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Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture—Part 1 |
< Back "Tang Things" in Momoyama Japan Andrew M. Watsky Vassar College Even as Japanese armies marched on Ming China in the late sixteenth century, the artifacts of ancient China continued to elicit the esteem of Japanese elites. China present was a target to defeat and incorporate into the Japanese realm, whereas China past was admired as an idealized antiquity embedded in paintings and other objects and in poetry that had been transmitted to Japan. This “China” was an imagined place, construed and constructed in Japan from imported Chinese objects and writings and then employed in Japan during this, the Momoyama period (1568-1615). As Chino Kaori has argued, the roots of the imagined “China” originated much earlier, in the Heian period (794–1185), as one half of a new Japanese whole that combined “Kara” (“China”) with “Yamato” (“Japan”). In this paradigm Kara, the Japanese reading of the character for “Tang,” at first denoted China’s Tang dynasty (618–906), an influential Asian presence while it existed; after the dynasty’s decline, however, “Kara” came to signify in Japan assimilated “Chinese” elements in Japanese culture. Although the dynasty was long vanished by the Momoyama period, Tang persisted in Japan as the referent for objects of Chinese origin, indicated by the term karamono, “Tang things.” The designation “karamono” could both suggest an object's remoteness from contemporary China and emphasize its role as a totem of an idealized “China past.” Veneration of these old “Tang things” – paintings, ceramics, and bronze vessels, among others – took many forms in the Momoyama, as it did in previous centuries. Cultured Japanese avidly collected them, as they long had, and they prized, carefully preserved, and wrote about them as authentic originals (that is, as objects that Momoyama connoisseurs believed to be authentic – whether they are now so considered or not – and treated with accordingly high regard). The Chinese objects served also as models for Japanese productions, which themselves were valued not as copies, for they rarely simply adopted the model without notable transformation, but as adaptations of the original that fulfilled local criteria. A painting of the latter sort, for example, typically spoke of “China” both in style and in theme: form and content were linked as a single entity that simultaneously expressed to a discerning audience an understanding of the original models and also the successful Japanese interpretation of those models. In this paper, I will focus on antique “Tang things,” in particular a painting and a ceramic vessel, and with them trace a concerted effort by sixteenth-century Japanese patrons and artists to aggressively claim Chinese antiquity as part of their own cultural heritage. These objects found their premier place of Japanese importance within the paradigmatic aesthetic and performative activity of Momoyama Japan, chanoyu, the ritualized consumption of tea. One gauge of the significance Momoyama Japan accorded “China” and Chinese artifacts is found in the discussions of chanoyu objects recorded in period chanoyu texts. Chanoyu participants kept diaries of tea gatherings and of special viewings of valued objects. These commentaries reveal personal responses to objects of interest. Another chanoyu text, The Records of Yamanoue no Sōji, is of an altogether different order. Written by the tea man Yamanoue no Sōji (1544–1590, disciple of the most important Momoyama tea master, Sen no Rikyū, 1522–1591), the text presents an orderly and annotated catalogue of venerable chanoyu objects and, most significant to our discussion, records tea lore and tea thinking about these objects and about “China.” The first work I will examine was treasured in Momoyama Japan as a particularly excellent painting by the thirteenth-century Chinese artist Yujian and depicted one of the famed Eight Views of Xiao Xiang, “Mountain Market, Clearing Mist.” Momoyama connoisseurs believed that Yujian had originally created the painting as part of a handscroll, but – according to The Records of Yamanoue no Sōji – that the handscroll had been dismembered and reconfigured into eight vertically oriented hanging scrolls in Japan in the fifteenth century. This transformation thereby allowed the painting to function according to Japanese display practices, most especially within the context of privileged presentation of sixteenth-century chanoyu, where the hanging scroll would have hung within the narrow vertical confines of the tokonoma display alcove within the tea room. The painting acquired great fame as a hanging scroll, appearing in tea diaries and Sōji’s Records as having been owned by, among others, earlier shoguns and the Momoyama warrior-ruler, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598). Its movement amongst prominent owners and appearances in chanoyu gatherings inspired awe (as recorded in period texts) as well as Japanese productions of paintings of the Eight Views of Xiao Xiang. The second work is an antique Chinese ceramic vessel that was transformed in Japan though an act of naming that tied the vessel to a specific Japanese location and thereby made it a Chinese object over which Japanese dominion was asserted. An ōtsubo, or large jar, it was one of a type of Chinese vessel that was produced in southern China as a utilitarian storage jar and imported to Japan from as early as the twelfth century. In Japan, from about the fourteenth century onward, such large jars were used to store tea leaves and, significantly, were appropriated as treasures of chanoyu value, the largest object displayed within the tea room. Sōji’s Records list twenty-two particularly famous large jars, all owned by esteemed chanoyu practitioners. One was named “Hashidate,” and the history of how it acquired its name as well as the literary and historical implications of the name were recorded and disseminated in the Momoyama period, best demonstrated by an entry in Sōji’s Records. Sōji provides two explanations for the name, both of which tie the name to the Japanese famed location of beauty, Amanohashidate. In particular, the second explanation – a complex story concerning an earlier shogun owner of the vessel – makes a compelling linkage between the vessel and not only the location of Amanohashidate, but also ancient Japanese poetry associated with Amanohashidate. Used in Japanese chanoyu and given a Japanese name rooted in Japanese geography and Japanese poetry, the Chinese antique became an assimilated ceramic that functioned within elite Japanese contexts and even became incorporated into Japan’s literary past. |
