Japan's Imperial Art World: A Conclusion
This module has argued that by the 1930s Japan had a nascent imperial art world, intimately intertwined with the art worlds of Korea and Taiwan. To support this argument, I examined art education and professionalization in Japan and Taiwan in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as Guo Xuehu's career and paintings. It is possible and necessary to demonstrate the existence of parallel intra-imperial infrastructures in other areas as well, such as art exhibitions, newspaper publicity, and art museums (See my dissertation. Also, Add ref to Noriko Aso's public properties. Also, the artworks themselves deserve more investigation. See Nancy Lin, dissertation, book in progress).
Such macro investigations of the empire are fraught with some problems. First, the emphasis on proximity/intimacy of Japan's and Taiwan's art worlds should not detract us from recognizing particular developments and specific conditions of each place. Second, we need to evaluate carefully the imperial rhetoric and reality. As Aimee Nayoung Kwon pointed out, the semblance of an imperial "imagined community" created by the Japanese language mass media circulating throughout the empire belied the violent repressions of conflict and difference (Kwon emphasizes that this "image of an imperial community" was accessible only to the colonized elites and Japanese settler community and so it was highly unlikely that it could have been shared by the general population. Book, 163-164, 240). Many other scholars have demonstrated the double-faced character of assimilation policies, according to which 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).
By adopting the concept of the imperial art world, I do not posit a seamless integration of regional art worlds within the empire, nor necessarily suggest that the boundaries of the imperial art world corresponded to those of the Japanese empire. Instead, I find the concept of the imperial art world useful to implicate Japanese artists in the project of empire and acknowledge the presence of colonial artists within the metropolitan art circles. It draws our attention to a moment in the history of East Asian art, where the boundaries between the arts of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan were being policed in new and distinct ways. Also, it highlights the emergence of shared knowledge, professional practices, and institutions, an access to which continued to be shaped by gender and class. By doing so, this concept helps us challenge our preconceived notions of place in relation to art.