Asia Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. vi, 248 pp. (Illustrations.) US$60.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-231-17292-9.
Michael Lucken’s Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts, translated from the French, concerns the period from the seventeenth century to recent times. It is, however, mostly a small number of twentieth-century arts that are his preoccupation as the preceding centuries are the counterpoint to his focal examples.
The first half, entitled “Historical Construction,” is divided into a number of thematic subsections that trace a narrative of imitation or lack of imagination (variously addressed as a strength, critical weakness, a defense against it, or indicative of some supposed national/geographical character) ascribed to Japan’s arts and other productive activities. These are marshalled from several centuries leading up to the early twentieth, from essays, novels, and travelogues by Europeans (English, French, and German).
It is a relatively conventional tale of an unacceptable standard maintaining that the West creates and the East imitates. When the West imitated the East, it was somehow alternatively creative rather than belated, indebted, or technically servile. Part of the interest here is how premodern European narratives about Japan (and Asia) alleged a lack of originality, dispersed by interlocutors who favoured the repetition of received ideas. As Lucken explains it, this was a case of a literary trope masquerading as an historical explanation of a distant people and country. This was subsequently internalized by the Japanese through into the twentieth century, before it was partly decommissioned by late twentieth-century postcolonial studies. Lucken writes that “Complete imitation of the West, the blind and slavish kind that Westerners liked emphasizing and the Japanese even attributed to themselves, never existed” (50). Inarguably, however, some Japanese works could be incrementally close to their Western sources. Part 1 is essentially a lengthy prelude to the writer’s more pertinent interests in his early twentieth-century and postmodern case studies that follow. Bridging the two parts are some reflections on the early- to mid-twentieth-century philosopher/cultural critic, Nakai Masakazu, cited through reference to Hasumi Shigehiko as being “the forerunner of all that is called in Japan contemporary thought” (59).
Four “masterpieces” are addressed in part 2 and these are said to represent contemporary influences and therefore muddy, even obviate, the un-nuanced creation/imitation binary in which imitation is not assigned a fixed position; the author calls this “the secret engine of twentieth-century Japanese art” (71). More specifically, Lucken’s idea is to consider how various modern and postmodern Japanese arts fit neither a progression from imitation, through individuation, then creation, nor a model moving from the rejection of imitation, followed by creation, then individuation.
His subjects are the “Western” oil painter Kishida Ryūsei’s portraits of his daughter, Reiko, done between 1914 and 1929, Kurosawa Akira’s black and white film Ikiru (1952), the photographic narrative Sentimental Journey–Winter (1991) by Araki Nobuyoshi that recorded the death of his wife in a succession of images that resulted in what might ultimately be called a kind of “still life,” and Miyazaki Hayao’s internationally acclaimed and popular animation, Spirited Away (2001). The four topics are said by the author to in some sense cover the twentieth century, meaning that it can “be read as an aesthetic history of modern Japan” (6), but in fact, if we look at them together, the specific concern is with arts evincing either serial production or the unfolding of events in time, though the times in his examples are frequently complex rather than chronological. Furthermore, a suite of oil paintings, two films, and a photographic diary barely touch upon Japanese modernism’s diversity, yet alone the sheer range of a single artist’s oeuvre.
While these examples might reasonably be taken as “Japanese” masterpieces, it is their admixture of Western and Eastern references/influences that is of significant import, and what counts among Lucken’s interests are those art forms that are already considered under some form of Westernization rather than examples of Japanese arts that might seem more resistant. His examples erode simplistic distinctions of East and West until such ascriptions are largely themselves somewhat peripheral or perhaps perennially undecided. In his final study of Miyazaki, for example, he discerns “going beyond dialectical oppositions by a genuine openness to others” (206) that is part of his discussion of a larger perspectival metaphor inherent in the animation.
But it is also interesting to note that pushing his first early modern example further might yet yield the desired complexity escaping reduction to East and West. While Kishida was one artist introducing Fauvism to Japan (largely meaning postimpressionism in the Japanese modernist context), he subsequently turned to an increasingly myopic realism (as did many others) through an exploration of German Renaissance painting. Thus it appears he sought an alternative point of “rebirth” in painting that was distinct from the pivotal Italian one that formed the basis of the main Western art-historical narrative. This was not simply anachronism because while in Kishida’s time Western modernism was being introduced to Japan, so simultaneously was much of Western modernism’s earlier history. The images of his daughter, which number over a hundred, form a part of this exploration, but so do his numerous self-portraits, and his still-life paintings.
All of those subsequently underwent variant forms of sinification from at least since 1915 (the author’s explanatory route is through photography and early twentieth-century studies of the supernatural) in Kishida’s piecemeal adoption of aspects of Chinese literati painting that had been imported to Japan from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, then indigenized. From 1918, Kishida frequently began inscribing the flanks of his portrait paintings with kanji scripts, whereas four years earlier they were dated and signed in English. And Kishida would later depict himself on several occasions as a Chinese hermit in the mountains, or Reiko in figural multiplication as part of a mandala, or as a Chinese immortal. Kishida’s multifaceted cultural references, in addition to works in oils, mineral pigments, watercolours, prints, sketches, his illustrations, ukiyo-e/kabuki imagery, and even a votive plaque, evidence the often manifold and frenetic character of early twentieth-century Japanese modernism. Early twentieth- century art practices can sometimes rival postmodernism’s alleged pluralism.
Matthew Larking
Independent Scholar, Kyoto, Japan
pp. 597-599