Conclusion: Japan's Imperial Art World
Many painters from Korea and Taiwan of the first generation to grow up under colonial rule attended art schools in Japan and participated in art exhibitions in the metropole. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, some of them would become well known figures in the imperial art world.
In the 1930s, young writers, dancers, and sportsmen from the colonies began to appear on the pages of metropolitan newspapers and magazines. In 1933 Korean writer Chang Hyŏkchu (Cho Kakuchu, 1905-1997) received a literary award for his writing in Japanese. The following year, Taiwanese Chinese writer Yang Kui's (1906-1985) short story was awarded a literary prize (Kleeman 2003, 160). In 1936, Son Kijŏng (1912-2002), a Korean marathon runner, won the golden medal for the Japanese team at the Summer Olympics in Berlin. As a result of assimilation policies, colonial subjects were given Japanese citizenship (kokuseki), yet were differentiated on the basis of their origins (koseki); they had to meet the obligations of imperial subjects, yet were denied many of the rights (Leo Ching, Morris-Suzuki, Oguma Eiji, Suh Serk Bae).
In 1933, the first government-sponsored permanent display of Japanese modern art in the Japanese empire opened at Seokjojeon, a building belonging to the Tŏksugung Palace compound in Seoul. And so, after many years of artists in Japan petitioning for a modern art museum in Tokyo, their demands were realized in a colonial metropole instead (add ref to my diss + chapter; Aso). In 1938, this permanent display became part of the Yi Royal Fine Arts Museum and a new building has been added to display premodern Korean art. The two buildings juxtaposed premodern Korean ceramics and art, with contemporary Japanese painting, sculpture, and crafts. This display embodied the new imperial art history in the making.
Japan's imperial art world expanded further. Manchukuo, with its annual Manchukuo Fine Arts Exhibition (J. Manshūkoku bijutsu tenrankai, 1938-1944), came into its orbit by the mid 1930s. In the early 1940s, the eyes of artists and art critics turned to the Southern Islands in the Pacific and the South East Asia, propelled by the idea of the Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere (Annika Culver, Glorify the Empire: Japanese Avant-Garde Propaganda in Manchukuo, The University of British Columbia Press 2013; Charlotte Eubanks....ADD REF).
The concept of the imperial art world is useful for rethinking Japanese modern art history. It highlights how the boundaries between the arts of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan were being policed in new ways in the colonial period. It points to Japan's claims to the mantle of "East Asian Art World." It gestures to cultural imperialism at home that helped Japanese artists see their art as a worthy match to Western art. (Add ref to Stephanie Su research on the competition between Chinese and Japanese artists at that time; check Aida Yuan Wong).
Furthermore, this concept invites us to challenge art historical notions of place in relation to art that tend to situate art within the timeless and fixed space of the nation. Nation state building has profoundly shaped how we study art. Yet, our global artistic imagination and reality has been equally, if not more, impacted by imperial formations and cultural imperialism. If we want to pay heed to these multiple dynamics at play, we need to develop more place-conscious approaches to art historical scholarship.
In this module, I have approached place as a historical construct. By paying attention to changes in the circulation of people and knowledge as well as individual actors' understanding of their own place, I have traced the process of place-making at a specific point in time. MAPPING? HOW? WHY?
In this way, I have demonstrated that an approach to Japanese modern art history that omits the empire is simply untenable.
DEEP MAPPING TEXT -> how I used Guo Xuehu`s story to reconstruct this <- what sort of spatial story is it?
-> place exists only in time (15)
-> mapping, a way to achieve the goal of capturing complexity (17)
-> "What we require is a spatial narrative that acknowledges how engaged human agents build spatially framed identities and aspirations out of actions, behaviors, imagination, and memory." (20)
-> "In the deep map, we understand space and place as the product of interrelationships, coexistence, and process, always changing and always in the state of becoming." (22)
An approach to Japanese modern art history that omits the empire is simply untenable.
Postcolonial studies have made this point. More recently, scholars have been debating the possibility of a global art history and of decolonizing art history (see Beatrice Joyeux-Prunel 2019 for an overview; reread it).