Professional Documents
Culture Documents
253-285
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:
Discourses
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
Proto-histories
g. Contact with other members of the Meiji elite at the Meiji Art
Society from 1889;
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
Parallel discourses
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
State autonomy
independent japan
neo-colonial Thailand
semi-colonial Philippines China
colonial Indonesia India Taiwan
Malay States Korea
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.
Proto-histories
53 Corrado Feroci, and others, Democracy Monument, 1938, Bangkok. Photograph: John
Clark, January 1992.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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