Download or read book Making Modern Japanese Style Painting written by Chelsea Foxwell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-07-20 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction. Nihonga and the historical inscription of the modern -- Exhibitions and the making of modern Japanese painting -- In search of images -- The painter and his audiences -- Decadence and the emergence of Nihonga style -- Naturalizing the double reading -- Transmission and the historicity of Nihonga -- Conclusion.

Download or read book Parallel Modernism written by Chinghsin Wu and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This significant historical study recasts modern art in Japan as a “parallel modernism” that was visually similar to Euroamerican modernism, but developed according to its own internal logic. Using the art and thought of prominent Japanese modern artist Koga Harue (1895–1933) as a lens to understand this process, Chinghsin Wu explores how watercolor, cubism, expressionism, and surrealism emerged and developed in Japan in ways that paralleled similar trends in the west, but also rejected and diverged from them. In this first English-language book on Koga Harue, Wu provides close readings of virtually all of the artist’s major works and provides unprecedented access to the critical writing about modernism in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s through primary source documentation, including translations of period art criticism, artist statements, letters, and journals.

Download or read book Maximum Embodiment written by Bert Winther-Tamaki and published by . This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maximum Embodiment presents a compelling thesis articulating the historical character of Yoga, literally the “Western painting” of Japan. The term designates what was arguably the most important movement in modern Japanese art from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Perhaps the most critical marker of Yoga was its association with the medium of oil-on-canvas, which differed greatly from the water-based pigments and inks of earlier Japanese painting. Yoga encompassed both establishment fine art and avant-gardist insurgencies, but in both cases, as the term suggests, it was typically focused on techniques, motifs, canons, or iconographies that were obtained in Europe and deployed by Japanese artists. Despite recent advances in Yoga studies, important questions remain unanswered: What specific visuality did the protagonists of Yoga seek from Europe and contribute to modern Japanese society? What qualities of representation were so dearly coveted as to stimulate dedication to the pursuit of Yoga? What distinguished Yoga in Japanese visual culture? This study answers these questions by defining a paradigm of embodied representation unique to Yoga painting that may be conceptualized in four registers: first, the distinctive materiality of oil paint pigments on the picture surface; second, the depiction of palpable human bodies; third, the identification of the act and product of painting with a somatic expression of the artist’s physical being; and finally, rhetorical metaphors of political and social incorporation. The so-called Western painters of Japan were driven to strengthen subjectivity by maximizing a Japanese sense of embodiment through the technical, aesthetic, and political means suggested by these interactive registers of embodiment. Balancing critique and sympathy for the twelve Yoga painters who are its principal protagonists, Maximum Embodiment investigates the quest for embodiment in some of the most compelling images of modern Japanese art. The valiant struggles of artists to garner strongly embodied positions of subjectivity in the 1910s and 1930s gave way to despairing attempts at fathoming and mediating the horrifying experiences of real life during and after the war in the 1940s and 1950s. The very properties of Yoga that had been so conducive to expressing forceful embodiment now produced often gruesome imagery of the destruction of bodies. Combining acute visual analysis within a convincing conceptual framework, this volume provides an original account of how the drive toward maximum embodiment in early twentieth-century Yoga was derailed by an impulse toward maximum disembodiment.

Download or read book Bokujinkai Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant Garde written by Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-07-20 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japanese calligraphy had its international heyday—collaborating with and yet challenging abstract painting—in the early postwar years. This book explores a Kyoto-based calligraphy group Bokujinkai, and its contribution to the Japanese, American, and European postwar avant-gardes.

Download or read book Modern Japanese Prints Statler written by Oliver Statler and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-09 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring over 100 unique prints, Modern Japanese Prints is a testament to the continuity of Japanese art and creativity. By far the most vitally creative group of artists working in Japan today, modern print-makers are truly international in appeal. Although they owe much of their heritage to the famous ukiyoe techniques of the past, they depart from their forebears in at least two important respects. In the first place, whereas in the ancient ukiyoe tradition a print was the joint production of three men— the artist-designer, the artisan who carved the blocks, and the printer—these modern artists perform all these functions themselves, thus satisfying their demands for individual artistic expression at every step of the creative process. Another distinguishing feature of this artistic school is that its inspiration is derived neither solely from its own Japanese past nor solely from the West. This book carefully traces the history of the modern print movement through detailed discussions of the life and work of twenty-nine of its most noteworthy and representative artists. It describes vicissitudes which the movement has undergone and the high artistic ideals which have motivated its members in spite of public apathy and the hostility of the traditionalists.

Download or read book Modern Japanese Painting Techniques written by Shinichi Fukui and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes it easy to create and admire wonderful Japanese-style paintings and portraits! Modern Japanese-style paintings are recognizable by their restrained use of three-dimensionality and perspective, reliance upon expressive lines, and the bold use of color to direct the viewer's eye. There are other ways that artists imbue their work with Japanese- inspired attributes, including through the skillful use of shape, texture, and facial expression. Author Shinichi Fukui introduces readers to 7 notable modern Japanese artists (Kazuo Kawakami, Chiaki Takasugi, Miho Tanaka, Ryohei Nishiyama, Jose Franky, Ryohei Murata, and Keiji Yano) who specialize in shin hanga-style portraiture of Japanese women. He then presents instructions to create 21 different original paintings--from sketching models, preparing and mixing paints, blocking in color, and rendering fine details. Using these techniques, and a bit of acrylic paint, readers will be able to create eye-catching works of art that express a timeless Japanese aesthetic.

Download or read book House and Home in Modern Japan written by Jordan Sand and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A house is a site, the bounds and focus of a community. It is also an artifact, a material extension of its occupants’ lives. This book takes the Japanese house in both senses, as site and as artifact, and explores the spaces, commodities, and conceptions of community associated with it in the modern era. As Japan modernized, the principles that had traditionally related house and family began to break down. Even where the traditional class markers surrounding the house persisted, they became vessels for new meanings, as housing was resituated in a new nexus of relations. The house as artifact and the artifacts it housed were affected in turn. The construction and ornament of houses ceased to be stable indications of their occupants’ social status, the home became a means of personal expression, and the act of dwelling was reconceived in terms of consumption. Amid the breakdown of inherited meanings and the fluidity of modern society, not only did the increased diversity of commodities lead to material elaboration of dwellings, but home itself became an object of special attention, its importance emphasized in writing, invoked in politics, and articulated in architectural design. The aim of this book is to show the features of this culture of the home as it took shape in Japan."

Download or read book Being Modern in Japan written by Elise K. Tipton and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a multi-faceted study of the development of modernism in Japan, with authors from Japan, the United States, and Australia spanning the fields of art history, social history, and literature.

Download or read book Since Meiji written by J. Thomas Rimer and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research outside Japan on the history and significance of the Japanese visual arts since the beginning of the Meiji period (1868) has been, with the exception of writings on modern and contemporary woodblock prints, a relatively unexplored area of inquiry. In recent years, however, the subject has begun to attract wide interest. As is evident from this volume, this period of roughly a century and a half produced an outpouring of art created in a bewildering number of genres and spanning a wide range of aims and accomplishments. Since Meiji is the first sustained effort in English to discuss in any depth a time when Japan, eager to join in the larger cultural developments in Europe and the U.S., went through a visual revolution. Indeed, this study of the visual arts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suggests a fresh history of modern Japanese culture--one that until now has not been widely visible or thoroughly analyzed outside that country. In this extensive collection, which includes some 190 black-and-white and color reproductions, scholars from Japan, Europe, Australia, and America explore an impressive array of subjects: painting, sculpture, prints, fashion design, crafts, and gardens. The works discussed range from early Meiji attempts to create art that referenced Western styles to postwar and contemporary avant-garde experiments. There are, in addition, substantive investigations of the cultural and intellectual background that helped stimulate the creation of new and shifting art forms, including essays on the invention of a modern artistic vocabulary in the Japanese language and the history of art criticism in Japan, as well as an extensive account of the career and significance of perhaps the best-known Japanese figure concerned with the visual arts of his period, Okakura Tenshin (1862-1913), whose Book of Tea is still widely read today. Taken together, the essays in this volume allow readers to connect ideas and images, thus bringing to light larger trends in the Japanese visual arts that have made possible the vitality, range, and striking achievements created during this turbulent and lively period.

Download or read book The Politics of Painting written by Asato Ikeda and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines a set of paintings produced in Japan during the 1930s and early 1940s that have received little scholarly attention. Asato Ikeda views the work of four prominent artists of the time—Yokoyama Taikan, Yasuda Yukihiko, Uemura Shōen, and Fujita Tsuguharu—through the lens of fascism, showing how their seemingly straightforward paintings of Mount Fuji, samurai, beautiful women, and the countryside supported the war by reinforcing a state ideology that justified violence in the name of the country’s cultural authenticity. She highlights the politics of “apolitical” art and challenges the postwar labeling of battle paintings—those depicting scenes of war and combat—as uniquely problematic. Yokoyama Taikan produced countless paintings of Mount Fuji as the embodiment of Japan’s “national body” and spirituality, in contrast to the modern West’s individualism and materialism. Yasuda Yukihiko located Japan in the Minamoto warriors of the medieval period, depicting them in the yamato-e style, which is defined as classically Japanese. Uemura Shōen sought to paint the quintessential Japanese woman, drawing on the Edo-period bijin-ga (beautiful women) genre while alluding to noh aesthetics and wartime gender expectations. For his subjects, Fujita Tsuguharu looked to the rural snow country, where, it was believed, authentic Japanese traditions could still be found. Although these artists employed different styles and favored different subjects, each maintained close ties with the state and presented what he considered to be the most representative and authentic portrayal of Japan. Throughout Ikeda takes into account the changing relationships between visual iconography/artistic style and its significance by carefully situating artworks within their specific historical and cultural moments. She reveals the global dimensions of wartime nationalist Japanese art and opens up the possibility of dialogue with scholarship on art produced in other countries around the same time, particularly Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Politics of Painting will be welcomed by those interested in modern Japanese art and visual culture, and war art and fascism. Its analysis of painters and painting within larger currents in intellectual history will attract scholars of modern Japanese and East Asian studies.

Download or read book Collecting Modern Japanese Prints written by Norman Tolman and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting Modern Japanese Prints is an authoritative guide to the contemporary Japanese art form of printmaking Authors, Mary and Norman Tolman have been involved with modern Japanese prints on every level for the past thirty years. They number among their close friends a great many contemporary Japanese printmakers. This Japanese print book contains several bodies of information. An introductory essay puts Japanese prints into historical perspective and gives a brief outline of techniques. All of the prints are in full color, in as large a format as possible, so that the art lover can savor the details of each work.

Download or read book Sat Haruo and Modern Japanese Literature written by Charles Exley and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Satō Haruo and Modern Japanese Literature, Charles Exley offers the first comprehensive examination of Satō’s literary oeuvre from the 1910s through the 1930s. The study examines the ways in which selected novels and short stories interact with cultural discourses of the time, including the fantastic, the discourse on melancholy and mental illness, detective fiction and early film, colonial encounter and critique of civilization, and hysteria and psychoanalysis. Exley’s alignment of Satō’s fictional work with its cultural and historical context illustrates the complex ways in which Satō’s aesthetic projections derived from and comment on Japan’s experience with modernization during the twentieth century.

Download or read book Negotiating Censorship in Modern Japan written by Rachael Hutchinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-21 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Censorship in Japan has seen many changes over the last 150 years and each successive system of rule has possessed its own censorship laws, regulations, and methods of enforcement. Yet what has remained constant through these many upheavals has been the process of negotiation between censor and artist that can be seen across the cultural media of modern society. By exploring censorship in a number of different Japanese art forms – from popular music and kabuki performance through to fiction, poetry and film – across a range of historical periods, this book provides a striking picture of the pervasiveness and strength of Japanese censorship across a range of media; the similar tactics used by artists of different media to negotiate censorship boundaries; and how censors from different systems and time periods face many of the same problems and questions in their work. The essays in this collection highlight the complexities of the censorship process by investigating the responsibilities and choices of all four groups – artists, censors, audience and ideologues – in a wide range of case studies. The contributors shift the focus away from top-down suppression, towards the more complex negotiations involved in the many stages of an artistic work, all of which involve movement within boundaries, as well as testing of those boundaries, on the part of both artist and censor. Taken together, the essays in this book demonstrate that censorship at every stage involves an act of human judgment, in a context determined by political, economic and ideological factors. This book and its case studies provide a fascinating insight into the dynamics of censorship and how these operate on both people and texts. As such, it will be of great interest to students and scholars interested in Japanese studies, Japanese culture, society and history, and media studies more generally.

Download or read book Modernism and Japanese Culture written by R. Starrs and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-10-12 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth and comprehensive account of the complex history of Japanese modernism from the mid-19th century 'opening to the West' until the 21st century globalized world of 'postmodernism.' Its concept of modernism encompasses not just the aesthetic avant-garde but a wide spectrum of social, political and cultural phenomena.

Download or read book Guide to Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints written by Helen Merritt and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[An] impressive volume, with a valuable amount of information not otherwise available in one source." --Choice Companion volume to Merritt's Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints. This volume is a reference work that is both comprehensive and rigorously chronological.

Download or read book Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism written by Erin Schoneveld and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism examines the most significant Japanese art and literary magazine of the early twentieth century, Shirakaba (White Birch, 1910–1923). In this volume Erin Schoneveld explores the fluid relationship that existed between different types of modern visual media, exhibition formats, and artistic practices embraced by the Shirakaba-ha (White Birch Society). Schoneveld provides a new comparative framework for understanding how the avant-garde pursuit of individuality during Japan’s Taishō period stood in opposition to state-sponsored modernism and how this played out in the emerging media of art magazines. This book analyzes key moments in modern Japanese art and intellectual history by focusing on the artists most closely affiliated with Shirakaba, including Takamura Kōtarō, Umehara Ryūzaburō, and Kishida Ryūsei, who selectively engaged with and transformed modernist idioms of individualism and self-expression to create a new artistic style that gave visual form to their own subjective reality. Drawing upon archival research that includes numerous articles, images, and exhibitions reviews from Shirakaba, as well as a complete translation of Yanagi Sōetsu’s seminal essay, “The Revolutionary Artist” (Kakumei no gaka), Schoneveld demonstrates that, contrary to the received narrative that posits Japanese modernism as merely derivative, the debate around modernism among Japan’s early avant-garde was lively, contested, and self-reflexive.

Download or read book Performing Nation written by Doris Croissant and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uniquely covering literary, visual and performative expressions of culture, this volume aims to correlate the conjunctions of nation building, gender and representation in late 19th and early 20th century China and Japan. Focusing on gender formation, the chapters explore the changing constructs of masculinities and femininities in China and Japan from the early modern up to the 1930s. Chapters focus on the dynamism that links the remodeling of traditional arts and media to the political and cultural power relations between China, Japan, and the Western world. A true tribute to multidisciplinary studies.