Japanese Art

KUNIYOSHI +: Design and Entertainment in Japanese Woodblock Prints / KUNIYOSHI +. Design und Entertainment im japanischen Farbholzschnitt, by Mio Wakita-Elis and Johannes Wieninger, edited by Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Mio Wakita-Elis, and Johannes Wieninger.
MAK/Verlag für moderne Kunst, Vienna 2019

"Kawanabe Kyôsai and Aesop’s Fables: Experiments and New Artistic Dimensions in the 1870s," Ukiyo-e Art, vol. 178, Tokyo: International Ukiyo-e Society, July 2019, 5-33.

「河鍋暁斎とイソップ物語 ― 1870年代における新たな試みと展開」『浮世絵芸術』178号、国際浮世絵学会、2019年7月、5-33頁。

Throughout the 1870s Kawanabe Kyôsai produced numerous Aesop’s Fables-related images in various media. These works include: 23 illustrations in the Tsûzoku Isoppu monogatari of 1873; 12 prints (containing 24 images) in the polychrome woodblock series Isoho monogatari no uchi published in December 1873 (Meiji 6) and in January 1875 (Meiji 8); three prints in his Kyôsai rakuga polychrome woodblock series published in 1875 (Meiji 7); illustrations for a textbook Shûshin setsuyaku dated ca. 1878 (Meiji 11), which was followed by a group of 14 paintings. In 1881 (Meiji 14) he returned to textbook illustration production with images published in the Shôgaku shûshinsho.

Kyôsai changed the “kyô” character in his name from 狂斎 to 暁斎 the year after his 1870 (Meiji 3) arrest for a painting which the authority claimed to be insulting an important governmental official. This character change was as if to mark a new start in his career. It would not be an overstatement to say that he walked side by side with Aesop’s Fables for the next close to decade, as he established his fame through successes both in Japan and overseas by the beginning of the 1880s. Kyôsai seems to have discerned the huge potential for expanding his own painterly world in this classic that was at once foreign, and at the same time, one with a close affinity to his own familiar cultural realm.

The Thomas James English translation of Aesop’s Fables of 1848 was one of the source works for Tsûzoku Isoppu monogatari. James’ book includes more than 100 woodcut illustrations, which became an important pictorial model of Western pictures for Kyôsai. His two Aesop’s Fables polychrome print series show Kyôsai adding a comic edge to fable imagery, thus revealing how he internalized this rich trove of foreign source material by bringing it into his own creative realm. Aesop’s Fables, particularly the episode of “The Vain Jackdaw”, and Kyôsai’s painting series can be seen as playing a major role in Kyôsai’s establishment of the crow imagery that would become extremely important in his career and oeuvre.

Very few previous studies have organized the entirety of Kyôsai’s Aesop’s Fables-related works and positioned them within his oeuvre. This article includes an examination of the series of paintings on these themes that have not yet been fully studied as it considers three focal issues within the role played by Aesop’s Fables in Kyôsai’s maturation as a painter, namely, how he studied and used Western book illustrations, created comic images of the fables, and established his own crow pictorial theme.

This is the English manuscript written in 2014 for my French article, “En embrassant une perspective de Oura Nobuyuki, et Culture et Politique des annees 1980 au Japon,” published in online journal Implications Philosophiques in August 2017 (http://www.implications-philosophiques.org/actualite/une/culture-et-politique-au-japon/).

In Japan, English-language usage in the public sphere, from advertising through popular music, general media, and signage runs a gamut of uses and accuracies from the intentional and unintentional misuse, to the irreverent and the occasional sublime. This paper sets out to explore and record the use of English in the naming of Japanese pop and rock groups. The central thesis of this essay being that Japanese pop and rock group names falls into five distinct categories or phenomena: meaningless names using language other than Japanese, arbitrary names from second languages, bastardised 'other' language derivatives, Romanised Japanese, and mixed Japanese and other language. This grouping ignores those names rendered in kan-ji, which although acknowledged, are not specifically within the scope of this research. By deconstructing and analysing this use, it is hoped to contribute to discourse in the fields of both culture (cultural appropriation), and language (language use and accuracy).

Japan in Australia is a work of cultural history that focuses on context and connection between two nations. It examines how Japan has been imagined, represented and experienced in the Australian context through a variety of settings, historical periods and circumstances.

Beginning with the first recorded contacts between Australians and Japanese in the nineteenth century, the chapters focus on ‘people to people’ narratives and the myriad multi-dimensional ways the two countries are interconnected: from sporting diplomacy to woodblock printing, from artistic metaphors to iconic pop imagery, from the tragedy of war to engagement in peace movements, from technology transfer to community arts. Tracing the trajectory of this 150-year relationship provides an example of how history can turn from fear, enmity and misunderstanding through war, foreign encroachment and the legacy of conflict, to close and intimate connections that result in cultural enrichment and diversification.

This book explores notions of Australia and ‘Australianness’ and Japan and ‘Japanessness’, to better reflect on the cultural fusion that is contemporary Australia and build the narrative of the Japan-Australia relationship. It will be of interest to academics in the field of Asian, Japanese and Japanese-Pacific studies.

This contribution reconsiders Vittorio Pica's criticism on Japanese art and its consequences in fin-de-siècle artistic taste and cultural debate in Italy. Pica was among the first critics to show a relevant interest in Japanese culture, under the influence of French criticism and especially of the Goncourt brothers. Thanks to primary unpublished sources and a new approach to his writings of literary tradition, this paper intends to recast the trans-medial and inter-medial fortune of Japonisme in Italy, too, and its legacy between the ongoing artistic production and contemporary collecting taste, with a special concern for modern painting, decoration and industrial arts.

It is a well-known fact that in western theatre avant-gardist painters got involved in theatrical enterprises since the first two decades of the th century, contributing to the modernist stage. Like in the West, innovative stage techniques and designs were first applied to the traditional stage, in Japan in kabuki, where the engagement of painters, not professionally affiliated with the theatre commenced at the turn to th century. Painting kabuki scenery had been the job of professional stage painters affiliated with the theatre for centuries. The involvement of professional painters in it, had been the first step towards the development of what was later called the modern stage. The essay presents the early history of Western-influenced Japanese painters and their contribution to kabuki scenery. This eventually led to the establishment of the new artistic profession of stage designerbutai schika , unknown to Japanese theatre until the end of World War I.

This chapter centers on the period from 1290 to the 1350s. Building on recent iconographic and textual discoveries, it explores the participation of Monkan 文観 (1278–1357), a second-generation disciple of Eison 叡尊 (1201–90), in the Mañjuśrī cult alongside his twofold biographical construction as an orthodox Shingon and Ritsu monk and as a heretical tantric practitioner. I argue that many continuities between the activities of Monkan and those of Eison and his leading first-generation disciples, including their shared emphasis on the Mañjuśrī cult, have been obscured by sensationalized portrayals of Monkan and the supposed aberrant sexual rituals of the “Tachikawa cult.” While showing how distortion itself becomes part of the historical record, this chapter highlights the blurred lines between Ritsu and Shingon, the heterodox and orthodox, and the public and private in Monkan’s activities and the biographical material we use to assess those activities.