Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2008.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 468-491).

"VIDEO HIROBA: Contingent Publics and Video Communication in Japan, 1966-1981" is the first major study in English or Japanese of the seminal 1970s video collective Video Hiroba (Video Plaza). Formed in the aftermath of both Expo ’70 and the late 1960s season of protest, Video Hiroba’s founding in 1972 coincided with a moment of crisis in public space. The combination of high economic growth, rapid industrialization and urbanization, and expansion of mass media in the 1960s also sparked a series of cultural debates around the effects of eizō (technological images) and media (both mass media systems and media technologies) under the highly-managed conditions of the information age, encompassed in the term kanri shakai (the managed or controlled society). Through encounters with North American video practitioners and engagements with these Japanese debates, the members of Video Hiroba developed video as an applied discourse centered on the idea of “video communication,” where video, counter to television but also to industrial capitalism, was positioned as process not product. Through individual and collective experiments with the possibilities of video, the members of Video Hiroba imagined contingent forms of community and experiences of urban space as alternative solutions to the failures of direct confrontation with authorities. Taking a cue from Video Hiroba’s concern with “video communication” over “video art,” this art historical study takes the framework of critical translation to investigate and articulate the forms of collectivity, the processes of mediation, and the systems of circulation with which Video Hiroba members experimented. After laying out the problems of visual culture and subjectivity in the arts from Japanese Surrealism through Expo ‘70, this dissertation devotes four chapters to examining Video Hiroba as a collective, charting their visions for video through their collective exhibitions, the circulation of their work domestically and internationally, the collective’s engagement with institutions, and their community-based work. Through these perspectives, it uncovers both a unique vision of video formed from the local context of 1970s Tokyo but with transnational aspirations, and an alternative lineage for contemporary Japanese socially-engaged art. The final two chapters look at the practices of individual members through a thematic lens to reveal different models of contingency in both urban space, and the discursive public space of media and culture. While these experiments chart possibilities for alternative ways of visualizing collectivity, in their attempts to make systems of media exchange both open and visible, they displace human authors. Combined with their aspirations to engage international art and video circles, in which Video Hiroba was seen as representative of “Japan” and “Asia,” this effect inadvertently played into a burgeoning techno-orientalist image for Japanese video in the early 1980s. This project thus charts competing possibilities for early video in Japan, as both a medium around which alternative modes of human-centered community could be formed, and a medium through which Japan could become, yet again, an empty image of reflection.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Canterbury, 2007. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 185-200). Also available via the World Wide Web.

This dissertation examines the historical and artistic circumstances behind the emergence in late medieval Japan of a short-lived genre of painting referred to as sankei mandara (pilgrimage mandalas). The paintings are large-scale topographical depictions of sacred sites and served as promotional material for temples and shrines in need of financial support to encourage pilgrimage, offering travelers worldly and spiritual benefits while inspiring them to donate liberally. Itinerant monks and nuns used the mandara in recitation performances (etoki) to lead audiences on virtual pilgrimages, decoding the pictorial clues and touting the benefits of the site shown. Addressing themselves to the newly risen commoner class following the collapse of the aristocratic order, sankei mandara depict commoners in the role of patron and pilgrim, the first instance of them being portrayed this way, alongside warriors and aristocrats as they make their way to the sites, enjoying the local delights, and worship on the sacred grounds. Together with the novel subject material, a new artistic language was created—schematic, colorful and bold. We begin by locating sankei mandara’s artistic roots and influences and then proceed to investigate the individual mandara devoted to three sacred sites: Mt. Fuji, Kiyomizudera and Ise Shrine (a sacred mountain, temple and shrine, respectively). For each of the sites, we read the histories (political, religious, economic, social) and diaries (of pilgrims, monks and warlords), noting upheavals, power dynamics, and institutional relationships, and how these circumstances and relationships changed over the course of the 16th and early 17th centuries. We then apply this textual history to a formal analysis of each of the mandara devoted to the site, studying how the history of the site and the layout of the shrines and temples and the route to them are expressed in the pictorial language of the mandara, and we try to imagine how these paintings were employed and enlivened in etoki performances. Furthermore, by closely studying similarities and differences in choice and emphasis we show that the mandara, above their call for pilgrimage and donations, also encode the historical conditions at the time they were painted, capturing for example the tensions between religious groups and classes or the changing fortunes of a particular institution over time. This investigation thus aims to show how reading the artistic language of sankei mandara enlarges our understanding of a particular moment in Japan’s social and religious history, making these images valuable primary sources that enhance and supplement research in a wide range of fields.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Washington, 2006. / Appendix A is English translation of Kisō no keifu by Tsuji Nobuo. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 420-425).

At the turn of the twentieth century, as Japan expanded its territory by colonizing other Asian nations, the Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty was signed in 1910 and Korea lost its sovereignty. In political turmoil, the formation of national and cultural identity was constantly challenged, and the struggle was not argued in words alone. It was also embedded in various types of visual cultures, with narratives changing under the shifting political climate. This thesis focuses on paintings exhibited in the Joseon Mijeon (조선미술전람회 The Joseon Fine Art Exhibition) (1922-1944), which was supervised by the Japanese colonial government and dominated, in the beginning, by Japanese artists and jurors. By closely examining paintings of ‘local color (향토색)’ and ‘provincial color (지방색),’ which emphasized the essence of a “Korean” culture that accentuated its Otherness based on cultural stereotypes, the thesis explores how representations of Korea both differentiated it from Japan and characterized its relationship with the West. In order to legitimize its colonial rule, politically driven ideologies of pan-Asianism (the pursuit of a unified Asia) and Japanese Orientalism (the imperialistic perception of the rest of Asia) were evident in the state-approved arts. The thesis explores how the tension of modern Japan as both promoting an egalitarian Asia and asserting its superiority within Asia was shown in the popular images that circulated in the form of postcards, manga, magazine illustrations, and more importantly in paintings. Moreover, this project examines both the artists who actively submitted works to the Joseon Mijeon and the group of artists who opposed the Joseon Mijeon and worked outside of the state-approved system to consider the complexity of responses by artists who sought to be both modern and Korean under Japanese colonial rule. / published_or_final_version / Fine Arts / Master / Master of Philosophy

From the beginning of serious art historical study of Japanese woodblock prints or Ukiyo-e, the artist Suzuki Harunobu (1725-1770) has been accorded a prominent position in the development of that art form primarily because of his role in the creation of the first full colour prints. This, and his particular conception of feminine beauty which he chose to illustrate most often as the main subject of his art, made him the dominant artist of his generation. The popularity he achieved during his lifetime was monumental, but he met with a premature and untimely death. Shortly after his death Shiba Kōkan (1747-1818), a young artist just beginning his career, made forgeries of Harunobu's prints and later admitted to doing so in his autobiography. Based on Kōkan's confession, there developed among art historians and connoisseurs, a long running, at times heated and, as yet, unresolved debate focussed upon determining which of Harunobu's prints are in fact forgeries. Because Kōkan eventually acquired fame as an artist who experimented with styles and techniques newly imported to Japan from Europe, Harunobu's prints that contain linear perspective, one such Western technique, have traditionally and without question been designated as forgeries. To this author, making such an attribution based on this criterion seems somewhat illogical. Why would Kōkan introduce something foreign to Harunobu's style into prints he intended to pass off as Harunobu's originals? The simplest resolution to this quandary is to assume that Harunobu must have also been experimenting with imported European styles. Based on this premise, this thesis introduces literary and visual evidence linking Harunobu to a number of sources of European-style art. Much of this evidence was uncovered through a re-examination of Harunobu's prints and literary accounts of his life in accordance with the social and artistic context in which he worked. The prints and the documents which this thesis discusses have long been known to art historians. They simply needed to be reworked to support this premise. This thesis does, however, introduce one print from the collection of the Oregon Art Institute which seems to have been overlooked by other scholars. It provides a clear example of Harunobu's Western-style art and through visual analysis of it, its sources can be identified among the Western-style megane-e of Maruyama ōkyo ( 1733-1795). The concluding section of this thesis examines the consequences of this evidence. Two of the so-called forgeries are reattributed to Harunobu and his prints as a whole are recast within the tradition of Western-style art in Japan. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

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This dissertation explores a vital moment in the history of Japanese photography through a sustained monographic analysis of Kawada Kikuji’s 1965 photobook Chizu (The Map). Through this first full-length English-language study on Kawada’s early work, I argue that Chizu is a palimpsest, where Kawada mobilizes both the malleability and medium-specificity of photography to create a temporal atlas of postwar Japan. Chizu is not legible cartography, but instead is an archival universe where the atomic bomb and its victims, Japan’s past military aggressions, and national narratives of ruin and growth are interwoven in a state of temporal confusion and perpetual haunting. Chizu is also wedged chronologically and theoretically between two periods in the history of Japanese photography: the early 1950s hegemony of postwar “realism” and the avant-garde project of Provoke in the late 1960s and 1970s. My dissertation intersects a sociopolitical and psychological history of postwar Japan with visual and iconographic analysis, accompanied by comparative frameworks of contemporaneous publications that also dealt with the subjects of the atomic bomb, the Second World War, and the political unrest of the early 1960s. By structuring the dissertation around the three major thematic categories that I have identified within the visual language of the photobook—the “stains” of the Atomic Bomb Dome, the “memorial goods” of the Second World War, and the “signs of the present”—I dissect and contextualize the temporal layering and theoretical stakes at work within Chizu’s complex network of traces. Chizu’s enormous significance lies in its refusal to settle on a firm aesthetic or theoretical language of photography, preferring instead to alternatively mobilize and refute indexicality, to put forward a multisensory experience of the photograph, and to cast assumptions about photography’s legibility into deep suspicion. I argue that this is a singular gesture of the period, one born not from individual subjectivity as dogmatic artistic ideology, but instead from an existential state of questioning the foundations of photography's relationship to time, to index, and to legible narrative. Finally, I argue that Chizu stands as an important artistic illumination of the concept of a longue durée violence: In this case, a violence continuously and insidiously enacted on a body of citizenry well before and well after the zero hour event of the atomic bomb.