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Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions
THE DOUBLE SCREEN: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting.
FRUITFUL SITES: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China.
JAPONISME COMES TO AMERICA: The Japanese Impact on Graphic Arts 1876-1925.
Selections from the Print Edition
CONTEMPORARY ART IN ASIA: Traditions/Tensions. Apinan Poshyananda, Thomas McEvilley, Geeta Kapur, Jim Supangkat, Marian Pastor Roces and Jae-Ryung Roe. Harry N Abrams, Inc., New York. 240pp. 222 illustrations, 190 in colour. £37.95/$49.50. Hardback. ISBN 0-8109-6331-0.
From EAR Vol IV No 4
The travelling exhibition which accompanies this important albeit slim volume has been the subject of more informal discussion at art gatherings than any other show of the genre in recent years. More pertinently, in the context of this issue of EAR on Chinese art in the 1990s, the collection of essays takes forward a debate that features so prominently in the world of contemporary Chinese practice.
A key feature shared across borders is the tension between the traditional and the modern and how it is producing innovative art -- when it's not spewing forth rubbish. The artists featured in the exhibition, which began at The Asia Society in New York in October 1996 and currently is on tour, represent nearly all that is most dazzling if not surprising in contemporary Asian art from the countries surveyed -- India, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand.
This, at least, is our hope because we are dependent here on the individual assessments offered by the essayists, art historians and critics in their own countries or, in the case of McEvilley, based in the West. Vishakha Desai, director of galleries at The Asia Society, in the foreword explains the slash in the title between the terms 'traditions' and 'tensions' is intended to acknowledge the dynamic forces at work. She is at one with Apinan Poshyananda, the curator and contributor from Thailand, who points out what a slippery slope a lazy juxtaposition between tradition and tension can be.
Desai is at pains to point out to potential detractors that not only is the ambiguity deliberate but that the show and the book are not intended to define or determine trends or box Asia or its parts. The essays hold up well the argument that Asian art defies compartmentalisation, as it nearly always has done when viewed outside the contexts of colonial histories, Orientalism or eurocentrism. To reinforce the argument, the essays are presented to the reader without a thematic or geographical arrangement. Instead, the essays and the art they introduce deal more with visual or conceptual commonalities.
This is a device that ought to rescue the book from any criticism, usually inevitable in exercises of this sort, that its choice of countries has been all too limiting or arbitrary. Why choose India and not Pakistan or Bangladesh, the latter being the inheritor of one of the richest artistic traditions on the subcontinent? Why take Thailand and not Vietnam?
These are questions likely to be asked, especially in view of the sweeping title of the show and the book, but not by EAR. Eastern Art Report is satisfied that the book renders a tremendous service, it is hugely entertaining, refreshing in its scholastic approach and worth all moments spent absorbing its message. Which itself is that there isn't a single message to be gleaned from the contemporary scene in Asia. Not yet at least, and perhaps not for a very long time. -- Sajid Rizvi.
THE DOUBLE SCREEN: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting. Wu Hung. Reaktion Books Ltd, London. 296pp. 198 illustrations, 30 in colour. £14.95. Softback. ISBN 0-948462-92-2
Professor Wu Hung has presented us with a stimulating discussion on the screen, that omnipresent piece of furniture or architectural prop in China and most of East Asia. Although focused on China, Hung has within his sights the many uses to which the screen has been put through the millennia -- as a divider of spaces and defender of cultural conventions, an almost irresistible surface for painting and a recurrent motif in art.
Wu Hung is the Harrie A Vandersteppen Distinguished Service Professor of Chinese Art History in the Department of Art and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilisations at the University of Chicago. Before that he spent about five years at the Palace Museum in Beijing, where no doubt he had plenty of opportunities to research the subject.
Authoritative books that go beyond the surface of the painting are few and far between. Professor Wu's approach opens up new possibilities. He presents and then examines the social context of Chinese painting, in particular the screen, both as a material product and as a device for further forays into the complexities of the culture that produced it. In that sense he complements and in certain cases takes forward the work of previous visitors to the arena, including Michael Sullivan, author of a pioneering essay on Early Chinese Screen Painting in a 1965 issue of Artibus Asiae.
The origins of the screen remain shielded from us all, but Wu Hung cites references in the Han period (206 BC-AD 220). This must have been much after its evolution from a simple ping, or shield, because by then the royal household had found a political use for the screen. As related in Li Chi's Book of Rites, the emperor sat in front of the screen and faced south while presiding over a formal audience -- a practice that continued into the last imperial household this century.
Because most screens have two sides, their role is defined by the images and decoration which in turn designate the areas that they divide. But Wu Hung takes issue with other art specialists' contention that the painted screen, with the handscroll and fresco, was one of the three most important forms of painting in China until its decline in the 10th century. Instead, he argues, there seems to have been no tradition of screen painting. 'Very likely the screen gained its independence during the Han and post-Han (periods), when it gradually separated itself from other types of ritual paraphernalia and luxury goods, and finally redefined itself as a kind of framed painting.'
This may have been the time, he argues, when the screen may have become the object one faced to admire, rather than turned one's back on or employed for mundane domestic purposes. Thereonward the screen evolved 'as an art object (requiring) its own space and place' and as a painting medium that demanded 'its framed surface to be recognised as an indispensable element in artistic creation.'
This is refreshing material, but Wu Hung delves deeper into the twin definitions of a traditional painting as a pictorial medium and as a pictorial representation. A more comprehensive albeit complex understanding of traditional Chinese painting, he concludes, may be possible at the conjunction of those two definitions. But he hopes that such a meeting point will be reached not through only verbal analysis but also through what he calls metapictures -- pictures which define what pictures are 'to stage, as it were, the 'self-knowledge' of pictures.'
The exhaustive references and bibliography reveal the breadth of Wu Hung's scholarship, and there are detailed descriptions of about 200 illustrations. But the book hurts for lack of an index. Since this is only the first edition of a fascinating survey demanding to be shared across cultures and disciplines, no doubt this need can be fulfilled in later editions.--Sajid Rizvi.
FRUITFUL SITES: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China. Craig Clunas. Reaktion Books Ltd. London. 240pp. 48 illustrations, 18 in colour. £14.95. Softback. ISBN 0-948462-88-4.
As a surveyor of important real estate, Craig Clunas has placed himself in the unlikely spot of a deconstructionist. This is more than welcome, as his addition to the Envisioning Asia series from Reaktion Books soon sets out to demonstrate. Ming Dynasty Chinese took their gardens seriously in more ways than European, Mughal or Persian patrons ever revealed they imagined.
Their botanical interests happily cross-fertilised and in turn were enriched by other finer pursuits of the society and culture that flourished from around 1450 to 1650.
The gardens figure in a great deal of early Chinese writing, as do their architecture and design, their role in society and their place alongside other aspects of China's material culture. In undertaking to examine the great body of literature, Clunas, formerly curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum who teaches at the University of Sussex, has concentrated on books, paintings, maps and other illustrations related to one of the more prosperous centres of Ming power, the lower Yangtze Valley region of Jiangnan, especially the city of Suzhou.
Although not the capital of the empire, Suzhou at the time reached new heights/lows of luxury, consumption and excess that are now available only to a selected few of the beneficiaries of China's emergent market economy. Ming Chinese measured their own and their social adversaries' true worth in the number of mulberry trees and landscape features of gardens, in about the same way that modern disciples of neo-materialism swear by purpose-built barbecues and bars by the poolside or lawns, double-glazing or car registration dates. Here Clunas offers absorbing accounts of the issues in land ownership at the time and a startling range of aesthetic considerations, ideas about the garden and actual practices and cultural constructs. Although the garden features in contexts as far apart as property ownership, social status, art and botany, he points out that these were not the only points of reference. He avoids going too far down the beaten path of the cosmological or holistic connections, but takes apart some of the earlier narratives that, we now discover, have been based on flimsy evidence. As he suggests, many other areas remain uncharted while some await closer scrutiny, perhaps a corrective treatment similar to that offered in this ground-breaking work by Clunas.--Sajid Rizvi.
JAPONISME COMES TO AMERICA: The Japanese Impact on Graphic Arts 1876-1925. By Julia Meech and Gabriel P Weisburg. Harry N Abrams Inc., New York. 256pp. $45.00. Hardback. ISBN 0-8109-3501-5.
The word Japonisme was first coined in 19th century France. The term defined the taste for things Japanese and is most often associated with 19th century European art -- French art in particular. Phillip Dennis Cate, director of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, New Brunswick, New Jersey, introduces Japonisme Comes to America with this explanation. The book is published in conjunction with the exhibition which moved from the Zimmerli Museum to the Setagaya Museum in Tokyo (20 December 1990-20 January, 1991) and is a sequel to the exhibition, Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on French Art, 1854-1910, held in 1975.
Cate asserts that in the ensuing 15 years a great deal of research and a number of important exhibitions have resulted in substantially greater knowledge and a more general awareness of Japan's pervasive effect on the style, content, technique and philosophy of the arts in Europe and the United States since 1854. This was the year that Commodore Matthew C Perry and his American fleet, with a show of force, convinced Japan to sign diplomatic agreements with the United States.
"With the opening of Yokohama in 1859, Japan, its art, and its culture became more readily accessible and intelligible to the West for the first time in almost two hundred and fifty years. This was, of course, to have a major impact on the world -- politically, economically, and artistically," says Cate. Consisting of an exhibition of works on paper -- prints, posters, watercolours, drawings and photographs -- by American graphic artists inspired by Japan, there is a huge variation of style on view in Japonisme Comes to America, something to please everyone, judging by the book's illustrations.
Japanese art, according to Phillip Cate, presented to Americans a new aesthetics which was also combined with craft and function. It was this combination that was most often attractive to American graphic artists who became not only some of Japanese art's most dedicated practitioners but also Japonisme's most ardent advocates. The glossy book is co-authored by Julia Meech, who is the principal organiser of the exhibition, and Gabriel P Weisberg, art history teacher at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Weisberg reports that when the Japanese government presented to Commodore Perry on behalf of the people and president of the United States a number of lacquers, porcelains, fabrics, fans and books, Americans in general underestimated their artistic value. "Only a few of the pieces were placed on public display, in the White House and elsewhere in Washington. Few could imagine that these objects of exquisite craftsmanship, with their refined sensibility and taste, would gradually affect the American sense of artistry. However, once stimulated by Japonisme, America began to compete with continental Europe to collect Japanese objects and to assimilate Japanese aesthetic concepts."
By the late 1880s, this had encouraged new levels of western inventiveness, and American designers, printmakers and artists such as John la Farge [who married Matthew Perry's granddaughter] enthusiastically reacted to the thousands of ukiyo-e ["picture of the floating world"] prints and decorative arts that had been imported from Japan. Initially, the United States became familiar with Japanese culture and artefacts through French and English reports and collections.
As the taste for Japonisme spread, America soon competed with European countries for the best goods. It was not until well after the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876, however, that Japonisme swept the United States and reached a broad public audience. Through samples of individual objects on view at the exhibition, Americans could see for themselves how European industrialists were responding to Japanese motifs in ceramics and other decorative art pieces.
Once convinced of the works' validity and direction, Americans became even more willing to use Japanese motifs in their own works. Japonisme reached a crescendo in the United States and Europe by the late 1880s and 1890s, and many people travelled to Japan to learn more about the country. Not only were commercial ties cemented and private American collections enriched, but the popular craze also continued to grow as Japanese objects became increasingly available. Through photography, journals and periodicals the American public were bombarded with images of Japan. By 1900 so many books and articles had been published on the Far East that few with any interest in culture could have remained oblivious to the seduction of Japanese civilisation.
Julia Meech looks into the reasons for the rise of Japonisme in America at the turn of the century. She explains that primarily it was new, which is to say 'exotic'. In addition, at the instigation of influential interior decorators such as Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) in New York, Japanese art came to be fashionable, as people with money began to buy it and set the trend. After 1900, the American public was greatly assisted in its perception of Japan by two factors: Japan's new dominance as a major world power; and Japan's increasingly important representation at world fairs, such as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis in 1904. Many American photographers at the turn of the century were influenced by the Japanese aesthetic of simplicity, abstraction, evocative empty space, even narrow vertical formats. Japanese art helped them to see naturalistic objects in a new light. Meech notes that the influence of French and British Japonisme, as well as the influence of Japanese art itself, is an important factor in this complex story. Further complicating the picture are the effects of East-West interaction: as Japanese artists and illustrators were exposed to western naturalism, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish national boundaries.
The American encounter with Japan occurred at a propitious time when there was a great longing both in Japan and in the West for the 'other,' the distant shore. "Japan was mysterious in part because of the language barrier. Few foreigners could be aware of the rich inner life and intellectual heritage of the Japanese. Even those who lived in Japan were often loath to acknowledge evidence of modernisation," says Meech. She avers that Japonisme reinforced the romantic ideals of numerous artists at the turn of the century. For others it served as a catalyst in the exploration of modernist aesthetics. Such was and is today Japan's ironic enticement to the West. -- Maggie James
