then mapping
their distribution elsewhere in Asia.
Pre-histories
Modernity in japanese art did not develop in an historical vacuum. Not only
was there a long pre-history of multiple art discourses but by the late eighteenth
century we see the advent of several phenomena characteristic of a modern art
world.f There was a widespread syncretic discourse in works where styles were
no longer singular, nor marked by a restricted set of stylistic interpretations.
There were multiple stylistic references even in official Kano ink painting, and
by around 1800 the graphic circulation of images in different styles to be imitated
by apprentice artists meant that a given visual style was not the exclusive
prerogative of a specific corporate atelier. Artists crossed between ateliers during
training even on pain of expulsion, or worked with several different teachers
before adopting their own style name. Some would also change their name
according to the stylistic mode in which they worked at a particular period. Art-
works, particularly paintings, were for sale while on public display in exhibitions,
in temples, and artists were both listed in town guides by their stylistic affiliation
and also took part in calligraphy and painting exhibitions, shogakai, in which
works were for sale." In short, despite various setbacks, particularly during a
purge from 1839 to 1842, the discourse of painting had begun to escape the
restrictive codes of political patronage and strict workshop affiliation, and to
establish the autonomy of art practice via commercial sale.
Increased quasi-commercial display and circulation of artworks resulted,
by the late eighteenth century, in a critical appraisal of works (discourses of
interpretation) that could also be less imbricated in codes of authority or
legitimation, due to the entrance of new stylistic exemplars from abroad, chiefly
from Holland and China. Significantly, the early nineteenth century showed the
first japanese excursions in literati painting theory, nearly a century after this
Chinese stylistic discourse had been introduced. Since the 1740s there had also
been style games by artists using aspects of Western perspective, but the history
of the assimilation of realism/naturalism from Dutch medical texts and scientific
'9 Association of Art Historians 1995 255

45 Anonymous, Kyoto school,

A Device for raising objects on
the sea bed, 1840s, etching,
9.7 X 8.9 cm. British Museum,
London.
encyclopedias indicates the transfer in conditions of scarce information but only

relative understanding. Knowledge in such conditions could only be achieved
by considerable cognitive efforts, and by the late 1790s the writings of Shiba
Kokan, although not widely circulated at the time, had begun to generate an
interpretive discourse directed back at Japanese art. This information gap in the
presence of an effort directed to overcoming it, particularly from the 1780s to
1850s (plate 45),10 points to the antecedence of discourses of interpretation
over discourses of the work. Thus re-evaluation of monuments of the past, which
is central to modernity, can come first through interpretation, rather than being
forced on interpretation by the discourse of works, as supposedly happened in
Europe.
The widespread circulation of ukiyo-e imagery through reprographic media
in late Edo Japan indicates that at least the populations of the three major cities
were visually literate, much as we know they were also largely script-literate.
Minor changes in the repertory of image types and styles used could identify
particular individuals or places. This only becomes apparent today when one
reconstitutes the conditions for that visual literacy by looking at a large number
of these images. Here we encounter one of the conditions for modernity in art,
which after photography, via Impressionism, was in Europe to lead to modernism
itself. The discourse of works is sufficiently large, but the variation sufficiently
minor, that the originary authority of stylistic variation or reference becomes
seen as relative only to the series of images from which it arises. This facilitates
the kind of self-referential discursivity - the play between codes - on the level

46 Left: illustration of Niagara Falls by Kamei Shiichi in Yochi Shiryaku, 4th ed., vol. 1; Right:
illustration from Yochi Shiryaku, 1875, lithography by Gengend6. Photo: Matsuda, Rokuzan.
of discourses of interpretation which is typically modern. These structural

elements may account for part of the attraction felt towards these images in mid-
nineteenth century Europe. We await some deeper interpretation of this curious,
unspoken semiotic homology, and perhaps should not see ukiyo-e merely as one
stylistic source for Impressionism, but the other way around, as a proto-
international style in its own right.
Proto-histories
We can think of modernity as having been established in japanese art when it

was established as a practice autonomous of other discourses of authority, such
as political power. 11 That is when it was able to relativize or render other its
own past, and when origination - whether of the artist's psyche or of the style
worked with - privileged the establishment of new works or monuments which
implicitly or explicitly re-ordered those of the past. To put a date on these
phenomena would be to stagiate what was never a discrete series of diachronic
steps, but most observers would see them as having come into play around
1896-1914, between Kuroda Seiki (an oil painter who became Professor of
Seiyoga at Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1896) and the foundation of the anti-
mainstream and briefly avant-garde Nika-kai (Second Section Society). Probably
the first case of meaningfully direct contact between European and japanese art
and artists had been Charles Wirgman, correspondent in japan for the Illustrated
London News from 1862, who in 1866 took Goseda Yoshimatsu, the twelve-
year-old son of a craftsman printer family resident in Yokohama, as his pupil. 12
What had happened between the 1860s and 1890s?
Understanding the well-documented proto-history of modernity in japanese
art is fundamental not only to the deeper understanding of japanese art, but
also may have reference to that of modernity elsewhere in Asia.l:' On one level
the technical practice of European oil painting, some of its training institutions,
and the mid-nineteenth-century European academic artistic discourses in works
© Association of Art Historians 1995 257

and in interpretation were transferred to japan. The elaborated series of domains

of contact are themselves well worth listing (plate 46):
a. European art in graphic form disseminated by returnees after

1869-70 and reproduced in widely published geographies from
1875;
b. Contact with foreign artists and photographers - some resident,

some itinerant - in the Treaty Ports 1859-73;
c. Various teaching ateliers set up by returned japanese artists from

1875;
d. Contact through Italian art teachers at the Art School of the

Technical College 1876-81;
e. Contact through a small number of returning artists throughout the

1880s;
f. Reference to European materials in the production of art manuals

after 1874, and of school textbook illustration throughout the
1880s;
g. Contact with other members of the Meiji elite at the Meiji Art
Society from 1889;
h. Establishment of fully fledged oil painting departments in Kyoto in

188014 and in Tokyo in 1896;
1. Foundation of a national salon at Bunten in 1907.
It did not take long for the assimilation of realism and then the
transformation of oil-painting discourse by the introduction of pseudo-historical
mythological subjects to occur." By the 1890s the japanese were even debating
the necessity of their continued learning from Europe.l" What is more
surprising is that critics did not realize that japanese oil painting could go in
its own autonomous direction from this point, in a trajectory which ultimately
led to the 1940s' war paintings of Fujita Tsuguharu.F
The transfer and transformation of one set of discourses between two cultural
sites would conventionally be seen as just a replacement or a rendering other
than of what was already there at the site transferred to. But does not late Meiji
mytho-nationalist painting indicate the interesting presence of a mutual
relativization between culturally defined pictorial discourses, or what I shall call
a double othering? just as earlier japanese painting, present before the full-scale
transfer of the 1860s-1890s, was relativized (significantly, unlike the Edo period,
with the contemporaneous transfer of discourses of both the work and
interpretation), so also there was a relativization in reverse against the discourses

47 (left) Kano Hogai, Bodhisattva Kannon the Compassionate Mother, 1888, Nihonga media
on silk, framed, 195.8 X 96.1 em. Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.
48 (right) Harada Naojiro, Bodhisattva Kannon on Dragonback, 1890, oil, 272 x 183 em.
Gokokuji Temple, Tokyo, on loan to National Museum of Modern Art.
which had been transferred as soon as they began to be transformed by

representation of japanese subjects and sensibilities. This is a peculiarly direct
creation of a double othering, one which allowed artists to oscillate between
playing japanese discourses against European ones and vice versa, so as to remain
relatively independent of both. This may account for much of the dynamic
possibility as well as the sometimes static self-satisfaction of later yoga in
japan.'" It is almost a paradigm of transcultural space.
Parallel discourses
A notion of double othering helps us to understand in a different way the

establishment of categories for neo-traditional (nihonga) (plate 47) and Westem-
style (yoga) painting (plate 48). From the position of double othering, nihonga/

yoga can be discerned as two parallel discourses, where othering is uni-directional

rather than bi-directional. Nihonga renders other or relativizes 'Western' painting
as it reconstitutes itself by assimilation from 'Western' painting. Yoga renders
other or relativizes 'Japanese' painting as it attempts to consolidate a relatively
fixed transfer at different periods of what it constructed as the discourse of
'Western' practice. Thus nihonga/yoga now appears in the discourse of
interpretation to be what has always been visible in the discourse of works. It
is a way of concealing, avoiding, controlling, constraining or - in the extreme
- of suppressing the aporia of double othering. This opens up a space of discourse
beyond the control or affiliation of either 'Japanese' or 'Western' painting. It
is this space from which modernity draws value and dynamic. 19
New authority codes
Modernity also involves new ways of assigning value within and between the
discourses of works and interpretation. This is, above all, achieved by changing
recruitment to training institutions and the function of their matriculation
procedures. In late Edo Japan we can conceive post hoc from artist biographies
that recruitment was from the extended family net of the household head, from
lower samurai in the case of Kano ateliers, and from the skilled townsmen
craftsman class in ukiyo-e painting. By the late nineteenth century recruitment
was on terms of educational attainment and ability; workshop training was
specified by syllabus and inter-subjective standards of proficiency; and on
matriculation a certificate was gained which provided a licence to teach or be
considered a member of a broadly defined professional class.
Essentially the authoritative allocation of value to types of art discourse
was mediated through the structure of the training institutions and the exhibition
opportunities which grew out of them. These were supposed to produce the
producers and circulate the kind of artworks which society as a whole valued.
In other words, the dominant control over art production which might in the
past-certainly before the 1750s - have been more directly exercised by the
politically or economically powerful, was from late Meiji derogated to the art
world itself. The direct re-intervention of the state in this world came with the
reconstitution of Teiten as Shinbunten (New Ministry of Education Fine Arts
Exhibition) in 1936-37. This was more of a temporary crisis within the wider
social processes of modernity which themselves extended to the art world,
processes which the art world overall was more or less able to hold off until
1942, when direct state control of art became almost absolute.
Significantly, the late 1910s to mid-1930s saw the advent of a typically
modern type of authority code, that which we have come to call the avant garde
(plate 49). This attempted to link the discourses of works and interpretation
in a unified movement, one which claimed new types of authority through formal
origination, access to the new, or more direct representation in art of repressed
social or psychological forces. The avant garde's claim implied a different access
to the authoritative allocation of values which privileged or legitimized art
practice. It underscored a different agglomeration of works and interpretations

MODERNITY IN JAPANESE ART 1850s-1940s
49 Catalogue Cover, Nouvelles

T endances de fa peinture de
Paris. Nagoya, 1933.
whose code claimed to be legitimately subversive of other authority structures,

above all of the training and exhibition system to which the state had allocated
authority in art. This suggested alternative power aggregations which could
reconstitute not merely power relations in the art world but also between the
art world and the wider society. .
Artistic identity
Artists produce their work, and agree or disagree with the way it is interpreted.
But until the advent of a modern, role-specialized artist, and then not always,
they rarely produced for themselves directly, because artistic subjectivity was
not often sovereign. For whom did they produce? By the 1870s we can even
see Takahashi Yuichi, who was born in the late Edo period and was some thirty
years old at the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868,20 as producing realist
oil paintings as part of a generational drive to master practices powerful/or Japan.
But it is only with the various art-training systems established in the 1870s and

50 Nakahara Minoru, Die

neue Universum, 1925, oil, 200
X 200 em. Private Collection,
Tokyo.
1880s that we begin to see types of artistic subjectivity where the artist, as a
matriculated professional, produced from a position other than that of a mere
producer. Then it is clear from a broad range of nihonga and yoga artists working
with themes that foreground elements from Japanese history, religion, or
mythology, that the artist is producing for the state.
Artistic subjectivity only moves to production as an expression of individual
selfhood after the 1910s, even if sale is through the controlled market of
government salons or artists' exhibition groups. It can be no coincidence that
this occurred at the twin junctures of a rise of small artists' groups associated
with a kind of avant garde, and with the slight relaxation of the late 1910s and
early 1920s'of the nationalist goals of Meiji (plate 50). One sees the rise of the
socially isolated artistic subjectivity which is characteristic of one aspect of
modernity associated with the early 1930s, and with the inner emigration
practised as a defence mechanism by some Surrealists in the 1940s. 21
Artistic subjectivity is an important index of modernity because artists link
the discourses of the work with discourses of interpretation through the way
they perceive their own position in history and society. Their biographical self-
understanding in effect serves as a code for works and interpretations. One does
not expect to find, nor indeed does one find, many inner emigres in the late
Meiji period, with the probable exception of the later years of Aoki Shigeru.F
One does, however, see a large number of such artists in the late 1920s and 1930s.
It is also possible to conceive of a conservative academic oil painting as
produced in ironic comment on a situation where the artist is purely the producer
for a ruling group. This, in a sense, is an attempt to turn political interventions
in the discourse of interpretation back on themselves, as was sometimes the case
in Chinese official art before 1979. But one does not see much work of this type
in Japan, unless we take Fujita Tsuguharu's late and unexhibited war

51 Umehara Ryusaburo,
Eruption Smoke, 1950-53,
tempera on paper, 118.77 x 92
em. National Museum of
Modern Art, Tokyo.
paintings P as indicating a radically a-nomic artistic subjectivity, balanced

precariously between interpretations of national heroism and meaningless, human
waste.
Stylistic motivation
The other, and one should say art-historically archetypal, linkage between the
discourse of works and that of interpretation is style. This is both a formal content
of the work, and a concretized code which mediates between the discourses of
the work and interpretation. A generalized code of style may appear topologically
to be present throughout an unmotivated and arbitrary interpretive field in relation
to other particular styles which constitute its sub-set, but its deployment as a
generalized code in one work or series of works is always motivated.j" It is the
technical result of a semiotic process which tends to reduce arbitrariness to that
minimum level necessary for the presence of the generalized code of style to be
recognized as such. The efficient cause for such motivation is that it is tied at
a basic level to an artistic intention, and the grouping or set of which has often
been attributed to an historical period, and to the Weltanschauungen which hold
sway therein.

One of the characteristic tendencies of modernism is to relativize - or to

render other - style itself;25 to shift the technical expression of the work into
a secondary register which comments on and disturbs the naturalization or relative
motivation of style, rather than working directly through it. In Euramerican
terms, this only happened after a long period of working through the technical
properties of a particular stylistic penumbra nameable as academy realismr"
this shift was distinguished from previous changes in art history because of its
conjuncture with the development of modern photographic and reprographic
technology, and the relatively brief military-political dominance of Euramerica
over its cultural others. These conditions were also present in japan, which saw
a revolution in its reprographics in the 1880s, a considerable domestic
photographic industry from the late 1910s, and the domination of Taiwan, Korea
and (briefly) considerable areas of mainland China.
We should then inquire, if modernist styles arrive in japan in about
1910-14, whether we are to view this as simply a transfer under different
conditions like that which took place from the 1860s to the 1890s, or are we
to see the radical difference in the position of modernist styles with regard to
style itself as changing the very nature of that transfer? There are persuasive
arguments both ways. It is actually quite easy to map in the discourse of works
the arrival and transformation of different modernist styles in japan, even in
the works of individual artists. There is typically the early and late work of
Umehara Ryusaburo-" which changes from a late Impressionism around 1913,
to a transformed type of japanese decorative Fauvism at the end of the 1920s
(plate 51) . There is also the change of Yoshihara jir6 28 from Surrealism in the
early 1930s to abstractionism shortly afterwards.
On the other hand, because of the double othering raised above, relativization
of style is implicit in the situation of yoga artists in japan. For them, even if
they merely worked in a transferred style without any transformation (although
few indeed perfectly complied with this extreme case), their style was already
relativized. In the discourse of interpretation double othering always implied
a critical distance from other styles, either those transferred earlier or those re-
formulated by nihonga. Of course, not many artists were so rigid - or lazy
- and it is the creative potential of their position which allowed yoga
quantitatively and qualitatively to outstrip nihonga by the mid-1920s. 29
Discourses
Comparison will now proceed in this and following sections between japan and
other Asian countries. At the very basic level of discourses, there are wide
differences between art cultures in when they were established and in the structural
relation of the discourse of works to that of interpretation. Let us look at China,
for example. Here the proto-historical contacts with European art, despite the
fact that Chinese literati had constructed that art as on the level of craft, had
some similarities with comparable contacts in japan. There were also genetic
links from China and japan via the influence of Suzhou perspective prints on
japanese ukiyo-e in the 1740s. There was, moreover, an elaborate series of art

discourses, particularly in painting, which could and were to be rendered other

in the early years of the twentieth century in a way similar to that which had
occurred in japan some thirty to forty years earlier. Chinese neo-traditionalism
even borrowed from nihonga by including technical importations from western
academic realism. japan might thus seem to be the typical case of modernity
in Asian art, with later variations in other Asian art cultures as mere sub-types
in a conveniently diachronic developmental tree.
But this kind of use of japan as a model by itself without multi-lateral
reference to a matrix of relations in other Asian art cultures would be unattractive
and misleading, both empirically and theoretically. Methodologically, it would
lead to an assumption of common phenomena which privileged one set of
historical conditions as the antecedent of other Asian cases. Empirically, it is
doubtful whether the japanese case could include all the variety of art practice
found elsewhere in Asia. Theoretically, it would reify one case, and assume that
the complexities of a particular model were the index of complexity, indeed the
test-bed for conceptual tools, for cases to be examined elsewhere.
Unlike japan, not all art cultures have either the structural dynamic between
discourses of works and interpretations from the outset of their development
of a modern art, nor do all have a pre-modern series of discourses of the kind
reacted with and against to form neo-traditionalist discourses. If othering occurs
internally, it must be of a different kind when there is no domestic pre-transfer
discourse to be othered. In mid-nineteenth century Indonesia there was some
decorative painting in java, and craft decoration for temple hangings in Bali,
but no art discourse in painting to be reacted against to form either a neo-
traditional art, or to form what I shall be forced to call a neo-Euramerican
art. 3D Painting as such in java is largely an importation from the Dutch, either
via a neo-colonialist school, or via the nationalist painters of the 1930s. Thus,
the othering which takes place in Indonesian modern art is that of something
which had already been transferred. Neo-traditionalism can only be construed
as a position about the results of such a transfer.
One can also conceive of more complex intermediate cases where art
discourses have always been syncretist and admitted of far more contiguity
between elements of disparate and newly imported styles alongside accumulated
prior - and by then assimilated - local ones than is admitted by the notion
of transfer to an existing discourse. Syncreticism implies absorption of integral
elements from different discourses without their overall globalization, analytical
paring down, or strong transformation. Far more contiguity is there than admitted
by the notion of transfer to a situation where art discourses did not exist -
at least in the sense of artworks being made which encapsulated higher cultural
and cognitive values. Syncretist absorption between discourses seems to have
been the case in Thailand 31 and the Philippines. Cultural provenance does not
seem to have been an issue in defining stylistic authenticity before the nationalisms
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
India presents the case of a multiplicity of discourses which may at different
times or phases be placed in any of these three categories, but with a basically
syncretistic tendency which overcasts all attempts to establish parallel neo-
traditional and neo-Euramerican discourses.

For the 1930s these discourse types may be roughly correlated with the
independence of the state, or the way in which it was colonized. The Thai neo-
colonial situation, for example, then resembled what would become the case
for many states which became independent from semi-colonial or colonial
situations after World War II. 32
Euramerican art Syncretism: Parallel-discourses

as art-discourse- contiguity of of neo-traditional
initiator disparate & neo-
discourses Euramerican
State autonomy
independent japan
neo-colonial Thailand
semi-colonial Philippines China
colonial Indonesia India Taiwan
Malay States Korea
Thus, before we go further, it is clear, on the structural basis of its art

discourses, that japan is only likely to be analytically comparable to China,
Taiwan and Korea, the last two being its colonies and the first having taken
japan as something of a role model in art from the early 1900s.
What distinguishes art discourses in the other parts of Asia, is that their
modern foundation is intricately tied up with the relative (lack of) international
autonomy of the state, and the extent to which the ruling elite has domestic
autonomy. The state is either nominally independent or is directly controlled
by a Euramerican power, and the elite may to some extent be autonomous of
domestic social pressures.
In this context art discourses may function as a mode of identity-making
by those tenuously preserving independence, like the Thai monarchy from the
1860s to the 1920s. They may also be a mode for opposing the already present
rule of a colonialist, like neo-traditionalists in Bengal from the early 1900s. In
many cases the discourse of works is in the sway of a non-art discourse of
interpretations, something fairly easily established from the variety of formal
expressions considered to have been representative of national or anti-colonial
sentiment before one considers any more direct ideological intervention.
Pre-histories
The similarities between japan and China in pre-nineteenth century contact with
'western' art have been mentioned. There does not seem to have been much
transfer in Indonesia or the Malay Sultanates because of Islamic anti-iconic

proscriptions. However, there was long contact of the Malay world with both
the Portuguese and Chinese, and one wonders how severe in fact those
proscriptions had been. There was also contact in Hindu areas and one Balinese
work is on European paper datable to before 1811. 33 In India there had been
contact with European art and Indian production in some of its modes from
the late 1580s,34 with production for the British in India by the 1790s. In
Thailand even the few surviving pre-nineteenth-century temple murals indicate
that 'Indian' [Sinhalo-Burmese], 'European' and 'Chinese' drawing conventions
were all present.
What does not seem to have been present except in parts of India" were
the various types of official art as in japan, nor their quite elaborate atelier system
to produce these with more or less formally matriculated artists, who were
professionals or quasi-professionals.
China had craftsmen ateliers which serviced decorative painting demand.
But the literati painting of the gentry elite was separated from professional painters
and the penumbra of styles derived from Ming decorative realism. Beyond them
were the nameless craftsmen painters and printers who are largely unstudied
by Chinese art history. It was these whose acceptance of elements of western
perspective for decorative schemes, and whose familiarity with oil painting in
the particular craftsman stratum of the trading ports, was to construct a type
of othering of the gentry tradition during the later nineteenth century. Despite
the quality of late Ming and early Qing book illustration, we find nowhere in
China the rich discourse of graphic images circulated widely among the wealthier
segments of the urban elite in Kyoto from the 1680s or even Calcutta from the
1830s.
The most characteristic aspect of japanese pre-modern history in many fields
was the gap between the discourse of works and interpretation, where great effort
was made in the discourse of interpretation to compensate for deficiencies in
the discourse of works. This was a feature of the pre-modern discourses elsewhere
too, but it would appear at the simplest level that japan was characterized by
the continuance of long habits of thought structured on its relationship with
China. In neither India " nor China'" do we see such a continuance, both
having a court-led fascination with the techniques of western visual representation
from time to time, but no general cultural drive to assimilate, master and
transform the other. By the late nineteenth century Thailand did not have rurala
aristocratic class independent of the court, nor an educated urban plebian class
with their own patterns of circulation of images and ideas." The hypothesis
of a direct correlation between the rise of visual and script literacy, whatever
the presence and importance of the culturally or religiously ascribed value of
the script, seems to hold in japan, as much as it is negatively confirmed by
nineteenth-century Thailand, or China until the literacy campaigns of the 1950s.
One should finally note here, as in japan, the universal importance in Asia
of the access to Euramerican art via secondary copies which were internally
circulated, and then replicated by the new reprographic techniques coming from
Europe and America in the later nineteenth century. The circulation of such
images through minor sources, such as religious illustrations (plate52), pamphlet
plates and advertising graphics, constitutes a kind of undercurrent within the

52 Anonymous (Calcutta), Scenes from the Tarakeshwar Scandal (The Elokeshi Scandal of
1873), c. late 1870s-early 1880s, woodcut, 46.8 x 27.8 em. From Paul, Ashrit (ed.),
Woodcut prints of Nineteenth-Century Calcutta, Calcutta: Seagull Press, 1983.
prehistory which habituates those illustrating Bengali almanacs in 1838, or

Shanghai lithograph-illustrated newspapers from 1884, to new sets of visual
conventions. This is even before the reprographic technology is entirely in local
hands, or produces to satisfy local rather than colonial demands.
Proto-histories
It is with the proto-histories of modernity in art in different Asian art cultures

that one sees why the japanese case is exceptional. To begin with the autonomy
of art discourse: whilst japan had an official art from the late 1880s, the actual
practice of art was left to the direction of artists because of a de facto separation
of the state's functions. Despite investment by the state and more broadly by
the Meiji elite, in art education and art patronage, there was not the series of
direct controls over the art world which are clearly seen in China from 1949
to 1985 and which were in principle still in place thereafter. The time the japanese
state did exercise direct control over the art world between 1942 and 1945, it
was singularly ineffective in changing the main directions of art production, as
any examination of the wartime Shinbunten (New Ministry of Education Fine
Arts Exhibition) catalogues reveals.
Other Asian art cultures with a quasi-autonomous art world were

53 Corrado Feroci, and others, Democracy Monument, 1938, Bangkok. Photograph: John
Clark, January 1992.
continuously subject to political intervention, particularly in Thailand and

Indonesia. In the former case this intervention was by military regimes in the
1930s, but later also by the implicit threats involved in lese-majesty clauses in
the constitution protecting the monarchy. In Indonesia most artists who associated
with the Persagi group after 1938 did so from a political position, and many
were actively engaged in the war of independence against the Dutch. Their art
was part of their political struggle, in the same way that that of Chinese artists
had been at Yan'an in the 1940s.
Probably a more significant difference with Japan, however, despite the
presence of the 'artist-politician' Sukarno in Indonesia, was the indifference of
political leaders and the middle and upper classes to plastic arts, which, until
the rise of a broader middle class (1960s-1980s), made them ignore these except
as public or status decorations. Leaders would open exhibitions as a matter of
status displayv'" and intervene if artists' work was offensive to ceremonial
values or the leader's self-image as a person of tasre.t? What seems most
characteristic of official collections in both Thailand and Indonesia is the apparent
indifference of the patrons to systematic considerations of taste, as if neither
a series of qualities inherent in the works nor an ordered sense of how such works
might be interpreted were relevant to the putative patron."
If art cannot be autonomous, can the past be rendered other? It can, but
only as part of the allocation of a non-art set of values. The reappraisal of
monuments of the past establishes them as part of a set of reintegrated national
values, to be defined negatively against those of a colonial ruler or of a neo-
colonial situation. Thus, it is possible to account for the persistent favour with
which conservative Lingnan-pai painting was favoured in China after 1949,
despite this school's association with the conservative and often neo-fascist
Guomindang (National Party). If art was Chinese, it opposed the West even as
it borrowed from it (indirectly via Japan), and marked a re-synthesis with the
past which glorified current rulers. Then the fact that it was artistically a very
timid response, and had been the taste of a politically bankrupt group, could
be overlooked.
More promising areas where Japan's historical experience of modernity
points to it as a comparative model for other Asian art cultures (plate 53) are

54 Cover, Youhua Xuanpinji (Collection of Selected Oil Paintings, the Album of the Maximov
training group) 1958. Collection of Zhan Jianjun, Beijing. Photo: John Clark, January 1990.
in the transfer of academic realism and in the articulation of a series of distinct
domains for artistic contact with Euramerica, the development of which contacts
was later broadly paralleled elsewhere. The transfer of Euramerican academic
realism in oil painting (together with associated graphic modes) is to be found
throughout the world during the past one hundred and fifty years. It is on such
a scale, and occurs in art cultures of such varied constitution, that it must be
considered among the most important of recent art-historical phenomena. Given
the strength of ethnocentrism and other systems in which centre dominates over
periphery, it is unsurprising that this phenomenon has hardly been noticed in
Euramerica.V Academic realism and late salon plein-airisme were assimilated
in the case of Japan into perhaps precisely that art culture most suited to receive
them. One tends theoretically to resist diachronic periodization by stages because
of the synchronic variety of changes which surround any such slicing. But one
cannot ignore the fact that the Japanese model empirically indicates a definitely
developmental series. The establishment of an Euramerican-style art school is
followed by a fine art society, then by a government salon in collusion and
competition with various artists' groups, ranging from the establishment-in-
waiting to the avant garde. Although their constitution is structurally and
chronologically varied, similar series are seen in China, India, Thailand and
Taiwan.
In domains of contact, I have already mentioned the role of diffusion of

55 Zhan Jianjun, Raising the House, from Youhua Xuanpinji, 1958.
Euramerican graphic imagery, whose frequency of circulation and re-distribution

is intimately tied to the scale and technological capabilities of the reprographics
industry. Here, japan appears to be a model, but an a-typical one in the sense
that its reprographic industry has always, since the late 1700s, been as advanced
technically (if not more) as those European cultures from which it later borrowed,
especially Italy and Germany in the 1870s. 43 In Shanghai in the 1890s-1910s,
or Calcutta in the 1860s-80s, one sees phenomena similar to those of japan
in the 1870s.
Contacts between Euramerican and local artists in a given Asian country
have always been subject to an array of attitudes about foreigners. Certainly,
there seems to have been more casual contact between local and visiting European
artists in India and japan, despite vigorous ethnocentricism, than in China outside
the treaty ports, even though one self-image of Chinese civilization is of an
openness to all outsiders who accept its norms. China is also the country where,
with the exception of Eastern Europeans in the 1950s, foreigners have played
the least significant role in teaching institutions (plate 54), whereas they can be
found everywhere else, sometimes for long periods which include eventual
naturalization.
For the Chinese (plate 55), foreign matriculation also functioned to privilege
returnee artists in the educational system as it did in japan around the turn of
the nineteenth century, but many modernist artists have suffered from working
in manners thought 'un-Chinese', where modernist formal innovation was
regarded as a matter for appraisal overseas and not in China. The only art
discourse deemed capable of contributing internationally to modern art by many
Chinese was to be a re-formed type of ink painting, and from the 1970s this
usually included a kind of abstract landscape. It requires little imagination to
understand how the openness or closedness of discourses, and the constitution
of relativization, is brought into effect as historical construction if no foreigners
have been involved in that formation, particularly no - or very few - foreigners
inside the art culture itself. This seems to me more crucial than whether the role
of those foreigners was in a colonial, neo-colonial, or independent state situation.
9 Association of Art Historians 1995 271

Part of the domain of contact is also found in foreign exhibitions at home,

or in officially approved national salons which privilege certain kinds of foreign
and domestic works inside the domestic discourses. All the major national Chinese
exhibitions since the late 1920s have been quadrennial rather than annual or
biennial. This may seem insignificant given the size of China and the lack of
its political centredness until 1949. But comparison with annual japanese national
exhibitions since 1907, the various annual fine art society exhibitions in India
since the 1880s, and national exhibitions in Thailand since 1949, suggests that
the Chinese case allows more central control over art discourse. The effect may
have been to prevent the national salon from performing even a properly
conservative and establishment role in constituting art discourses, because of
the way a work was censored by the artists' work unit, such as his art school
or publishing house, before submission.
Parallel Discourses
It would seem that double othering can only occur when there is both a
traditional, that is pre-modern, painting style to be relativized at the same time
that Euramerican styles are relativized on their transfer.That was the japanese
and, with various reservations, the Chinese and Indian cases. How then can
Euramerican styles be relativized when their transfer is the founding moment
for art discourses? How can Indonesian, and in many senses Malay, Thai and
Philippine artists relativize Euramerican stylistic discourse, when it is their only
such discourse? They are able to do so, although Euramerican painting may
have become their only artistic discourse; their expression is from a position
within their own cultural discourse. That is, the function of othering the past,
which already exists in their culture, is articulated through reference to a wide
and by no means mono-dimensional set of values, sometimes in decoration and
craft, sometimes in oral literature, whereas their othering of the present is carried
out by their relativization of Euramerican artistic discourse. It is simply easier
for the critic or historian to map that othering in artistic, especially pictorial,
discourse when such an art discourse is already present. What is already so dearly
present in China, japan, Korea and Taiwan can actually be misleading, for what
is rendered other in the establishment of modern art discourses may appear in
plastic art works, but can refer to discourses found elsewhere which have
borrowed that expression (plate 56). Only by recognizing this can one begin
to understand the manipulation of 'Tantric' symbols in some Indian painting
in the early 1970s, or the manipulation of Chinese 'character' forms in the late
1980s. In life as in art (plate 57), we should not analytically assume the content
plane to be the same as that of expression.f"
The creativeness of Japanese modern art in the transformation of various
modernist positions in the 1920s, and the exploration of several new ones in
the 1970s and 1980s, hints that the process of double othering conceals a much
wider aporia than is simply to be understood through the fertility of double
othering alone. The term aporia refers to that zone in which argument fails,
and here also indicates that topos which is beyond culturally ordained knowing

56 K.C.S. Panicker, Words

and Symbols, 1967, oil, 246 X
122 em. From Award Winners
of the National Exhibition of
Art 1955-1990. Catalogue,
Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi,
1990.
57 Xu Bing, Book, 1988.

Collection of the Artist. Photo:
John Clark, January 1990,
Beijing.
in one culture but may be knowable between cultures. I think it is possible to

consider double othering on the analogy of Bateson's Learning III. 45Exactly how
it is to be defined and understood will take a long time for semiotics and related
disciplinary knowledge in art history to work out, but in a rudimentary sense
there is some kind of control relation between the discourses of works and
interpretations which are specific to an art culture and which correct what those
discourses define as errors of choice, as formulated in Bateson's Learning I. We
can simply treat this control as a code until some richer description appears.
When this set of choices is othered by transferral of exogenous discourses, a
corrective is made to the set of alternatives from which choice is made or in
how the sequence of experience is punctuated, like Bateson's Learning II. The
othering of Euramerican discourses (after their use) to other autochthonous

58 Li Binggang, First dispersal

of the cordite smoke, 1985, oil.
Published in Meishu (Fine Art),
November 1986, from an
exhibition of works of the
Southern Front.
discourses is equivalent to a corrective change in the system of sets of alternatives,

like Bateson's Learning III. This perspective allows understanding of modernity
in art as a type of learning which maps spaces between discourses, and makes
the deep-seated structure of their codification systems available to understanding.
japanese discourses allowed implicit understanding of the systematicity of such
codes from outside the aporia. Because of the historical density of their demand
and the contingency of an independent state in the late nineteenth century, these
discourses could operate from a position of power on them. Historical
contingence, not cultural essence, does more to explain why modernity in art
in japan is more an exception than a comparative model for understanding other
Asian art cultures.
New Authority Codes
Notwithstanding the observation above, in regard to mediating the allocation

of values through the structure of training institutions and exhibitions, japan

59 Jin Shangyi, Two Nudes,

1988, oil on canvas. Collection
of the artist, Beijing. Photo:
John Clark, January 1990.
is a valid comparative model. The clarity and range of the art education system,
its supporting exhibition structure and later artist groups, were almost exactly
paralleled in India and China; and in varying degrees broad similarities could
also be found in Thailand and Malaysia. But the degree to which this mediation
was autonomous varied according to the wider cultural discourses: those of
nationalism (plate 58), in which they were embedded, and particularly those
of nationalist anti-colonialism. Certainly, in China, when art-teaching institutions
operated effectively from 1954 to 1964, class origin was a major element in
recruitment, assessment and promotion in art academies.t" Such recruitment
was in direct pursuance of state goals premised on a notion of China's national
weakness from its semi-colonial situation and the means to redress this structurally
(plate 59).
Japan also presents something of a comparative model in the rise of the
avant garde. Analagous situations can be found in India in the 1940s and in
both mainland China and Taiwan in the late 1980s (plate 60), where based on
comparison with the Japanese model the tripartite structure of establishment,
establishment-in-waiting (or anti-mainstream) and avant garde can be identified.
Of course, in countries once colonized, and especially in India where the language
and forms of the colonizer still have wide social currency and function, the rhetoric
of anti-colonial nationalism tended to cut away the political position of the avant
:;) Association of Art Historians 1995 275

60 Wu Tianzhang, Beijing Massacre Sketches, 1989, Collection of the artist, Taibei.

Photo: John Clark, December 1989.
garde as their appeal has been to values of the independence movement which
have been betrayed by the new establishment. But this establishment not only
espoused the same values, it could claim that it was their legitimate embodiment
in the post-Independence period. The japanese avant garde in its various
incarnations since the 1910s, on the contrary, has always been nearer to the
Euramerican one, in that it opposed the establishment's notion of art values,
to the extent that appeals to common values in nationalism or even broader left
political struggles could always be controverted from an avant-garde position.
Artistic Identity
The embedding of artistic discourse in systems of social production, as in

japan, meant that, with some Chinese exceptions, it is almost impossible to
identify pre-modern Asian artists who produce as an expression of individual
selfhood. Indeed, as with japan, it is not difficult to identify those involved with
the proto-modern transfer of Euramerican styles and the othering of pre-
discourses as simply producing a kind of transcription of pre-transfer mythological
themes.
Artists in many other Asian art cultures engage in descriptive or monumental
work which basically fulfils the social needs of a given historical epoch, but they
do not engage in that production as an expression or re-structuring of individual
selfhood which we think of as modern. Indeed, many great modern artistic

personalities were cast aside for a time by their cultures for doing precisely this,
like the oil painters Lin Fengmian in China and Affandi in Indonesia.
japan does indeed provide a comparative model in that the rise of a modern
artistic subjectivity is associated with a particular structure for the art world
around 1910 (see Artistic Identity pp. 261-3). We can identify the same structure
in India around the same period, despite the colonial situation. It is found in
Shanghai briefly, if very tenuously, in the late 1920s and early 1930s; in Thailand
from the 1950s; in Taiwan from the 1960s; and in the People's Republic of China
after 1979. Of course, the particular structure artistic subjectivityreceives depends
on wider issues of personality formation in a given cultural continuum, and
different cultural systems cannot be reduced to one another. But the plurality
of their contents does not alter the aspects of modernity by which the structuring
of artistic personality may be understood.V
Stylistic Motivation
Perhaps what most characterizes japanese stylistic motivation, particularly in

painting, and what renders the japanese case most easily trivialized by simplistic
cross-cultural generalization, is the historical length and complexity of its art
discourses. The general japanese cultural situation since even before Asuka
(around AD 650) was the uni-directional one of being the recipient of transfers
which were then assimilated and transformed, to stand as referents in a continuous
process of othering later and more recent transfers, chiefly from China."! This
situation was only changed at the end of the nineteenth century when japanese
cultural products - such as ukiyo-e - had already interposed in Euramerican
discourses from which styleswere then accepted into japan. However, this history
did mean that the japanese were positioned to regard as other those styles which
they accepted as new. One supposes they were themselves slowly to recognize
that their own cultural products had an impact on the production of cultural
products elsewhere by the end of the 1980s.
It must be clear that such a relation of unidirectional and distanced separation
had an impact in japan on the relativization of style itself, and on the modernist
shift of technical expression into a secondary register which comments 00 style.
In a real sense this had been the situation of japanese painting at least since the
late tenth-century formation of the distinction between kara-e and yamato-e,
painting in the 'Chinese' and 'japanese' modalities. It was then, without the later
plurality of cultural references, without nineteenth-century reprographics,
photography and japanese dominance of other cultures which appeared necessary
for japanese art discourse to have become modern.
This relation to transferred styles was quite different in most other Asian
countries. There seem to be broadly three types of situation. Transferred style
can be kept on the outside of internally centred discourse as in China, so much
so that its assimilation by artists regarded within the discourse is never
acknowledged, despite its relative obviousness to later art historians."
Transferred style can be regarded simply as one among a wide range of technical
modes which may be manipulated as a patron requires or as content demands,

61 Anonymous (Calcutta),
Portrait of an Unidentified
Calcutta Banian, c. 1850,
watercolour on ivory in an
inlaid wood and ivory frame,
20.2 x 15.2 em. Peabody
Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.
the centrality of discourse being located beyond the technical medium in which
style is expressed. Despite its cultural plurality, I think some such relation pertains
in many parts of India from the early seventeenth to late nineteenth centuries
(plate 61). Finally there is a third type where style is simply the marker for a
centre between art or religious discourses. That centre acquires merit by the
decorative propinquity of styles, not their assimilation into any wider or more
dominant discourse. This, I think, is the pre-modern Thai case.
In the Chinese world one has seen transferred styles motivated to disturb
the centrality of the discourse. India has seen the same functioning to resist the
discourses external to art which seek to push their motivations elsewhere. And
in Thai (or Indonesian) modern art one has seen some works attempting to
motivate style as an expression of cultural essence, because to establish a cultural
essencewould be to usurp the position of that centre which had exerted hegemony
from its position between transferred styles.
Finally, a note of caution: in examining the motivations of modernist styles
in Asia one is always in danger of falling back for explanation on the drives
of some tribal consciousness in some pre-cultural, ethnically Procrustean time.
This may be hypothesized as still extant in a parallel discourse to the present,
where graphemes can be read off as the coexistence or survival of primeval pre-
modern, non-'western' myths, and expressed in resistance to Euramerica. This

62 Ian Fairweather,
Monastery, 1961, pya on
cardboard,142.81 x 185.8 ern.
National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra.
63 Lai Chunchun, As High as
Heaven, 1989, mixed media on
paper. Collection of the Artist,
Taibei.
particularly appealing position was, of course, found in the 1930s mood of Pan-
Asianism in japan and reappears paradoxically in some modern critics.l" who
do not take as much cognizance of what, besides the 'western', modern Asian
art might oppose. japan's experience is comparable not because it is advanced,
which in a methodologically trivial sense it may well be, but because japan
represents a particular matrix of possibilities worked out with a certain complexity
and intensity.
Conclusion
In japan, it is the political conditions for the establishment of art discourses,

the historical conditions which provide for parallel discourses, and the long and
specific history of a special structure for stylistic motivation, that render it only
of value as negative comparison in understanding modernity in art elsewhere
in Asia. But the japanese case retains positive value as an hermeneutic type whose
interior relationships may indirectly show what the structuring of art discourse
could be.
Many intelligent and informed explorers still map the topology of the East
and the West, of the Wareware Nihonjin (We japanese) and gaijin (Those
Outside), and of the Yellow and the White. Will thought ever catch the Aborigine
with a video camera, the Scotsman painting China on an Australian beach (plate
62), or the Tokyo- and New York-trained Taiwanese minimalist leaving her
traces on the void to the sound of Nanguan (plate 63)?51
john Clark
School of Asian Studies, University of Sydney
Notes
This is a version of the paper presented at the international conference Stirrup, Sail & Plough:
Continental and Maritime Influences on Japanese Identity, which was held at the Research School of
Pacific Students, Australian National University, Canberra, 20-23 September 1993. I am grateful to
Christine Davidson and John Keenan for some comments.
1 Y6ga is the Japanese term for 'painting in the Painting, Seiy6ga, since 1896 at the Tokyo
western manner' which is usually half of the School of Fine Art, was a juror and leading
pair with Nihonga or 'painting in the Japanese founder.
manner'. Historically the distinction was much 2 Some of my papers took up these questions
more on technical grounds than as separated earlier, including the following: 'Modernity in
cultural discourses. In a text of 1826, cited by Japanese Painting', Art History,
Sasaki Seichi in Yooroppa aburae no Nihon voI.9,no.2,June 1986; 'Problems of Modernity
dochakukatei no Kenkyu; I, Tama Bijutsu in Chinese Painting', Oriental Art, New Series,
Daigaku Zairyogaku Kenkyushitsu, 1978, voI.32,no.3, 1986; 'Some Models in Japanese
p.21, the distinction in Japan was between Art History', Burlington Magazine, vol.128,
abura-e, oil painting, and in China of no.1005, December 1986; 'Modernism and
Xiyanghua, Western painting. The binary Traditional Japanese-style Painting',
distinction of y6ga / nihonga became the Semiotica,l, 1989;'Academicism in Chinese oil
formal, categorical division for works at the painting and a nascent avant-garde in the
First Bunten, or Ministry of Education 1980s', in Paul Duro (ed.), Perspectives in
Exhibition, in 1907, at which Kuroda Seiki, Academic Art, Occasional Papers, vol.3. The
who had become the first Professor of Western Art Association of Australia, 1991;

'Postmodernism and recent expressionist class of being. The entity composed by the
Chinese oil paiting', Asian Studies Reviews, problem and its solutions constitutes a form-
voI.15, no.2, November 1991; 'The class. Historically, only those solutions related
Conditions for Post-Modernity in japanese Art to one another by the bonds of tradition and
of the 1980s " Proceedings of the 7th Biennial influence are linked as a sequence', G. Kubler,
Conference of the Japanese Studies Association The Shape of Time, New Haven: Yale
of Australia, Canberra Australia-japan University Press, 1962, p. 33. Only now the
Research Centre, 1991; 'Origins and Stimuli of materiality of the modern relativizes the bonds
Modern Asian Art: autochthonous demand, of multiple traditions.
external domination, and co-option models', 6 Among relatively few attempts are: japan
discussion paper for International Roundtable Cultural Forum (ed.), Modern Art of Asia,
on Contemporary Asian Art, The Asia Society, Tokyo: Toto Shuppan Center, 1961; Kawakita
New York, November 1992; 'Surrealism in Michiaki, et al., Ajia Kindaikaiga no
japan', in M.Lloyd, T. Gott, C.Chapman, Yoaketen, Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbun, 1985;
Surrealism: Revolution by Night, Australian The Asian Art Biennales at the Fukuoka
National Gallery, Canberra, 1992; j. Clark Museum since 1979, and other one-person and
(ed.), Modernity in Asian Art, Sydney, Wild group exhibitions there; Y. Furuichi, M.
Peony, 1993; Modern Indian Art: Some Ushiroshoji, Y. Sakonaka (eds.), Tonan Ajia
Literature and Problematics, Occasional Paper, no Niuu Aato: Bijutsu Zensen Hokujochu
no.21, Research Instutute for Asia and the Ten, Tokyo, The japan Foundation, 1992
Pacific, Universiry of Sydney, 1994; 'The (whose bibliography also lists some other
japanese Avantgarde before 1945', in A. japanese material on S.E. Asian art).
Monroe, Japanese Avant-Garde Art of the 7 See my paper, 'Institutional Modernity in
Postwar and Contemporary Eras, New York, Asian Art', Kunstlerischer AustauschlArtistic
Alfred Knopf & The Guggenheim Exchange, Akten des XXVlIl. lnternationalen
Museum,1994. Kongresses fur Kunstgeschichte Berlin, 15.-20.
3 See my paper 'Problems of Modern Painting Juli 1992, Herausgegeben von Thomas W.
Beyond Byzantium', Papers on Far Eastern Gaehtgens, Akademie Verlag, 1993,
History, no. 41, March 1990, for four pp.655-68.
definitions of moderniry. 8 See, inter alia, Kyoto Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan
4 U. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington, Hen, Juhasseiki no Nihon Bijutsu - Katto
Indiana University Press, 1976, 1979, p. 57. suru Biishiki, Kyoto: Kyoto Kokuritsu
Eco depends on Christian Metz's Language et Hakubutsukan, 1990; Kobe Shiritsu Hakubut-
cinema, Paris, Larousse, 1970, in whose sukan, Megane-e to Tokaido Gojusan Tsugi
reprint (Paris: Editions Albarros, 1977, ten: Seiyo no eikyo wo uketa Ukiyoe, Kobe:
p. 182) Merz states: 'Ainsi se trouve engendre Kobe Shiritsu Hakubutsukan, 1984.
un veritable systeme de relations inter-codiques 9 For details of social structures in at least
qui est lui-meme, en quelque sorte, un autre Kyoto which anticipate modern art worlds
code, er qui - dans I'ordre du codique, non later in japan, see Tatsuro Akai, Kyoto no
de la matiere de I'expression - represente ce Bijutsushi, Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 1989,
qu'il ya de plus specifique dans chaque pp. 275-301.
language: c'esr la formule codique de sa 10 On the extraordinary diversity of nineteenth-
specificite' [Author's italics]. The confusion century japanese etchings, see my catalogue,
between content of expression and the speci- Nineteenth-Century Japanese Copperplate
ficity of codification is precisely that made by Prints [edited by Timothy Clark], London:
cultural essentialists; see my essay, 'The British Museum Occasional Paper, 1993.
Structure of "Iki" by Kuki Shuzo', Asian 11 The trajectory which leads from M. Foucault's
Culture Quarterly [Taipei], vol. 12, no. 1, The Order of Things, London: Tavistock,
1984, pp. 45-51. 1970, to E. Said's Orientalism, Viking/
In what follows, a diagram may be Penguin, 1978, has tended to construct the
helpful: see p. 285. periphery in the centre's 'Third World' guise. I
5 This reworks the basic position, adumbrated do not claim that the approach advanced here
by Eco, 1976, see note 4 above, p. 316, that is unproblematical from that perspective. It
'Semiosis is the process by which empirical looks the other way around, along or between
subjects communicate, communication being Asian art cultures, and not down or up, as the
made possible by the organization of significa- Orientalist critique is methodologically
tion systems', in terms of the sequence of art required to.
objects across and between cultural boundaries 12 See my Japanese-British Exchanges in Art,
in time. This would be a semiotic reworking 1850s-1930s, privately published, London,
of Kubler: 'The problem disclosed by any 1989, pp. 223-6.
sequence of artefacts may be regarded as its 13 See, inter alia, Shigeru Aoki and Tadayasu
mental form, and the linked solutions as its Sakai (eds.), Nihon Kindai Shiso Taikei, Dai

17 Kan, Bijutsu, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoren, strucrions to establish authenticity, value,

1989; Shigeru Aoki, Abura-e ShOgaku, Tokyo, competence and mastery; the linkage of
Chikuma Shobe, 1987; Shigeru Aoki (ed.), nihonga/yoga constructions to non-art
Meiii Yoga Shiryo - Kirokuhen, & Meiii discourses.
Yoga Sbiryo, Kaisoben, Tokyo: Chua Koren 20 See my Japanese-British Exchanges in Art,
Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1986; Shigeru Aoki (ed.), op. cit., note 11 above, pp. 253-5.
Takahashi Yuichi Abura-e Shiryo, Tokyo: 21 See my paper, 'Dilemmas of Selfhood: Public
Chilo Koron Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1984. and Private Discourses of Japanese Surrealism
14 On the Kyoto oil painters, see Y. Shimada, in the 1930s', presented at the Sydney Society
'Meiji no Kyoto Yoga', Kindai no Bijutsu, for Literature and Aesthetics, 10 June 1993,
no. 49, November 1978. and the Biennial Conference of the Japanese
15 Perhaps the strongest early assimilations were Studies Association of Australia, Newcastle,
the work of Takahashi Yuichi at the Kotohira 9 July 1993, in submission, and the essays in
Shrine after 1877. See Hen Asahi Shinbunsha, Surrealism: Revolution by Night, op. cit., and
Takahashi Yuicbi to Kotobiragu Hakubut- Japanese Avant-Garde Art of the Postwar and
sukan, Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1983. For Contemporary Eras, op. cit. (see note 2
the relations with the French academy which above).
provided the base for mythology painting, see 22 Shigeru Aoki [1882-1911] is best known for
J. Thuiller, T. Kagesato and N. Abe, Nihon his romantic inflection of late Meiji nationalist
Kindai Yoga no KyoshO to Furansa/ expression with references to the Pre-
L'Academie du [apon moderne et les peintres Raphaelites, some of whose albums were in his
francais, Tokyo: Bridgestone Museum of Art, studio. See Giichi Nakamura, Kindai Nihon-
1983. bijutsu no sokumen: Meiii Yoga to Igirisu
16 For this debate, see the three-hour speech of Bijutsu, Tokyo: Zokeisha, 1976; Aoki Shigeru
Toyama Masakazu to the Meiji Art Society of = Meiii Romanshugi to Igirisu, Kurume:
17 April 1890 and the two-hour reply by Ishibashi Bijutsukan, 1983.
Hayashi Tadamas of May 1891, in Aoki and 23 Fujita's war painting falls into three periods:
Sakai, op. cir., 1989, pp. 122-66, note 9 (1) during and after his visit to South China in
above. 1938; (2) during and after his visit to S.E.
17 Fujita Tsuguharu [1886-1968] was the son of Asia in 1942; (3) paintings done in the last
a Japanese Imperial Army Medical Corps years of the war and never exhibited, which
doctor, who was persuaded to let his son took their materials from overseas magazines.
study art by another army doctor, Mori Ogai, For a brief survey of this, see my paper 'The
himself a novelist, art critic and conduit for art Art of Modern Japan Three Wars', Bulletin of
information from Europe. Fujita soon acquired the Japanese Studies Association of Australia,
prominence in Paris during the 1920s for his 1991, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 38-44.
fond blanc and elegant outline drawing. 24 See Eco, 1979, op. cit. (note 4 above),
Hostility to him after 1945 for his war art pp. 189-90, and F. Saussure, Course in
forced him abroad and back to France where General Linguistics [1915], London: Fontana/
he became a French citizen, was baptized a Collins edition, 1974, pp. 132-3, for various
catholic as Leonard Foujita, and died in 1968. approaches to motivation. Saussure conceives
See J. Selz, Foujita, Naefels: Bonfini Press, of motivation as that which binds together
1981, and Hommage a Leonard Foujita, isolated linguistic units; Eco sees it as a kind
Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun, 1968. of transfer or imprint which is analogical when
18 One might observe that this double othering the sign is an iconic one.
also seems to have been a feature of the 25 See my Beyond Byzantium, op. cit. (note 3
handling of the culturally other, from ukiyo-e above).
to 'primitive' art in European modernism, 26 The advent of modernism marks a kind of
where these were othered by a refusal to metaphorical jump inside a series of discourses
countenance their authocthonous discourses of which had become metonymically saturated.
interpretation even as their formal features and On this notion, see my 'Modernism and
some, often blatantly self-serving, notion of Traditional Japanese-style Painting', op. cit.
their meaning was used as a weapon by (note 2 above).
modernist artists, and later by curators and 27 Umehara Ryusaburo could be considered the
critics, to relativize their own European last pupil of Renoir, under whose inspiration
discourses. he worked during the last part of his first visit
19 Here one relinquishes consideration of some to France from 1890- 1913. There is a
other important issues which bear on the prodigious bibliography on him in Japanese,
nihonga/yoga construction: the types of including Umehara Ryusaburo (Gendai Nihon
contact and mediated interfaces with non- Bijutsu Zenshu: 12), Tokyo: Shueisha, 1971;
Japanese art for non-oil-painting practitioners Collected Works by Umehara Ryusaburo in
in the 1880s; the use of nihongalyoga con- the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo:

Kinryudo, 1969. discourse than is countenanced in any notion

28 Yoshihara Jiro [1909-1972} was an oil of discourses produced by their power situa-
painter from Ashiya in the Kansai whose tion alone. In art discourses, the realia indicate
exhibition at the Nikakai [Second Section various domains in whose structuring power is
Association} in 1933 was sponsored by Fujita only one element alongside historical conjunc-
Tsuguharu. Yoshihara later became the ture, the relative autonomy of art discourses
founder of the postwar Gutai group. See from other discourses, and the formal poten-
'Tokushu: Yoshihara Jiro', Bijutsu Techo ; vol. tialities and conflicts implicit in systems of
31, no. 446, March 1979. codes.
29 According to the serial catalogues of the 33 There is a Balinese Ramayana Kakawin identi-
Bunten, Teiten, Kaizoten, Shinbunten and fied by the late Anthony Forge in Canberra.
Niten exhibitions, Nitenshi Hensaku Iinkai, This is on paper from a ream of double-
Nitenshi, Tokyo, Zaidanhojin Niten, 1982- foolscap folio English Watman paper datable
84, the relation between submissions and to before 1811, which was brought by either
exhibitions for given years was as given in the Raffles or Crawfurd. There are even earlier
table on p. 285. works in Java on European paper brought by
These tables reveal quite acidly that even the the Dutch. I am grateful to Robyn Maxwell,
most conservative of genres, Nihonga, was Curator, Department of Asian Art in the
overtaken at the quasi-official salon by Yoga National Gallery of Australia, for confirming
in 1926, and outstripped completely by 1929, these details.
a situation which was not reversed after the 34 See J.e. Harle, The Art and Architecture of
reorganization of 1936. the Indian Sub-continent, Harmondsworth:
30 'Colonial' or 'neo-colonial' would be names for Penguin, 1986, p. 376.
processes which are secondary and not primary 35 See R. Chatterjee, From the Karkhana to the
to the structure of art discourses. The term Studio: Changing social roles of patron and
Euramerican is deliberate and comes from artist in Bengal, New Delhi: Books & Books,
Ou/mei and o/bei, the Chinese and Japanese 1990; T. Guha-Thakurta, 'The Making of a
neologisms for Europel America. Here, New "Indian" Art': Artists, aesthetics and
'Euramerica' and related adjectives mark the nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850-1920,
position that 'western' cultural products do not Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
in essence belong to countries in western 36 Particularly the paintings and sculptures made
Europe and North America where 'western' by students of the Sir J.J. School of Art in
culture may have originated. 'Western' is in Bombay for various official projects. On
fact too unspecific, when we discuss what official art in India, see Guha- Thakurta, note
developed in a cultural-historical continuum. 22 above, and J.e. Bagal, Centenary: Govern-
The use of 'Euramerica' implies that, despite ment College of Art and Craft, Calcutta,
its cultural specificity, the America which 1864-1964, Calcutta: Government College of
Japan and China encountered in the nineteenth Art and Craft, 1966; C.L. Burns, 'The Func-
century was a cultural and historical extension tions of Schools of Art in India', Journal of the
of Europe. Royal Society of Arts, 18 June 1909; W.E.
31 Particularly when one looks at the stylistic Gladstone Solomon, The Bombay Revival of
diversity of the late Ayutthaya and early Indian Art (on sending panels to the British
Ratanakosin temple murals which I have seen, Empire Exhibition, Wembley), Bombay: Sir
such as Wat Yai Suwannaram (dating from the J.J. School of Art, 1924; L. Heath, 'The Mayo
late seventeenth-early eighteenth century) and School of Arts, Lahore', Arts and Letters
Wat Ko Keo Suttharam (1734) in Petchaburi, (Society for India), 1931; N.M. Kelkar, The
and Wat Phutthaisawan (late seventeenth Story of the Sir].]. School of Art: 1857-1957,
century) in Ayutthaya. See R. Ringis, Thai Bombay: Government of Maharashtra and Sir
Temples and Temple Murals, Singapore: J.J. School of Art, n.d. (1969?).
Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 97-102. 37 See R.M. Swiderski, 'The Dragon and the
32 Such an analysis assumes that art discourses Straightedge: Part 1 - A semiotics of the
are separable from the discourses of power in Chinese response to European pictorial space;
which they are embedded or by which they Part 2 - The ideological impetus of linear
may be motivated in the Saussurian sense. perspective in late Ming-early Qing China;
They have the distinct advantage of privileging Part 3 - Porcelains, horses and ink stones -
realia against rhetoric: it is against the the ends of acceptance', in Semiotica, 81(1 12),
ignorance of the former that this essay has 1990; 82(1/2), 1990; 82(3/4), 1990.
worked. Any examination of the realia of art 38 Indeed, literacy was low in Thailand until the
discourses under conditions of, say, colonial 1960s, for males and females being 31.2 per
domination reveals that there is far more resis- cent in 1937,53.7 per cent in 1947,70.8 per
tance to, and repossession of, the imaged by cent in 1960, and 81.8 per cent in 1970; see
the borrowed foreign or relativized local art D.K. Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History, New
rsJ Association of Art Historians 1995 283

Haven: Yale University Press, 1984 [Thai complex relation between early and later
edition), p. 291. nineteenth-century Japanese non-woodblock
39 For the relations between King Bhumipol and prints.
Piriya Krairiksh, see A. Poshyananda, Modern 44 Or, in Haberrnas's terms, that values are the
Art in Thailand, Singapore: Oxford University same as arguments about their validity: see
Press, 1992, pp. 98-9. note 46 below.
40 See A. Mclntyre, 'Sukarno as Artist-Politician', 45 See G. Bateson, 'The Logical Categories of
in A. McIntyre (ed.), Indonesian Political Learning and Communication' (1964),
Biography: In Search of Cross-Cultural Under- reprinted in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind,
standing, Melbourne: Monash Papers on New York: Ballantine, 1972, especially
Southeast Asia, no. 28, 1993. p.293.
41 I have seen parts of the Presidential Collection 46 See my paper 'Realism and Revolutionary
and Adam Malik Collection in Jakarta, and Chinese Painting', Journal of the Oriental
many of the Thai Royal Collection works in Society of Australia, vols. 22 and 23,
Bangkok during a research trip in 1991-2. See 1990-91.
the catalogues Lee Man-fong, Lukisan-lukisan 47 This paraphrases Habermas: 'The value
dan Patung-patung Kolleksi Presiden Sukarno systems of French and German culture are in
dari Republik Indonesia, 5 vols., Jakarta, fact good examples of historical configurations
1964; Liem Tjoe lng, Lukisan-Iukisan Koleksi of value contents that cannot be reduced to
Adam Malik, Jakarta: P.T. Intermasa, 1979; one another. But the pluralism of value
Apinan Poshyananda, Western-Style Painting contents has nothing to do with the differences
and Sculpture in the Royal Thai Court, 2 vols., among the aspects of validity under which
Bangkok: Amarin Printing Group, 1993. The questions of truth, justice and taste can be
last includes many art-historically valuable differentiated out and traditionally dealt with
translations of the diaries of King as such.' From J. Habermas, The Theory of
Chulalungkorn about his visits to European Communicative Action, vol. 1, Thomas
artists' studios, and his views on European art. McCarthy trans., London: Heinemann, 1984,
Significantly, neither country yet has a proper p.250.
gallery space to exhibit recent modern or neo- 48 I discuss some of these issues in my 1986
traditional art. My review of the Thai cata- Burlington Magazine article, op. cit. (note 2
logues is in Art & Asia Pacific, vol. 1, no. 3, above).
1994. 49 J. Cahill, The Compelling Image, Cambridge,
42 The re-questioning of Said's Orientalism must Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982,
begin with assessing the extent to which what pp. 1-35, etc.
it constructs as the centre has contributed to 50 See 'Gendai Bijutsu no "Ajiagaku" e -
maintaining this ignorance among those Indekkusu', in Furuichi et aI., 1992, op. cit.
interested in working at what Orientalism (note 5 above).
constructs as the periphery. 51 A South Taiwanese classical musical repertory
43 See my catalogue Japanese Nineteenth-Century which preserves ancient melodies and forms
Copperplate Etchings, London: British which were later historically occluded in
Museum, 1993, for some indication of the 'Central' Chinese culture.

Diagram from n. 4 above (p, 281).
metarode
meta-discourse
FIELD OF META-DISCOURSES
code code
[text] [context)
I
discourse of works
I
discourse of interpretations
~-:
work a works b, c, d... interpretation a interpretation b, c, d
[text) [context) [text) [context)
FIELD OF ART
Diagram for n. 29 above (p. 283).
5th 6th 7th .. . 10th 11th ...

Teiten Teiten Teiten .. . Teiten Teiten ... Kaizoten
1924 1925 1926 .. . 1929 1930 ... 1936
Nihonga Works 2543 2267 2237 2164 2146 1561
Submitted
Nihonga Works 131 144 191 292 361 367
Exhibited
Nihonga 131 143 191 292 361 ~67
Exhibitors
Yoga Works 1639 2037 2365 4458 4434 3026
Submitted
Yoga Works 108 114 154 271 259 373
Exhibited
Yoga 106 111 153 272 259 373
Exhibitors

Yoga in Japan: Model or Exception?' Modernity in Japanese Art 1850s-1940s: An International Comparison

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Yoga in Japan: Model or Exception?' Modernity in Japanese Art 1850s-1940s: An International Comparison

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Art History ISSN 0141-6790 Vol. 18 No.2 June 1995 pp.

Yoga in Japan: Model or Exception?'

a. A sharp reappraisal of the institutional base in the structuring of

b. An end to the sovereignty of origination as the privileging moment

c. The viewing of modernity as a field of discourses with - or on -

© Association of Art Historians 1995. Published by Blackwell Publishers,

d. A re-awareness that styles in modernism are simply discourses of

e. The abandonment of culturally essentialist interpretations in favour

f. Recognition that the interpenetration and cross-assimilation of

g. An awareness that the charateristically modern products of 'Western

Allow me first to clarify certain terminology derived from semiological

254 © Association of Art Historians 1995

'9 Association of Art Historians 1995 255

45 Anonymous, Kyoto school,

encyclopedias indicates the transfer in conditions of scarce information but only

256 © Association of Art Historians 1995

of discourses of interpretation which is typically modern. These structural

We can think of modernity as having been established in japanese art when it

© Association of Art Historians 1995 257

and in interpretation were transferred to japan. The elaborated series of domains

a. European art in graphic form disseminated by returnees after

b. Contact with foreign artists and photographers - some resident,

c. Various teaching ateliers set up by returned japanese artists from

d. Contact through Italian art teachers at the Art School of the

e. Contact through a small number of returning artists throughout the

f. Reference to European materials in the production of art manuals

h. Establishment of fully fledged oil painting departments in Kyoto in

1. Foundation of a national salon at Bunten in 1907.

258 © Association of Art Historians 1995

which had been transferred as soon as they began to be transformed by

A notion of double othering helps us to understand in a different way the

© Association of Art Historians 1995 259

yoga can be discerned as two parallel discourses, where othering is uni-directional

New authority codes

260 © Association of Art Historians 1995

49 Catalogue Cover, Nouvelles

whose code claimed to be legitimately subversive of other authority structures,

© Association of Art Historians 1995 261

50 Nakahara Minoru, Die

262 © Association of Art Historians 1995

paintings P as indicating a radically a-nomic artistic subjectivity, balanced

'9 Association of Art Historians 1995 263

One of the characteristic tendencies of modernism is to relativize - or to

264 © Association of Art Historians 1995

discourses, particularly in painting, which could and were to be rendered other

© Association of Art Historians 1995 265

Euramerican art Syncretism: Parallel-discourses

Thus, before we go further, it is clear, on the structural basis of its art

266 © Association of Art Historians 1995

'9 Association of Art Historians 1995 267

prehistory which habituates those illustrating Bengali almanacs in 1838, or

It is with the proto-histories of modernity in art in different Asian art cultures

268 © Association of Art Historians 1995

continuously subject to political intervention, particularly in Thailand and

© Association of Art Historians 1995 269

270 © Association of Art Historians 1995

55 Zhan Jianjun, Raising the House, from Youhua Xuanpinji, 1958.

Euramerican graphic imagery, whose frequency of circulation and re-distribution

9 Association of Art Historians 1995 271

Part of the domain of contact is also found in foreign exhibitions at home,

272 © Association of Art Historians 1995

56 K.C.S. Panicker, Words

57 Xu Bing, Book, 1988.