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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Career Guides

In general, painters in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century specialized in one of the two modes of painting: nihonga and seiyōga. The distinction between the two modes was based on the medium, painterly technique, and the presumed set of traditions and masters each mode was indebted to, not on the nationality of the painter or the subject matter of the work.

By the early 1920s, the knowledge of artistic professionalization became codified and made available in how-to-paint books and career guidebooks for aspiring artists. Such publications propagated painting as a modern career that one could pursue by studying artworks in reproduction and in original, by receiving direct instruction at an art school, and by networking.

For example, painter Nakagawa Kigen (1892-1972) and art critic Yokogawa Kiichirō (1895-1973) co-authored a specialized guide entitled Bijutsuka o kokorozasu hito no tame ni (For People Aspiring to Become Artists). Published in 1933, it belonged to the Gendai shokugyō gaido bukku (Guide Books to Modern Professions) series, which included guides on how to become a journalist, musician, writer, pilot, filmmaker, business executive, lawyer, beautician, working woman, and soldier. The book emphasized how art education and a stellar exhibition record constituted the two key paths to establishing oneself as a professional artist.

Bijutsuka o kokorozasu hito no tame ni outlined four methods of studying oil painting, listed according to their desirability and effectiveness: entering an art school, entering an oil painting research studio, receiving individual instruction, and studying from books. The authors indicated that the last method was least effective. However they considered it an option for people who were unable to pursue any of the other three methods. They also suggested that the last option was less desirable in the case of nihonga because of its difficult technique and so the authors strongly encouraged aspiring artists to seek other options beyond studying books (Nakagawa Kigen, and Yokogawa Kiichirō, Bijutsuka o kokorozasu hito no tame ni (Tokyo: Genninsha, 1933), 159.).

Ishino Takashi's (1897-1967) Shuppin kara nyūsen made (From Submission to Acceptance at an Exhibition, 1934), and Zenkoku bijutsuten shuppin annai (The Nationwide guide to participation in exhibitions, 1942) provided detailed guidance on successful exhibition participation. The author explained the characteristics of each exhibition and advised potential participants to submit their work to the exhibition with the best fit. He suggested that the work should attract attention of jurors and future audiences by making a lasting impression. He also advised perseverance, as one's work would typically be rejected two or three times before finally securing acceptance.

According to Ishino, artists should create a good working environment by visiting exhibitions and collecting reproductions from art magazines and materials that might make good sources for still lifes. When learning how to paint, artists should engage in critically evaluating their own works, practice painting on a large-sized canvas that one would use to submit to an exhibition, send their work by post to receive a critique through mail (tsūshin hihyō), join a group of fellow painters, and inform themselves about the art establishment. He also suggested that it was possible for a self-taught oil painter to exhibit in any art society, in contrast to nihonga painters, who would typically exhibit only with a group of their artistic affiliation. Having introduced the most important developments in oil painting over the past twenty years, such as fauvism, cubism, futurism, expressionism, abstraction, and constructivism, he strongly advised against blindly copying any of these styles. He stated that painting was akin to science (kagaku/saiensu) and also entailed individual expression. Overall, the author balanced between not imposing anything on the painters while pointing them towards the type of painting that would be accepted at exhibitions.

Ishino's two books were aimed at empire-wide audiences. Shuppin kara nyūsen made directly addressed instructors of drawing and encouraged them to participate in art exhibitions to reap the benefits, such as consolidating one's reputation, having a motivational impact on one's own students, achieving personal cultivation, and gaining an opportunity to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of one's own work in comparison to others on display. The author often addressed the particular situation of artists and art instructors living in the provinces (chihō), for example, by providing detailed information on transport companies that handled artwork for submission to exhibitions. Although the scope of the provinces was left unsaid in his first book, the second book included a typology of exhibitions with official salons in Seoul and Taipei discussed under "regional exhibitions" (chihōten). The book provided a short history of the two salons and reprinted an excerpt of their respective regulations pertaining to eligibility requirements. Clearly, the author recognized that his readership extended to the empire.

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Model Works
Sketching from nature and studying acclaimed works of the past and present constituted the two key methods of acquiring painting skills for both nihonga and seiyōga painters in early twentieth-century Japan. (Fujishima Takeji, Geijutsu no esupuri (Tokyo: Chūō kōron bijutsu shuppan, 2004), 221-222.). Exhibition jurors, established artists, and authors of advice books emphasized that aspiring artists should study masterpieces through copying. At the same time, they suggested that each artists should aim to develop their own original expression.
Copying has had an important place within the artistic training both in European academy and in Japan. During the Tokugawa period, artists of the Kano school used to copy so-called funpon (model paintings). Funpon were wide-ranging collections of images that reproduced original paintings faithfully or in rough sketches in smaller size. They were zealously guarded and enabled transmission of artistic styles and subject matter within the workshop. Lippit Yukio, Painting of the Realm. The Kano House of Painters in 17th-Century Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 238-239. Jordan, Brenda G., and Victoria Weston, Copying the Master and Stealing His Secrets: Talent and Training in Japanese Painting (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2003).
By the early twentieth century, looking at original paintings and experiencing their size, color, and texture required access to private collections or visiting art exhibitions. The Tokyo School of Fine Arts and the Japan Art Association (Nihon bijutsu kyōkai) frequently included “model works” (sankōhin, literally "objects for reference") in their exhibitions for study purposes. Furthermore, with the launch of the Ministry of Education Fine Arts Exhibition in 1907 in Tokyo, artists in Japan began voicing even stronger demands for establishment of a modern art museum. By canonizing recent art, this museum would also function as a source of model works.
Similarly, Japanese settler-artists in Taiwan and colonial bureaucrats believed that representative examples of modern Japanese art could guide local artists and educate the art public. Therefore, the first Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition was accompanied by a special exhibition of over twenty nihonga and oil paintings on loan from Tokyo as model works (The Korea Fine Arts Exhibition also featured Japanese modern art as models).
Painter, art teacher, and long-term resident of Taiwan, Ishikawa Kin’ichirō (1871-1945), described his emotional experience of viewing these works at the first official salon in Taiwan:
The model works displayed are an oasis of art for art connoisseurs and the study of [art]. Having come in contact with these fine works, I feel that art by great masters draws you in without effort, just like that, quietly, like the gentle flow of water. It feels like being completely embraced by serenity. Ishikawa Kinichirō, “Taiten sankōkan,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, 28 October 1927, A.M. ed., 4.
Some model works, such as Araki Jippo's painting, left such a lasting impression that critics recalled it years later in their reviews (Arai Hideo, “Hogarakani rappa ga naru (jō) Taiten o megurite,” Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, 20 October 1935, P.M. ed., 7.). Since it is impossible to identify Araki's painting which traveled to Taiwan in 1927, we can only speculate how the technical virtuosity of this renowned bird-and-flower salon artist must have appealed to contemporary viewers.
In the subsequent salons, the organizers abandoned the practice of organizing a special display of models perhaps due to lack of funding. Instead, they encouraged the invited jurors from Japan to bring their own works for the purpose of displaying them as model works. The Japanese language press in Taiwan often advertised in advance the subject matter and size of the jurors’ works and, upon the exhibition’s opening, reproduced and reviewed them in detail. On average, each juror would bring just one or two works. For example, Araki Jippo, who traveled to Taiwan as a juror for the 1935 salon, bought this work with him.
Japanese settler-artists expected much from the jurors' works. They repeatedly stated how difficult it was to see good paintings on the island and requested that jurors visiting from Japan bring their most representative and stimulating works with them. In his touching review of Umehara Ryūzaburō’s Sakurajima, on view at the Taipei salon in 1935, painter Tateishi Tetsuomi (1905-1980) recalled the sadness he had felt not being able to see the acclaimed work of his former teacher when it was first displayed in Tokyo at the Kokuga exhibition and the joy of finally having the opportunity to view the painting in person in Taipei (Tateishi Tetsuomi, “Taiten o miru (2),” Ōsaka asahi shinbun Taiwanban, October 29 1935, 5.). Even though, in total, only a small number of model works from Japan were displayed at the Taipei salon, Japanese settler-artists attached great importance to them.
What is more, Japanese settler-artists and critics in Taiwan often complained about the jurors' model works in the press. The most often repeated criticism was that the work was small, not representative of the artist’s oeuvre, lacking educational merits, or that it could guide only beginners and would leave true art lovers dissatisfied. By and large, the artists did not complain about the specific styles or subject matter represented in the jurors' works. They just desired to see masterpieces rather than average paintings that the juror in question happened to have had on hand in his atelier as he was embarking on his trip to Taiwan (Yes, all jurors at the Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition invited from Japan were male). Some suspected, and rightly so, that the Japanese jurors did not take the Taiwanese art world seriously (Nagayama Yoshitaka, "Taiwan zakkan," Taiwan kyōiku, no. 11 (1933): 124.). The very idea itself of learning by looking at good models was was not contested.
Also, education through models was conducted on a more local level. For example, some paintings by artists from the Tainan Prefecture which had previously been on display at the Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition were on view as models at the Tainan Prefecture Schools Art Exhibition in 1934. "Taihoku tsūshin," Taiwan kyōiku, no. 3 (1934): 127.
The use of Japanese modern paintings as model works at the Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition reinforced a worldview according to which the geographic distance between the metropole and the colony equaled a gap in artistic progress. Moreover, it gestured to the desire of molding the future art in Taiwan on artistic models from Japan and with Japanese settler artists as major protagonists. Inasmuch as many jurors and salon organizers in Taiwan continuously championed so-called "local color" in works on display, suggesting that art in Taiwan should depict local subject matter and posses native characteristics, the implicit assumption was that such art should be simultaneously "Japanized" and able to speak to imperial audiences. Indeed, many paintings at the Taiwan salon depicted Taiwan's landscapes and customs considered exotic from the colonizer's viewpoint, especially the aborigine population of the island. With time, some art critics in Taiwan began to question these demands for local color as vague (See: Liao Chinyuan, “Taiwan kindai gadan no ‘rōkarukarā’: Taiwan Bijutsu Tenrankai no tōyōgabu o chūshin ni,” in Geijutsu/kattō no genba: kindai Nihon geijutsu shisō no kontekusuto, ed. Iwaki Kenʼichi (Kyoto: Kōyō shobō, 2002), 202.). Settler-artist and juror Shiotsuki Tōhō suggested that since the distance between Japan and Taiwan had shrunk so much, and since the young artists in Taiwan studied past and present art from all over the world, it would be impossible to expect them to produce artworks as if Taiwan were in isolation. He did, however, hope that the specific geographic conditions of the island would contribute to the eventual emergence of a distinct art. Shiotsuki Tōho, “Dai 8-kai Taiten no mae ni,” Taiwan kyōiku, no. 11 (1934), reprinted in: Yen Chuanying, and Tsuruta Takeyoshi, eds. Feng Jing Xin Jing: Taiwan Jin Dai Mei Shu Wen Xian Dao Du. Vol. 2 (Taipei: Xiong shi tu shu gu fen you xian gong si, 2001), 281.
The popularity of the local color discourse in the 1930s reflected a larger shift within the empire towards an understanding of Japan as a nation of diverse cultural regions. Historian Kate McDonald describes it as geography of cultural pluralism. She suggests that it came up in response to the anti-colonial movements and functioned as a way to sustain the hierarchy between the metropole and the colonies. McDonald Kate, Placing Empire Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017), 17, 85, 159.
The question of local color in the art of colonial Korea and Taiwan has been widely debated and studied. Recently, scholars have turned to highlighting the inherent contradictions of this discourse (Lin, Ming-hsien, ed. New Visions/Meili xinshijie: Collected Papers on the Historical Significance of Taiwan’s Gouache Paintings/Taiwan jiaocaihua de lishi yu shidai yiyi xueshu yantaohui lunwenji (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2008), 146. See also: Kwon Nayoung Aimee, Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
The Taiwan Government-General Library and Its Art-related Collections 46 Taiwan sōtokufu toshokan; 1915 image_header 5113 2021-01-28T21:39:55-05:00 Magdalena Kolodziej
The colonial government of Taiwan opened its library in 1915 in Taipei. The colonial government in Korea opened its library in 1925 in Seoul. Some historians have suggested that the relatively late establishment of both Government-General Libraries reflected the discriminatory policy of keeping the colonized people from going beyond their station in life. (Kawata Ikohi, “Ajia shinryaku to Chōsen Sōtokufu Toshokan (1),” Jōkyō to shutai, no. 140 (1987): 87-88.) Others pointed out that the activities of both libraries were part of the general turn in both colonies towards a cultural rule following the March First Movement in Korea in 1919 and the appointment of civilians instead of military to the post of the Government-General. (Katō Kazuo, Kawata Ikohi, and Tōjō Fuminori, Nihon no shokuminchi toshokan: Ajia ni okeru Nihon kindai toshokanshi (Tokyo: Shakai hyōronsha, 2005), 84. Ujigo Tsuyoshi, “Kindai Kankoku toshokanshi no kenkyū: shokuminchiki o chūshin ni,” Sankōshoshi kenkyū, no. 34 (1988): 5-6.) The policies of cultural rule aimed at assimilating the colonized population and fostering pro-Japanese attitudes.
Next to public schools teaching Japanese language, public libraries constituted a crucial part of the cultural infrastructure of the expanding empire. They were extremely active in comparison to their counterparts in mainland Japan and attracted some of the most capable library staff from Japan. (Katō Kazuo, Kawata Ikohi, and Tōjō Fuminori, Nihon no shokuminchi toshokan: Ajia ni okeru Nihon kindai toshokanshi (Tokyo: Shakai hyōronsha, 2005), 12-14.) They catered to Japanese settlers and the colonized, a growing number of whom could read Japanese (The Taiwan Government-General Library also had some books in Chinese and Western languages). The knowledge of Japanese language varied among the colonized subjects based on their level of contact with the Japanese population, class, education, and the year of birth. By 1941, 57% of population in Taiwan was being or had been educated in Japanese language, which was the highest literacy rate in any colony. (Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2003), 142.) In her discussion of Korean writers publishing in Japanese in the prewar period, literary scholar Aimee Nayoung Kwon reminds us that such seemingly "natural" command of the Japanese language was a result of violence of imperial censorship and assimilation policies. (Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 190-191.) Such policies intensified after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, when the colonial government began promoting the "imperial subject movement" (kōminka) to Japanize everyday customs and ultimately draft the the colonized into the military. Fujii Shōzō, "The Formation of Taiwanese Identity and the Cultural Policy of Various Outside Regimes," in Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895-1945, eds. Liao Binghui and Wang Dewei (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 70.
This pathway examines user statistics and art-related holdings of the Taiwan Government-General Library to illuminate the role of the library and books in the making of the nascent imperial art world. As discussed in the "Art Education and Professional Development" pathway, studying from books constituted the most informal method of art education and was relatively available.
Questions for the classroom:
- What was the role of class, gender, and ethnicity/nationality in access to the Taiwan Government-General Library?
- What do classification schemes used by librarians in their user statistics and catalogues tell us about their vision of a colonial society?
- How do books, journals, art postcards, and reproductions as vehicles of artistic knowledge impact the knowledge being transmitted?
Exhibition Fever
By the early 1920s, major newspapers in Japan began highlighting in their reporting the so-called “newcomer” artists (shinjin) and those who had received their "first acceptance at the exhibition" (hatsu nyūsen). The press helped shape the popular image of an artist as a successful exhibition participant. Also, exhibition participation promised an opportunity for sales and elevating an artist's standing in the art market. As an acceptance of one's work at a major exhibition became a decisive moment in launching a career, some artists began to enter their works when still in art school.
With the acceptance of an oil painting by the Taiwanese-Chinese oil painter Chen Chengbo to the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts Exhibition in Tokyo in 1926 and the opening of the first Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition in Taipei in 1927, the young generation of artists in Taiwan also began to envision their careers through the lens of exhibitions.
Many young artists must have held their breath as they crowded outside of the museum to catch a peek at the list announcing the selected names and the titles of the admitted works. Within a few hours, the names of admitted artists were announced on the radio and published the next day in all major daily newspapers. Art career guidebook writer Ishino Takashi (1897-1967) described how these artists would hear with excitement their name on the radio, have journalists arrive at the door, and receive greetings from acquaintances exclaiming “Congratulations!” when randomly met on a train. Ishino Takashi, Shuppin kara nyūsen made (Tokyo: Gakkō bijutsu kyōkai shuppanbu, 1934), 108.
More senior artists sympathized with the ambitions of the young artists, yet at the same time they viewed them as prone to the "exhibition intoxication” (tenrankai kaichūdokushō) and cautioned against it. (Ishino Takashi, Zenkoku bijutsu tenrankai annai (Tokyo: Geijutsu gakuin, 1942), 115.). For example, painter Ishii Hakutei (1882-1958) encouraged aspiring artists to take art seriously and not to aim at only the benefits resulting from participation in exhibitions. (See afterword to: Ishino Takashi, Shuppin kara nyūsen made (Tokyo: Gakkō bijutsu kyōkai shuppanbu, 1934), 143-145.). Elsewhere, painter Arishima Ikuma noted that aspiring painters submitted their works to exhibitions after only two or three years of study and then became very disappointed and would stop painting when rejected (Arishima Ikuma, Bijutsu no aki (Tokyo: Sōbunkaku, 1920), 44). With the art world organized around competitive exhibitions, senior artists acted as jurors and gatekeepers, and were eager to protect their exclusive status.
Soon, a small industry developed catering to aspiring artists. Art supply companies such as Ōsama shōkai began organizing correspondence courses and in-person instruction under the guidance of exhibition jurors (Kolodziej Magdalena, "Gaka Ri Jinsei no bijutsu ehagaki korekushon kara miru Tokyo gadan," in Nyoze Gamon Roku, ed. Nyoze gamon roku henshūiinkai (2020), 173.). They also provided a special delivery service for artists living outside of the metropolitan area and aiming to submit their works to a juried exhibition. By securing discreet transport and submission to juried art exhibitions, they advertised that they were able to protect the name of the artists in case their work was rejected. Yoshida Hanryō, Teikoku kaiga hōten: ichimei Bunten shuppin hiketsu (Tokyo: Teikoku kaiga kyōki, 1918), 316. Ishino Takashi, Shuppin kara nyūsen made (Tokyo: Gakkō bijutsu kyōkai shuppanbu, 1934), 99.
Little research exists on the artists’ use of such delivery services. Based on the exhibition catalogues, we can gauge that the number of artists living outside of the metropolitan area participating in the official salon in Tokyo grew only slowly in the prewar period. This research is made complicated by the fact that some artists moved to Tokyo temporarily and submitted their works under a Tokyo address, and so the number of participants from Tokyo is inflated. However, it is clear that art supply companies, which also targeted school children, were well positioned to early recognize this new demand and to step in and provide delivery and educational services extending well beyond Tokyo.

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