Keramic Art of Japan

Last year I came across this book Keramic Art of Japan in our art library, and I've been more or less obsessed with it ever since. It was published in England in 1875, and it's basically an illustrated catalog of Japanese ceramics in various public and private collections. But the illustrations! In addition to photographs and photolithographs, it has the most extraordinary chromolithographs I've ever seen in person. They were done by a French firm and each image required a whole series of hand-drawn lithographic stones, one for each color and shade. They are so detailed, so colorful, so three-dimensional and yet so flat: their quality is almost magical.


This semester I'm finally getting to indulge my interest in Keramic Art of Japn by using it as the object of my final project for my class on "Dimensions of Material Culture." This will force me to look at the book as a material object: its size, bindings, printing, typography, etc., everything that isn't its text or its images. As an added bonus, I'm also giving a preliminary presentation on Keramic Art at a research colloquium on "Photography and the Technologies of Empire and Race" that's part of a Visual Culture Center conference here at UW-Madison. So I'll get to talk both about how all the images (even the chromolithographs) make use of photography, and how the book relates to England's imperialist attitudes towards Japan in the late-nineteenth century.


It's these later aspects--how the book uses mimetic technologies like photography and chromolithography, and how the book relates to Japonisme as a colonial discourse--that make me interested in using Keramic Art of Japan as a focus for my MA paper next semester. Specifically I want to compare what's going on in Keramic Art with the ways in which Japanese people were mimetically copied and mimicked by the English in popular illustrations and plays like Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado (as I discussed in my presentation for UCLA's Graduate Symposium on the Remnant). I have a hunch that one of the reasons Japonisme is under theorized in the scholarly literature is that Japonisme is thought to have been about decorative arts rather than figural representations. Even in my own department, with its emphases on material and visual culture, vases and parasols just don't register as having the same political consequences as images of people. Leaving aside that this plays right into nineteenth-century ideas of Japanese art as "merely" decorative, I hope that by looking at representations of Japanese people and objects in tandem I can demonstrate how they were unforunately equated.

Remnant Redux

Following the basic rule of academia that no conference paper should actually correspond to the abstract you originally submitted for it, I've written my UCLA paper along slightly new lines. I was originally planning on tying in the whole "remnant" idea by talking about how the images medievalize Japanese people, that is, represent them as living in a colorful but outdated feudal society. But the problem with art history is that, contrary to popular belief, you can't just claim that the image looks like whatever you want. You need actual visual evidence, enough to convince a room full of people that they can see in the image what you can see. And the more I looked at these images, the less evidence I saw of medievalizing tendencies.


But what I did see more and more in the images was a certain theatricality. Platforms and stages, curtains, audiences, subjects directly addressing viewers: everything suggesting that Japanese people were seen not just as remnants of an "old" Japan, but also as performing remnants of their ancient civilization for western audiences. What's interesting about this emphasis is that these exhibitions were still seen as authentic, as providing a picture of "real" Japan, even when the exhibitions were frankly discussed as performances. Much like how a "staged" photograph was considered much more realistic in the 19th century than it would be today.


If westerners saw Japanese culture as more or less a performance, than the inevitable outcome is performances like Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado, in which "Japanese" culture can be performed not just for westerners but also by westerners. And in the inevitably unequal power relations of the time, Japanese people were not given the same privilege of being able to perform western culture. In fact, Japan was aggressively westernizing at the time, reforming their government, education system, and military along western lines, wearing western clothes, etc. Some of these policies were praised in the West, but others, particularly wearing western clothing, were openly ridiculed. So we get things like this image, which was an apparently hysterical picture of Japanese men in western dress, when it first appeared in an English periodical in 1877. It's humor lies mostly in how the man on the right is trying to get on his horse on the "wrong" side, and how the men on the left have top hats and clothes that don't fit properly by English standards. Images like this one confirmed the idea that Japanese people belonged in their "ancient" costumes and would never be able to out-westernize the West.

Japonist Remnants

There's exciting news on the academic front: Lina is presenting at her very first conference. It's just a graduate symposium, but it's being held in the sunny locale of UCLA. I really liked the paper idea that I proposed for the conference, so I'm very excited that is was chosen, but now the problem is that I actually have to write the paper!

The theme of the symposium is "Remnants," which I can only assume was dreamed up during some sort of beach-side drug-induced powwow. It's a typical term for academia in that you thought it referred to something fairly specific, something left over or a surviving remainder, but once you try to define what might be and not be a remnant you realize that the term could encompass literally everything. As the symposium's organizers themselves pointed out, the entire "field of art history can be conceived of as a discourse of the remnant."

So the challenge in submitting an abstract to a symposium about everything is how to make your paper topic sound like it fits the theme without (a) sounding like everyone else's abstract and (b) using the word "remnant" 15 times in one paragraph. I wanted my topic to relate to Japonisme, but I also wanted the opportunity to write about something new, something I hadn't had a chance to discuss yet in my seminar papers. So I returned to some images I had come across last year that depict Japanese women for a western 19th century audience.


Basically, the abstract points out that even though some scholars have argued that Japonisme (the western interest in Japanese arts and society beginning in the mid-19th century) helped objectify Japanese people as having certain essentialist characteristics, visual representations of Japanese people have rarely been analyzed for how they might have contributed to this problem. So my paper argues that images of Japanese people that circulated in the west represented them as remnants, that is, not just as the remains of another far away culture, but also as the remains of a long ago civilization. By constructing Japanese people as remnants of an "old" Japan that was still going on, Japan gets constructed as a place living in the past, as a decidedly non-western, non-modern place.

I'm particularly into this image, which I found more recently, that represents a "Japanese Village" that was set up as a kind of amusement park in London. Newspaper articles from the time suggest that it was incredibly popular, with an average of 3,000 daily visitors, so popular in fact that an eager entrepreneur decided to set up an "Indian Village" along similar lines. Despite the different political relationships England had with India (its preeminent colony) and Japan (merely an economic and military dependent), the cultures of India and Japan were presented to the English public in sometimes similar ways. My favorite example of this is the Great Exhibition in Brussels, in which the English pavilion contained both an Indian village and a Japanese village, the latter graced with a statue of Queen Victoria. You really can't make this stuff up.