artificialia

Thanks to Donald Richie for reviewing What’s the Use of Art? Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context in The Japan Times on February 24, 2008.

I’m giving a public talk at UCLA’s Center for Korean Studies (243 Royce Hall) on Tuesday, March 4, 2008, which will consider how the survival of old things (especially objects from the 16th century) informs modern national identity in Japan. In particular, I’ll examine the genealogy of “acquiring and possessing Korean things” as an elite cultural practice in late medieval and early modern Japan. Buddhist monks, merchant tea practitioners, and feudal lords actively sought ceramics and other forms of material culture from Korea, and cherished and labeled these pieces as products of Korai (Koryo). I will survey some of these objects, and then theorize the legacy of their existence in Japan.

Examination of Korean art in Japanese collections has tended to focus on style and aesthetics with little attention to the biographies or socio-political influence of such objects. Perhaps we assume that in the relationaship between art and society, pictures and things are mere contrivances or tools. However, some anthropoligists have challenged us to revise this view, arguing that artistic products have a non-linguistic agency through which they influence people. How, we need to ask, do material things shape (literally and figuratively) the world we live in? What role have old things played in the making (and unmaking) of modern identity in Northeast Asia?

My review of Wm. Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck and Arthur E. Tiedemann, Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 2: 1600 to 2000 (Columbia University Press, New York, 2005) appears in the recently published Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal v. 15 (2007), p. 20-21. EMJ has gone completely online, making it the most accessible journal in our field.

The anthology that I edited with Jan Mrazek is now available.

East Asia Seminar: A Symposium

The Early Modern in East Asia: The Challenges of Periodization
February 1, 2008
SOS 250, USC

9:00 - 9:10 a.m. Welcome and Opening Remarks

9:00 - 10:50 a.m. East Asia and the Early Modern World

John Wills Jr., USC
Some Earlier Divergences: China-Europe Differences that Mattered,
Han to Ming

Robert Marks, Whittier College
Early Modern or Late Imperial: An Environmental Perspective

Richard von Glahn, UCLA
An East Asian Early Modernity? Kinsei in Japanese Scholarship on
Japanese and Chinese History

11:00 a.m. - 12:10 p.m. Consciousness and Culture

Samuel Yamashita, Pomona
Reimagining the Intellectual Landscape of ‘Early Modern Japan

Jahyun Kim Haboush, Columbia University
Discourse of ‘Nation’ in Choson Korea: Early Modern?

1:30 - 2:40 p.m. Interactions

John Duncan, UCLA
From External Stimulus to Internal Integration in Late Koryo and
Early Choson Korea

Kenneth Pomeranz, UC Irvine
Early Modern Networks Without an Early Modern Period-or is it the
Other Way Around?

3:00 - 4:40 p.m. Authority Structures

R. Bin Wong, UCLA
The Eighteenth-century Qing State: Fantasies and Fallacies of the
‘Early Modern’

Kyung Moon Hwang, USC
Constructions of State and Society in the Late Chosôn

Morgan Pitelka, Occidental College
Afterlives of the Shogun: Tokugawa Ieyasu’s Material Legacy in
Early Modern Japan

4:40 - 5:00 p.m. Closing Discussion

Sponsored by the East Asia Seminar of the USC-Huntington Early Modern
Studies Institute, and the Department of History, East Asian Studies
Center, and Korean Studies Institute at USC

A short essay (just 500 words!) of mine has just been published in a new book, which will probably sell more copies than anything else I will contribute to in my entire life: the 10th edition of the Lonely Planet Japan Guide.

The essay, “Japanese Tea Culture,” is easy to find: it’s on page 100! The book looks great and is already helping me to plan my next research trip.

I have an essay in the new anthology The Culture of Copying in Japan: Critical and Historical Perspectives (Routledge, 2007), edited by Rupert Cox.

The contents include:

Series Editor’s Preface Joy Hendry
Introduction Rupert Cox

Section 1: Original Encounters

1. Body to Body Transmission: The Copying Tradition of Kagura Performance Irit Averbuch 2. A Spectrum of Copies: Ritual Puppetry in Japan Jane Marie Law 3. Copying in Japanese Magazines: Unashamed Copiers Keiko Tanaka

Section 2: Arts of Citation

4. The Originality of the ‘Copy’: Mimesis and Subversion in Hanegawa Toei’s Chosenjin Ukie Ronald Toby 5. Copy to Convert: Jesuits’ Missionary Practice in Japan Alexandra Curvelo 6. Back to the Fundamentals: “Reproducing” Rikyu and Chojiro in Japanese Tea Culture Morgan Pitelka 7. An Investigation of the Conditions of Literary Borrowings in Late Heian and Early Kamakura Japan Rein Raud 8. Chinese Calligraphic Models in Heian Japan: Copying Practices and Stylistic Transmission John Carpenter

Section 3: Modern Exchanges

9. Beyond Mimesis: Japanese Architectural Models at the Vienna Exhibition and 1910 Japan British Exhibition William Coaldrake 10. Copying Kyoto: The Legitimacy of Imitation in Kyoto’s Townscape Debates Christoph Brumann 11. Copying Cars: Forgotten Licensing Agreements Chris Madeley 12. ‘Hungry Visions’: The Material Life of Japanese Food Samples Rupert Cox

The volume originated with an interesting conference held in 2001 at Oxford Brookes University in Oxford, UK. It has been rather a long time gestating, and as far as I can tell the contributors never got a chance to check proofs or submit images, but I hope it will be an interesting volume nonetheless.

My first edited anthology, Japanese Tea Culture: Art, History, and Practice is now available in paperback. This is exciting for me because it means the price drops from $150 for the hardback to $35 for this new paperback edition. The publisher, Routledge (it used to be RoutledgeCurzon, but it seems Routledge is dropping the “Curzon” from the list of books they acquired from Curzon Books in 2002) has digitized it and is making it available through one of these increasingly common print-on-demand systems, which they call “Paperbacks Direct.”

I found a few typos in the opening pages that do not appear in the hardback version (perhaps they result from the process of digitization?) and will search for more, but it still seems to be a step in the right direction.

I just wanted to mention that I recently posted about the Freer Gallery and the British Museum at Displaying Japan, and commented on the incredible Discover Nikkei website (from the Japanese American National Museum) at the collaborative Japanese history blog Frog in a Well. I also cannot recommend the blog I am a Viking highly enough, and encourage one and all to visit, especially if you like food and have lived in Japan. That freak at the Grumpy Professor is worth a visit as well.

On November 12 I got to participate in a day-long workshop on Raku ceramics at the American Museum of the Ceramic Arts (AMOCA) in Pomona, California. This is a small but lovely new museum that is putting on some innovative events and shows. This particular event was organized by the Raku potter Jim Romberg, who also organized an event called the Raku Summit 2005 at Western Colorado’s Eagleheart Center for Art and Inquiry.

The event started with ceramic demonstrations by Steven Branfman, Patrick Crabb, and Jim. Paul Soldner also put in an appearance, complete with cigar smoking and lecherous groping of a young woman posing for a picture with the old American Raku master.

I participated in a roundtable discussion with two collectors of American Raku ceramics and the three demonstrators. The panel was fun (see the photos below) and inspired me to think about writing some short explanations of the basics of Raku ceramics for potters and students who might not want to buy Handmade Culture.

As you can see, the panel was held outdoors, in the hot November sun (80 degrees, at least!) in front of the wonderful chaos of the workshop leftovers.

At least 200 people were in attendance and many had questions about Raku history. Of particular interest were issues such as the question of Korean origin, differences in technique then and now, continuity and change in Japanese and American Raku, and the relationship between collectors and Raku potters.