Conclusion: Japan's Imperial Art World
A growing number of painters from Korea and Taiwan of the first generation to grow up under colonial rule attended art schools in Japan and participated in smaller and major art exhibitions in the metropole. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, some of them would become well known figures in the imperial art world. The 1930s also saw the appearance of young emerging writers, dancers, and sportsmen from the colonies on the pages of metropolitan newspapers and magazines. In 1933 Korean writer Chang Hyokchu (Cho Kakuchu, 1905-1997) received a literary award for his writing in Japanese. The following year, Taiwanese Chinese writer Yang Kui's (1906-1985) short story was awarded a literary prize (Kleeman 2003, 160). In 1936, Son Kijŏng (1912-2002), a Korean marathon runner, won the golden medal for the Japanese team at the Summer Olympics in Berlin.
Japan's imperial art world expanded further. Manchukuo, with its annual Manchukuo Fine Arts Exhibitions (J. Manshūkoku bijutsu tenrankai, 1938-1944), came into its orbit, as well as the Southern Islands in the Pacific and the South East Asia at large by the early 1940s. Recent scholarly monographs by Asato Ikeda, Annika Culver, and Charlotte Eubanks bring this aspect into sharp relief, further demonstrating that an approach to Japanese art history that omits the empire is untenable (Asato Ikeda, The Politics of Painting: Fascism and Japanese Art during the Second World War, 2018; Annika Culver, Glorify the Empire: Japanese Avant-Garde Propaganda in Manchukuo, The University of British Columbia Press 2013; add full ref).
When studying the imperial art world, we need to distinguish between 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 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).
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 Japan's claims to the mantle of "East Asian Art World" and how artists in Japan saw their art as a match to Western art. (Add ref to Stephanie Su research on the competition between Chinese and Japanese artists at that time; check Aida Yuan Wong?).
Furthermore, this concept invites us to challenge art historical notions of place in relation to art that tend to situate art within the timeless and fixed space of the nation. Nation state building has shaped how we study art, yet our global artistic imagination and reality has been equally if not more impacted by imperial formations and cultural imperialism. Postcolonial studies have made this point. More recently, scholars have been debating the possibility of a global art history and of decolonizing art history (see Beatrice Joyeux-Prunel 2019 for an overview; reread it).
In this module, I have approached place as a historical construct. By paying attention to changes in the circulation of people and knowledge as well as individual actors' understanding of their own place, I have traced the process of place-making at a specific point in time in a specific location. In this way, CONTINUE THINKING ABOUT THIS + DEEP MAPPING.
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