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Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture—Part 2 |
< Back Reinventing Antiquity: Taiga's Famous Sites of Japan Hans Bjarne Thomsen University of Chicago Are antiquarian expressions culture-specific? Or can antiquarian expressions of one culture be used to inspire those of others? And how did artists use the visual forms of nonnative antiquarianism to create new visions of their own culture’s past? In order to address these questions, this paper proposes to look, in general, at eighteenth century in Kyoto and, specifically, at the case of Ike Taiga. It will be seen that Ike Taiga took the visual expressions of Chinese antiquarianism as his models and created visions of an imagined Japanese past, that is, new expressions of a native antiquarianism. Eighteenth century Kyoto experienced a period of profound sinophilic antiquarianism that became reflected in many aspects of contemporary culture, including poetry, calligraphy, seal carving, art collecting, and painting. Large temple collections of Chinese paintings collected in earlier periods became closely studied and appeared in the works of various artists. Artists such as Itō Jakuchū made close copies of such Chinese works and themes from Chinese paintings came to inform the new painting expressions that appeared at the time. We can see from contemporary documents such as the Ga no ki, that artists were aware of the location of these canonical Chinese works and that they created a hierarchy of extant art work with the imported paintings at the very top. Likewise can we see that new collections wee being formed in private hands at this time and that these collections included newly imported- -and eagerly studied- -Chinese paintings and calligraphy. Ike Taiga took very much a part in this new wave of Chinese studies, and, as a result, references to Chinese paintings, Chinese themes, and Chinese calligraphy appear prominently in his works. During his life he continually experimented on and elaborated on these expressions of the Chinese past. At the same time, Taiga also used the visual forms of the Chinese past to create new visions of his ancient Japan. Through the formats, the themes, and even the calligraphic forms of the imported works, Taiga successfully transformed nonnative inspirations in order to create a corpus of works of Japanese antiquarianism. We will examine several important works in Taiga’s oeuvre in order to examine the mechanism by which he used the outer Chinese forms of Chinese antiquarianism to create new visions of Japan’s past. |
