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- Convenors:
-
Nora Usanov-Geissler
(Freie Universität Berlin)
Annegret Bergmann (Ritsumeikan University)
Antje Papist-Matsuo (Freie Universität Berlin)
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- Discussant:
-
Anton Schweizer
(Tulane University)
- Stream:
- Visual Arts
- Location:
- Torre B, Piso 5, Auditório 3
- Sessions:
- Thursday 31 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
In the Momoyama era, art production flourished in a situation of eco-political and socio-religious interests and foreign exchanges. The panel will consider some of its innovative artworks, regarding both their production contexts and historiographic approaches to them.
Long Abstract:
The Momoyama era can be characterized by ample domestic socio-political vicissitudes and transcultural exchanges. Art production responded to these stipulations by way of innovative formats, materials, techniques, and motifs, which are generally considered to be creative reflections of structural shifts. The panel aims at highlighting the active agency of Japanese artists and patrons in the 16th and 17th centuries by questioning established narratives of "foreign influences" in art historical research.
At the turn of the 16th century, concurrent negotiations of a Japanese identity on multiple socio-cultural levels became necessary. First of all, as self-concepts to distinguish the Japanese from the "foreign". While exchanges with China and Korea are traceable to ancient times, the new commerce with the Europeans entailed innovative items, ideologies and more. Secondly, in the course of the political formation of a central government, political and cultural topographies were rearranged.
In the field of aesthetics, the connoisseurship in arts from the Asian mainland was still recognized as characteristic of the elite. In contrast, innovative European-style items and artefacts were much appreciated and sought after by a broader public. Nevertheless, artistic images of the foreign, represented in artefacts of this era, often contradicted actual contemporaneous political measures against the Asian mainland and the Europeans respectively.
The case studies in this panel will shed light on three positions: In folding screen paintings, a capital-based fashion for European items emerges through ambitious images, pictorially detaching the European foreigners from the inner circle of Miyako. On the other hand, it will be discussed how elite Japanese buyers of tea ceramics deliberately turned to aesthetic principles from Korea and initiated transformations in traditional value systems. Thirdly, in the export lacquer ware market, appropriations answered to European demands, thereby distinguishing foreign and domestic values, while at the same time the traditional system of lacquerwork appointment to the elite transformed into one of freely ordered lacquerware.
The papers discuss the conditions of production and the contexts of diverse art forms in the Momoyama era. They also aim to review their research histories in order to reflect current perspectives and receptions of transcultural exchanges.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 31 August, 2017, -Nora Usanov-Geissler (Freie Universität Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyses pictorial negotiations of identities in nanban byōbu paintings. It focusses on their spatial setting in the littoral periphery as opposed to the capital, and examines how this marginal position is mirrored in art historical narratives.
Paper long abstract:
The Momoyama era with its intertwined political and cultural changes is well reflected in research with diverse disciplinary focusses in and outside Japan. Visual sources like fūzokuga folding screens from the 16th and 17th centuries have often been called upon for arguments in those studies. Especially details of the so-called nanban byōbu are regularly referred to, in particular their colorful depictions of European merchants arriving on the Japanese coast. In recent research, these images have often been conceived as factographic event-pictures which document trade relations and the Christian mission in the littoral periphery, insinuating that the nanban byōbu artists actually had and visualized first hand transcultural experiences. But despite the increase of merged art forms for export in the Momoyama-era, nanban byōbu were exclusively produced for Japanese connoisseurs and were neither sold to foreign merchants nor exported as diplomatic gifts. Consequently, the objectives of their pictorial negotiations were intentionally domestic.
By questioning how nanban byōbu reflect on upheavals in the sociocultural topography of the realm in the making and on issues of prestige concerning its centers and margins, the paper aims at adding a new perspective to the academic discussions of the screen paintings. It outlines processes of mobility and appropriation within Japan which led to the construction of fancy nanban-narratives in the 1590s: Capital-based, topical imageries of Europeans which were somewhat detached from Hideyoshi Toyotomis actual political measures against them. Including this context, the littoral, the peripheral region represented on nanban byōbu, is interpreted as a construction of the sociographical center, a heterotopic entity against which agents of the capital composed their own identities and endeavors.
Returning to recent receptions of nanban byōbu, it is remarkable that apparently, they are being classified and collected more often in the context of nanban bijutsu than as fūzokuga from the capital. In this respect, it will further be discussed how the spatial detachment and the incorporation of the foreign in nanban byōbu determinate their historiographic reception.
Annegret Bergmann (Ritsumeikan University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper presents in Japan commissioned and in Korea produced goshomaru tea bowls as a product of the Momoyama zeitgeist and explores whether their historiography fell victim to the historical narrative of the tea ceremony.
Paper long abstract:
The Momoyama era was one of the most international and innovative times in Japanese art and culture, and the use of imported Korean tea bowls (Jap. kōrai chawan) in the tea cere-mony chanoyu - the most valued social as well as ritual appreciation of art during that time - was well established.
Against this background of internationalism and the craving for things overseas, Ko-rean tea bowls triggered a change in the appreciation of tea utensils in the tea ceremony, and further, as agents of transcultural manifestations, they were highly valued by those in military, political or economic power. In my paper I will deal with goshomaru tea bowls that were commissioned in Japan and made in Korea at the turn of the century - during a time when official connections between the two countries had been cut off. Their design is closely connected to one of the leading figures in the chanoyu of the time, Furuta Oribe (1544-1615), whose name today is used to designate a whole category of pottery, Oribe yaki, which was later mass-produced in Mino kilns, Aichi Prefecture. I will deal with the possible connec-tion between the goshomaru bowls and this innovative tea practitioner to show that they are a result of the Momoyama zeitgeist. The scarce sources on these bowls leave them a mystery that I will approach by looking into the development of the chanoyu during the 16th and 17th century, and its historical narrative that emphasizes the genealogy of tea masters and the categorizing of utensils.