Art History & Archaeology
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Item Between Body and Spirit: Indian Influences on Modern Japanese Art(2024) Chiu, Chao Chi; Volk, Alicia; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation contributes to ongoing examinations on modern transcultural exchanges between Japan and other Asian countries in the field of Japanese art by investigating the influence of India on itinerant Japanese artists throughout the twentieth century. In doing so, it challenges prevailing assumptions that Japanese artistic engagement with foreign culturesoperated entirely within an imperialistic context. Among the many Asian countries that served as sources of artistic inspiration for Japan, India stood out from the rest because of its esteemed spirituality in the eyes of Japanese intellectuals. Contemporary Japanese writings emphasized India’s importance as the birth place of Buddhism and framed the South Asian country as a bastion on Asian spiritual fortitude against the influx of Western materialism. Consequently, India also attracted Buddhist artists across Japan to visit its ancient temples and museums to its art. While these Japanese abroad expressed their admiration towards India’s religiosity and adherence to keeping its traditions alive, they also fantasized about the exoticism and corporeality embodied in Indian art and contemporary locals. Such fantasies were visualized intheir works in visual icons such as half-nude females with elaborate poses, Buddhist figures, including the Buddha himself, with exaggerated Indian ethnic features, and tropical plants and animals representing a long-lost past. I argue that Japanese adaption of Indian styles and themes into their art was characterized by a precarious harmony between spiritual and corporeal elements in the artist works. Furthermore, each artist defined “spirituality” and “corporeality” in distinct way, which led to diverse approaches. My dissertation revolved around four artists as case studies: Arai Kanpō, Nōsu Kōsetsu, Ishizaki Kōyō, and Sugimoto Tetsurō. By examining the careers, writings, and artworks of each artist, I will highlight how Japanese artists interpreted Indian materials and utilized them to create unconventional works. Furthermore, I would contextualize these artists’ work in the development of Japanese perspectives toward India throughout the twentieth century, expressed through contemporary writings that praised India for its spiritual fortitude but also denigrated them as an inferior Asian country. Examining the artists’ life and works in connection to changing perspectives towards India, Buddhism, and religious art in modern society, this dissertation explores the nuances of Japan’s artistic interaction with foreign materials beyond the context of colonialism and imperialism.Item Made Visible: Women Artists and the Performance of Femininity in Modern Japanese Art, 1900-1930(2024) Wies, Lillian T; Volk, Alicia; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation offers a new framework for understanding individual Japanese women artists’ work and the systems of gender oppression that characterized modern Japanese art. It does so by engaging with the visualization of Japanese women artists in the early twentieth century. In response to societal anxiety about the increase of women artists in the perceived male domain of the professional art world, women artists were pressured to conform to standards of normative femininity. Those standards, I argue, can be united under a single archetype, the “female artist,” which came to dominate the visual representation and social imagining of women artists. This study offers a nuanced investigation into the reciprocal relationship between women artists and the “female artist” by focusing on four establishment women painters: Kajiwara Hisako, Shima Seien, Yoshida Fujio, and Kametaka Fumiko. Chapter One establishes the ideological grounding that defined women artists by their gender and pressured them to perform hegemonic femininity, thereby creating the marginalized “female artist” archetype. Chapter Two explores the “female artist” as a visual type, established through photographic reproductions of women artists in women’s magazines and by a painted representation of the type by Kajiwara Hisako. The chapter evaluates the complex ways women artists participated in the construction of the visual type, arguing that women made micro-adjustments to the type that valorized women’s artistic skill even as they upheld oppressive gender ideals. Chapter Three details Shima Seien’s use of self-portraiture to protest the dehumanizing elements of the “female artist” archetype and assert an alternative vision of herself as an artist and individual. Chapter Four considers Yoshida Fujio’s embrace of the “female artist” as part of a journey towards personal and artistic self-determination. The Coda uses the case study of Kametaka Fumiko and the false attribution of her self-portrait, Hanare yuku kokoro, to her deceased husband, Watanabe Yohei, to reflect on how the “female artist” archetype continues to diminish women artists’ position within scholarship. The goal of this study is to make visible the diverse ways modern Japanese women artists negotiated systemic gender discrimination in an effort to recover a sense of their agency and individuality.Item Evolution and Eternity in the Landscape of Defeat: Yokoyama Taikan and Mt. Fuji(2023) Mastrandrea, Magdalena; Volk, Alicia; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The end of the Fifteen Year War in August 1945 abruptly dismantled the ideology of art in service of the empire that established Japanese painters had worked under for over a decade. During this time, Yokoyama Taikan, a figurehead of the Nihonga painting genre who infamously called on artists to support the war effort, displayed hyper-nationalist paintings of Mt. Fuji, an icon synonymous with the nation of Japan. As droves of American Occupiers entered the country following Japan’s surrender, artists like Taikan quickly began to adjust their public image to avoid consequences. Yet only two years later, Taikan painted and displayed Landscape of the Four Seasons, an 88-foot-long scroll painting progressing through scenes of mountains, forests, rivers, and most notably, beginning with Mt. Fuji. Although painted in the midst of the Allied Occupation of Japan, when all Japanese media was subjected to strict censorship, Taikan’s use of Fuji at the beginning of this composition blatantly recalls his wartime paintings of the mountain. Despite this, he successfully exhibited Landscape of Four Seasons at the 1947 Japan Visual Arts Academy exhibition, or Inten, the first full-scale Inten since Japan’s surrender. In my analysis of this image, I begin by introducing compositionally similar Mt. Fuji paintings from before the war’s end to establish Taikan as a vehemently nationalistic artist who glorified the empire in the image of Fuji. Through examining the iconography and display of Landscape of the Four Seasons, painted in the dramatically shifted political climate of 1947, I argue that the image of Mt. Fuji, only recently associated with extreme nationalism and militarism, evolved rapidly after Japan’s surrender into a symbol of hope and resilience. The idealistic, symbolic nature of Nihonga painting allowed Taikan to exploit Fuji’s new meaning in defense of his wartime endeavors. Therefore, his Occupation era landscapes of the exact same subject matter evaded suspicion. Landscape of the Four Seasons is evidence of this phenomenon and of Taikan’s full reentry into the mainstream Japanese art world because of its display in the Inten, where it attracted significant attention. In addressing this, I explore the evolution of Mt. Fuji as an icon in the eyes of the Japanese and Americans alike, defining its new symbolism in the postwar period.Item Competing Constructivisms: Modern Architecture and Design in Japan and Korea, c. 1925-1940(2015) Kim, Suzie; Mansbach, Steven A.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on a set of dynamic Japanese and Korean architects and artists who, during the interwar period, actively adopted and transformed the principles of Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and International Architecture into their own artistic style. This study provides the first comprehensive study of the multifaceted connections between Europe, Japan, and Korea to explore the richness of this relatively underrepresented, but decisive, modern aesthetic impulse. Prior to and during the period of the activities of the two major architectural groups in Japan, Bunriha Kenchikukai (1920-1928) and the Sousha (1923-1932), Yamaguchi Bunzo (1902-1978), the leader of the Sousha, demonstrated a strong commitment to Marxism and promoted gorishugi kenchiku (rationalist architecture), which acted on his vision of social transformation through a rationalist and functional approach to architectural design. In contrast, Yamawaki Iwao (1898-1987) enjoyed a rather socially neutral perspective of Constructivism and searched for a synthesis between the principles of the Bauhaus style and traditional Japanese interior designs of private houses. Furniture designer Kurata Chikatada (1895-1966), the leader of Keiji Kobo (1928-1940), employed the idea of standardization derived from the Bauhaus workshops, and tried to find a way to mass-produce handcrafts. Whereas Yamaguchi, Yamawaki, and Kurata used Constructivism to open up a wide field of modernist opportunity and inventiveness, Korean architects and artists, who worked under circumstances defined mostly by the colonial status of the nation, embraced the international movement only in a rather informative and redemptive way--a "local" way to assert a suppressed national dynamism. The first generation of Korean architects, which included Park Gil-ryong (1898-1943) and Park Dong-jin (1899-1981), suggested a way to incorporate the qualities of Constructivist style into Korean homes. Korean artists Lee Sun-seok (1905-1986) and Yoo Youngkuk (1916-2002), who studied in Tokyo during the 1930s, adapted the Constructivist style to suit the local customs and artistic conventions of Korea after they returned to their homeland. This comparative study will provide new insights into the history of modern architecture and design in Japan and Korea and a reassessment of the significance of these architects and designers who, from the mid-1920s, contributed to make Constructivism internationally recognized.Item Tradition Revitalized: The Chinese Painting Research Society of Republican Beijing(2014) Zhang, Jingmin; Kuo, Jason; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1920 a group of traditional artists in Beijing formed the Chinese Painting Research Society, an art institution that enormously influenced Chinese art in the twentieth century. This dissertation locates this society within contemporary social, historical, and cultural trends and argues that its use of traditional Chinese art, antiquities, and even archaeology to counter Western art influence was part of a larger search for national and cultural identity. The first part of the dissertation focuses on the historical and theoretical foundations of the society. The second part sets the artistic activities of the group, including their exhibitions and journals, against contemporary cultural backdrops. The study accomplishes a number of goals. First, it sorts out the historical facts of this overlooked society in a way that reintroduces it to art historical scholarship. Second, it demonstrates that the seemingly conservative stance of the society was just a way to secure its standing and guard its goals. Third, it establishes the group's importance to the field of modern Chinese art. Finally, by thoroughly examining the society and its accomplishments, this dissertation shows that the traditional artistic approach championed by the society is worth scholarly attention, and that the modernization of Chinese painting occurred not only in Chinese-Western synthesis. Innovation within tradition was equally viable.Item Beyond Nationalism: The Work of Xu Jianbai in Maoist China, 1949 - 1979(2012) Gent, Madeline Lilia; Kuo, Jason; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Beyond Nationalism: The Work of Xu Jianbai in Maoist China, 1949-1979, examines the life and work of the contemporary Chinese painter Xu Jianbai (1925 - ) as an access point to reconsider Chinese art under the period of Mao Zedong as a more complex and varied narrative than what has been relayed by traditional scholarship. The project considers the biography of the artist, especially her training under Lin Fengmian and in the United States and later persecution, as a key component to understanding her choice of style and subject matter. In the thesis, I argue for a more inclusive history of Chinese painting from this era. Paintings by artists like Xu Jianbai, which one might dismiss as non-representative of art at the time, are actually an entry point into a broader understanding of the divisive and varied culture and politics in China under the dictatorship of Mao Zedong.