Conclusion: Japan's Imperial Art World
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 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).
The concept of the imperial art world is useful for rethinking Japanese modern art history because it highlights how in that particular moment the boundaries between the arts of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan were being policed in new and distinct ways. Also, it gestures to the emergence of shared knowledge, professional practices, and institutions, an access to which varied based on ethnicity, language, gender, and class. The "regional" art worlds within the empire were not seamlessly integrated, nor were all artists and artistic traditions equally recognized.
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. Furthermore, 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).