Books by Christine Guth
Res, 2019
This essay reflects on the historical and cultural contingency of the model both as an analytical... more This essay reflects on the historical and cultural contingency of the model both as an analytical category and as a material thing in the context of Japan, with particular reference to its role in diverse forms of knowledge exchange in the early modern era, a period roughly coinciding with the rule of the Tokugawa shoguns from 1603 to 1867. 1 It is intended as a brief intervention, not an encyclopedic survey of this complex and understudied subject. Models exist in many forms in Japan, both two-and three-dimensional, but also embodied, and have operated within multiple and sometimes overlapping social and cultural processes that constructed their codes, values, and uses. Their study is complicated, however, by the fact that neither their forms nor the language used to refer to them have remained constant across historical periods, raising fundamental questions about what constituted a "model" in the early modern era. Mokei, for instance, which most closely approximates the English term "model," is a modern coinage that gained currency in the late nineteenth century in response to the practical need for a classificatory category for the reduced-scale models of historic buildings that became fixtures in the international expositions in which Japan participated. 2 These were primarily ethnographic specimens that made visible the distance between Japanese and Western architectural materials, techniques, and styles. The word mokei replaced an older term, hinagata, which was commonly applied to models of many kinds, but especially printed books that enjoyed wide circulation from the seventeenth century featuring pictorial models of fashionable garment designs. 3 Yet
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Charles Longfellow, son of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, arrived in Yokohama in 1871, intending a b... more Charles Longfellow, son of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, arrived in Yokohama in 1871, intending a brief visit, and stayed for two years. He returned to Boston laden with photographs, curios, and art objects, as well as the elaborate tattoos he had "collected" on his body. His journals, correspondence, and art collection dramatically demonstrate America's early impressions of Japanese culture, and his personal odyssey illustrates the impact on both countries of globetrotting tourism.
Interweaving Longfellow's experiences with broader issues of tourism and cultural authenticity, Christine Guth discusses the ideology of tourism and the place of Japan within nineteenth-century round-the-world travel. This study goes beyond simplistic models of reciprocal influence and authenticity to a more synergistic account of cross-cultural dynamics.
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Recherche, Jan 1, 2010
Livre: Art of edo japan the artist and the city 1615-1868 (paperback) GUTH Christine.
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This beautifully illustrated survey examines the art and artists of the Edo period, one of the gr... more This beautifully illustrated survey examines the art and artists of the Edo period, one of the great epochs in Japanese art. Together with the imperial city of Kyoto and the port cities of Osaka and Nagasaki, the splendid capital city of Edo (now Tokyo) nurtured a magnificent tradition of painting, calligraphy, printmaking, ceramics, architecture, textile work, and lacquer. As each city created its own distinctive social, political, and economic environment, its art acquired a unique flavor and aesthetic. Author Christine Guth focuses on the urban aspects of Edo art, including discussions of many of Japan’s most popular artists—Korin, Utamaro, and Hiroshige, among others—as well as those that are lesser known, and provides a fascinating look at the cities in which they worked.
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In this illustrated book Christine Guth examines the intimate relationship between art collecting... more In this illustrated book Christine Guth examines the intimate relationship between art collecting, the tea ceremony, and business through the activities of Masuda Takashi (1848-1938), the highly charismatic director of the Mitsui conglomerate whose opulent life and passionate pursuit of art continue to influence new generations of aspiring business magnates in Japan. An elaborate social ritual in which the worlds of business and art collecting intersected, the tea ceremony guided Masuda in amassing the finest collection of Sino-Japanese art in the early Japanese industrial era. Guth's exploration of his aesthetic ideas deepens our understanding of not only the formation of the canon of Japanese art but also the role of art in the ideology of early modern Japan.
At a time when there were few art museums in Japan and Japanese art was becoming internationally known, Masuda's tea gatherings functioned as a salon where his colleagues, other collectors, and art dealers could view, discuss, and handle works of art. Under his influence, art collecting and mastery of the tea ceremony became integral parts of the business training and activities of Mitsui executives. Masuda's collection was rich in calligraphy, ink painting, lacquer, and ceramics, but it was especially noted for its Buddhist painting and sculpture. These works, which were dispersed after World War II, are now in museums and private collections throughout Japan and the United States.
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A major contribution to a neglected facet of Japanese art and religion, one of historical importa... more A major contribution to a neglected facet of Japanese art and religion, one of historical importance, the deity Hachiman, which throws light on the entire phenomenon of the role of figural imagery in Shinto.
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Published Articles and Reviews by Christine Guth
Journal of Design History , 2016
Abstract: This essay introduces a little known but significant aspect of the career of architect,... more Abstract: This essay introduces a little known but significant aspect of the career of architect, furniture designer, and self-styled woodworker George Nakashima based on correspondence beginning in 1950 and ending shortly before his death in 1990. The exchanges with, among others, Gira Sarabhai, a founding director of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, and Udar Pinto, a disciple of Sri Aurobindo, adds nuance to the conventional narrative of Charles Eames’s pioneering role in the dissemination of modern design in India. By drawing attention to Nakashima’s deep and enduring personal, spiritual, and professional ties with India, the correspondence also raises questions about the role of spirituality as an agent in the diffusion of modern design.
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Monumenta Nipponica, 1987
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Dress History: New Directions in Theory and Practice, edited by Charlotte Nicklas and Annebella Pollen, 2015
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The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, edited by Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, 2016
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Design and Culture 6/2 (2014), Jul 2014
In this article, I use actor–network theory (ANT) to throw light on the cultural logic of the har... more In this article, I use actor–network theory (ANT) to throw light on the cultural logic of the hari kuyō – or ritual needle disposal. Hari kuyō dovetails with ANT principles because this ritual is a dynamic, historically constituted formation that is shaped by the distributive agency of a network of people, processes, and things. Held annually in temples and shrines across Japan since the Edo period (1603–1867), this ritual disposal of needles has been the subject of extensive scholarship, but insufficient attention has been given to the needle as a technological affordance, and more specifically, to the implications of its materials, manufacture, and consumption for the special status it enjoys in Japan’s object world. Challenging assumptions about the universality of the separation of subject and object upon which I believe that thing theory is premised, my critical analysis of the hari kuyō draws attention to the importance of recognizing the ontological ambiguity between the human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate status of objects as a constituent of design history in Japan.
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Inventing Asian: American perspectives around 1900, 2014
pp. 86-99
Based on symposium presented at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, these... more pp. 86-99
Based on symposium presented at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, these essays examine the presence and myths of Asia in American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Surface Tensions: Surface, Finish and the Meaning of Objects, 2013
p. 34-44
Surfaces are often held to be of lesser consequence than 'deeper' or more 'substantiv... more p. 34-44
Surfaces are often held to be of lesser consequence than 'deeper' or more 'substantive' aspects of artworks and objects. Yet it is also possible to conceive of the surface in more positive terms: as a site where complex forces meet. Surfaces can be theorized as membranes, protective shells, sensitive skins, even thicknesses in their own right. The surface is not so much a barrier to content as an opportunity for encounter: in new objects, the surface is the site of qualities of finish, texture, the site of tactile interaction, the last point of contact between object and maker, and the first point of contact between object and user. Surface tensions includes sixteen essays that explore this theoretically uncharted terrain. The subjects range widely: domestic maintenance; avant-garde fashion; the faking of antiques; postmodern architecture and design; contemporary film costume. Of particular emphasis within the volume are textiles, which are among the most complex and culturally rich materialisations of surface. As a whole, the book provides insights into the whole lifecycle of objects, not just their condition when new.
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East Asian Lacquer: Material Culture, Science & Conservation, 2010
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This article looks at the cultural context in which Hokusai’s now iconic print ‘Under the Wave of... more This article looks at the cultural context in which Hokusai’s now iconic print ‘Under the Wave off Kanagawa’ was produced and consumed to explain how and why it came to be singled out from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, of which it is a part. Its originality lies in going beyond the biographical and connoisseurial approach to examine this woodcut within the maritime turn in visual culture that developed in the early 19th century as both product and producer of Japan’s shifting geopolitical circumstances, and especially its vulnerability to foreign incursions.
Guth’s 12,000-word essay is not only the first extended critical study of the woodcut but also the first to make a serious consideration of the political environment that informed both its creation and changing readings. While it takes Japan from the 1830s to 1860s as its focus, it throws light on the key factors that help to establish this image within the canon of world art. Since its publication, the article has become required reading in university courses on Japanese visual culture.
Guth first presented this material, based on research initiated during a year-long fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, in her prestigious three-part 2008 Toshiba Lectures in Japanese Art at SOAS and the British Museum, London, and the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, Norwich. She was also invited to provide a commentary on the woodcut in the 2010 BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects. The essay forms the basis for the first chapter of her forthcoming sole-author book, The Great Wave: Biography of a Global Icon, which will be published beyond the REF census period.
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Global Design History (2011)
Chanoyu, commonly known in the Anglophone world as the ‘tea ceremony’, was characterised by its m... more Chanoyu, commonly known in the Anglophone world as the ‘tea ceremony’, was characterised by its most famous 16th-century practitioner Sen no Rikyū as nothing more than ‘boiling water for tea’. Yet like much writing on tea, such statements hide the true nature of a practice that, since the 15th century, has been a driving force behind the production and consumption of both imported and domestic luxury goods in Japan. As part of her exploration of fresh interpretative models for the study of a practice that had far-reaching economic implications in early modern Japan, Guth first presented this material in 2008 at a symposium on global commodities co-organised by Warwick University and the V&A Museum, and was later invited to submit it for publication in Global Design History.
This article examines the culture of tea from the perspective of import substitution and innovation, following a methodological perspective discussed in an influential essay by Maxine Berg, who wrote the response to Guth’s contribution to the edited volume. Import substitution, as Berg has defined it, refers to the replacement of like with like, as when a luxury article that becomes too scarce or costly is replaced by a domestic product that simulates its appearance, but not its mode of manufacture. Guth complicates this idea by situating import substitution within tea culture discourses to demonstrate how imported ceramics from China and South-East Asia could be replaced with dissimilar ones through a process of symbolic inversion, and how these in turn could give rise to a range of innovative locally produced teawares that assumed the same luxury status as those they were intended to replace. In so doing, Guth demonstrates the importance of looking into the larger geographies in which both the production and consumption of Japanese tea ceramics were implicated.
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Translation in Modern Japan
The role of translation in the formation of modern Japanese identities has become one of the ... more The role of translation in the formation of modern Japanese identities has become one of the most exciting new fields of inquiry in Japanese studies. This book marks the first attempt to establish the contours of this new field, bringing together seminal works of Japanese scholarship and criticism with cutting-edge English-language scholarship.
Collectively, the contributors to this book address two critical questions: 1) how does the conception of modern Japan as a culture of translation affect our understanding of Japanese modernity and its relation to the East/West divide? and 2) how does the example of a distinctly East Asian tradition of translation affect our understanding of translation itself? The chapter engage a wide array of disciplines, perspectives, and topics from politics to culture, the written language to visual culture, scientific discourse to children's literature and the Japanese conception of a national literature.
Translation in Modern Japan will be of huge interest to a diverse readership in both Japanese studies and translation studies as well as students and scholars of the theory and practice of Japanese literary translation, traditional and modern Japanese history and culture, and Japanese women’s studies.
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Moving beyond contemporary Western frameworks that have led to the stigmatisation of copying in J... more Moving beyond contemporary Western frameworks that have led to the stigmatisation of copying in Japan, Guth’s original article examines this practice within the cultural contexts of the production, use and display of Japanese crafts. It illuminates the complex, changing and, often contradictory roles of the copy in transmitting the techniques, styles, and values of traditional crafts, taking into account both its ritual connotations and its promotion through government legislation aimed at preserving traditional Japanese crafts. Guth contends that copying should be interpreted in relational terms, as a dynamic practice that makes tradition possible, and that copies are thus speaking as much to history as to modernity.
Guth’s critical approach was prompted by her sense that scholars had not sufficiently interrogated the significance of the copy and its associated practices in contemporary craft practice. Her essay focuses on textiles, ceramics, and lacquer – traditional crafts whose leading practitioners have since 1954 been designated ‘Intangible Cultural Property’ (or more commonly, ‘Living National Treasures’). In so doing, Guth argues for both the historical and contemporary roles of copying and the copy as valuable forms of technology and knowledge transfer.
Extending Guth’s previously published research (‘Kokuhō: From dynastic to national treasure’, Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie, 9(9), 313–22) on the institution of the system of National Treasures to take into account practices as well as art objects, the material in this essay was first presented in the context of a symposium at the British Museum held on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan’ (2007). It was developed for publication at the suggestion of the editors of the Journal of Modern Craft. Its contribution lies in its reassessment of current scholarship on Japanese crafts by making explicit the role that copying has played and continues to play in constructing individual and national identities.
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Books by Christine Guth
Interweaving Longfellow's experiences with broader issues of tourism and cultural authenticity, Christine Guth discusses the ideology of tourism and the place of Japan within nineteenth-century round-the-world travel. This study goes beyond simplistic models of reciprocal influence and authenticity to a more synergistic account of cross-cultural dynamics.
At a time when there were few art museums in Japan and Japanese art was becoming internationally known, Masuda's tea gatherings functioned as a salon where his colleagues, other collectors, and art dealers could view, discuss, and handle works of art. Under his influence, art collecting and mastery of the tea ceremony became integral parts of the business training and activities of Mitsui executives. Masuda's collection was rich in calligraphy, ink painting, lacquer, and ceramics, but it was especially noted for its Buddhist painting and sculpture. These works, which were dispersed after World War II, are now in museums and private collections throughout Japan and the United States.
Published Articles and Reviews by Christine Guth
Based on symposium presented at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, these essays examine the presence and myths of Asia in American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Surfaces are often held to be of lesser consequence than 'deeper' or more 'substantive' aspects of artworks and objects. Yet it is also possible to conceive of the surface in more positive terms: as a site where complex forces meet. Surfaces can be theorized as membranes, protective shells, sensitive skins, even thicknesses in their own right. The surface is not so much a barrier to content as an opportunity for encounter: in new objects, the surface is the site of qualities of finish, texture, the site of tactile interaction, the last point of contact between object and maker, and the first point of contact between object and user. Surface tensions includes sixteen essays that explore this theoretically uncharted terrain. The subjects range widely: domestic maintenance; avant-garde fashion; the faking of antiques; postmodern architecture and design; contemporary film costume. Of particular emphasis within the volume are textiles, which are among the most complex and culturally rich materialisations of surface. As a whole, the book provides insights into the whole lifecycle of objects, not just their condition when new.
Guth’s 12,000-word essay is not only the first extended critical study of the woodcut but also the first to make a serious consideration of the political environment that informed both its creation and changing readings. While it takes Japan from the 1830s to 1860s as its focus, it throws light on the key factors that help to establish this image within the canon of world art. Since its publication, the article has become required reading in university courses on Japanese visual culture.
Guth first presented this material, based on research initiated during a year-long fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, in her prestigious three-part 2008 Toshiba Lectures in Japanese Art at SOAS and the British Museum, London, and the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, Norwich. She was also invited to provide a commentary on the woodcut in the 2010 BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects. The essay forms the basis for the first chapter of her forthcoming sole-author book, The Great Wave: Biography of a Global Icon, which will be published beyond the REF census period.
This article examines the culture of tea from the perspective of import substitution and innovation, following a methodological perspective discussed in an influential essay by Maxine Berg, who wrote the response to Guth’s contribution to the edited volume. Import substitution, as Berg has defined it, refers to the replacement of like with like, as when a luxury article that becomes too scarce or costly is replaced by a domestic product that simulates its appearance, but not its mode of manufacture. Guth complicates this idea by situating import substitution within tea culture discourses to demonstrate how imported ceramics from China and South-East Asia could be replaced with dissimilar ones through a process of symbolic inversion, and how these in turn could give rise to a range of innovative locally produced teawares that assumed the same luxury status as those they were intended to replace. In so doing, Guth demonstrates the importance of looking into the larger geographies in which both the production and consumption of Japanese tea ceramics were implicated.
Collectively, the contributors to this book address two critical questions: 1) how does the conception of modern Japan as a culture of translation affect our understanding of Japanese modernity and its relation to the East/West divide? and 2) how does the example of a distinctly East Asian tradition of translation affect our understanding of translation itself? The chapter engage a wide array of disciplines, perspectives, and topics from politics to culture, the written language to visual culture, scientific discourse to children's literature and the Japanese conception of a national literature.
Translation in Modern Japan will be of huge interest to a diverse readership in both Japanese studies and translation studies as well as students and scholars of the theory and practice of Japanese literary translation, traditional and modern Japanese history and culture, and Japanese women’s studies.
Guth’s critical approach was prompted by her sense that scholars had not sufficiently interrogated the significance of the copy and its associated practices in contemporary craft practice. Her essay focuses on textiles, ceramics, and lacquer – traditional crafts whose leading practitioners have since 1954 been designated ‘Intangible Cultural Property’ (or more commonly, ‘Living National Treasures’). In so doing, Guth argues for both the historical and contemporary roles of copying and the copy as valuable forms of technology and knowledge transfer.
Extending Guth’s previously published research (‘Kokuhō: From dynastic to national treasure’, Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie, 9(9), 313–22) on the institution of the system of National Treasures to take into account practices as well as art objects, the material in this essay was first presented in the context of a symposium at the British Museum held on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan’ (2007). It was developed for publication at the suggestion of the editors of the Journal of Modern Craft. Its contribution lies in its reassessment of current scholarship on Japanese crafts by making explicit the role that copying has played and continues to play in constructing individual and national identities.
Interweaving Longfellow's experiences with broader issues of tourism and cultural authenticity, Christine Guth discusses the ideology of tourism and the place of Japan within nineteenth-century round-the-world travel. This study goes beyond simplistic models of reciprocal influence and authenticity to a more synergistic account of cross-cultural dynamics.
At a time when there were few art museums in Japan and Japanese art was becoming internationally known, Masuda's tea gatherings functioned as a salon where his colleagues, other collectors, and art dealers could view, discuss, and handle works of art. Under his influence, art collecting and mastery of the tea ceremony became integral parts of the business training and activities of Mitsui executives. Masuda's collection was rich in calligraphy, ink painting, lacquer, and ceramics, but it was especially noted for its Buddhist painting and sculpture. These works, which were dispersed after World War II, are now in museums and private collections throughout Japan and the United States.
Based on symposium presented at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, these essays examine the presence and myths of Asia in American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Surfaces are often held to be of lesser consequence than 'deeper' or more 'substantive' aspects of artworks and objects. Yet it is also possible to conceive of the surface in more positive terms: as a site where complex forces meet. Surfaces can be theorized as membranes, protective shells, sensitive skins, even thicknesses in their own right. The surface is not so much a barrier to content as an opportunity for encounter: in new objects, the surface is the site of qualities of finish, texture, the site of tactile interaction, the last point of contact between object and maker, and the first point of contact between object and user. Surface tensions includes sixteen essays that explore this theoretically uncharted terrain. The subjects range widely: domestic maintenance; avant-garde fashion; the faking of antiques; postmodern architecture and design; contemporary film costume. Of particular emphasis within the volume are textiles, which are among the most complex and culturally rich materialisations of surface. As a whole, the book provides insights into the whole lifecycle of objects, not just their condition when new.
Guth’s 12,000-word essay is not only the first extended critical study of the woodcut but also the first to make a serious consideration of the political environment that informed both its creation and changing readings. While it takes Japan from the 1830s to 1860s as its focus, it throws light on the key factors that help to establish this image within the canon of world art. Since its publication, the article has become required reading in university courses on Japanese visual culture.
Guth first presented this material, based on research initiated during a year-long fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, in her prestigious three-part 2008 Toshiba Lectures in Japanese Art at SOAS and the British Museum, London, and the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, Norwich. She was also invited to provide a commentary on the woodcut in the 2010 BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects. The essay forms the basis for the first chapter of her forthcoming sole-author book, The Great Wave: Biography of a Global Icon, which will be published beyond the REF census period.
This article examines the culture of tea from the perspective of import substitution and innovation, following a methodological perspective discussed in an influential essay by Maxine Berg, who wrote the response to Guth’s contribution to the edited volume. Import substitution, as Berg has defined it, refers to the replacement of like with like, as when a luxury article that becomes too scarce or costly is replaced by a domestic product that simulates its appearance, but not its mode of manufacture. Guth complicates this idea by situating import substitution within tea culture discourses to demonstrate how imported ceramics from China and South-East Asia could be replaced with dissimilar ones through a process of symbolic inversion, and how these in turn could give rise to a range of innovative locally produced teawares that assumed the same luxury status as those they were intended to replace. In so doing, Guth demonstrates the importance of looking into the larger geographies in which both the production and consumption of Japanese tea ceramics were implicated.
Collectively, the contributors to this book address two critical questions: 1) how does the conception of modern Japan as a culture of translation affect our understanding of Japanese modernity and its relation to the East/West divide? and 2) how does the example of a distinctly East Asian tradition of translation affect our understanding of translation itself? The chapter engage a wide array of disciplines, perspectives, and topics from politics to culture, the written language to visual culture, scientific discourse to children's literature and the Japanese conception of a national literature.
Translation in Modern Japan will be of huge interest to a diverse readership in both Japanese studies and translation studies as well as students and scholars of the theory and practice of Japanese literary translation, traditional and modern Japanese history and culture, and Japanese women’s studies.
Guth’s critical approach was prompted by her sense that scholars had not sufficiently interrogated the significance of the copy and its associated practices in contemporary craft practice. Her essay focuses on textiles, ceramics, and lacquer – traditional crafts whose leading practitioners have since 1954 been designated ‘Intangible Cultural Property’ (or more commonly, ‘Living National Treasures’). In so doing, Guth argues for both the historical and contemporary roles of copying and the copy as valuable forms of technology and knowledge transfer.
Extending Guth’s previously published research (‘Kokuhō: From dynastic to national treasure’, Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie, 9(9), 313–22) on the institution of the system of National Treasures to take into account practices as well as art objects, the material in this essay was first presented in the context of a symposium at the British Museum held on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan’ (2007). It was developed for publication at the suggestion of the editors of the Journal of Modern Craft. Its contribution lies in its reassessment of current scholarship on Japanese crafts by making explicit the role that copying has played and continues to play in constructing individual and national identities.
My essay, published in Bijutsu Kenkyu, the journal of the Department of Fine Arts, National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Japan, examined the changing meanings of these terms. I used a discussion of the use of these terms between the 16th and 19th- centuries to illuminate the class and gendered dimensions of the reception of Japanese visual and material culture in Europe, and, especially, America. In so doing I demonstrated the way artefacts exported from Japan took on an ideological significance that they never had in their country of origin.
This is the first systematic study of the problem surrounding the formation of the categories "curiosity" and "curio" to take Japan as its point of reference. My essay problematised the discussion of the reception of Japanese artefacts in the West in terms of the "fine" and "decorative arts" by showing the persistence yet changing parameters of their classification as curiosities.
My research on curios was further developed in the context of a workshop, Japan Goes to the World's Fairs: Japanese Art at the Great Expositions in Europe and the United States, 1867-1904 held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in October 2005 and published in Design.
My key primary sources were Takamura Kôun's autobiography and the poetic and critical writings of his son. These primary source materials are rare in the history of 19th-and early 20th-centrury Japanese art, offering a rare vantage point from which to understand the personal and professional struggles for self-definition that were part of the intense debates of the period about the nature of the artistic profession, and most notably the distinction between 'craftsman' and 'artist'. The volume is now widely used as a text in teaching about Japanese art and culture.
This essay examines the changing meanings of these terms to illuminate the class and gendered dimensions of the reception of Japanese visual and material culture in Europe, and, especially, America. The word “ curiosity ” was used beginning in the sixteenth century to designate rarities from Japan acquired by male collectors for display in private and public cabinets of curiosities. Its diminutive form “ curio, ” which came into currency only with the advent of widespread trade with and travel to Japan in the nineteenth century, by contrast, designated novelties, often of small scale and cost, purchased by female consumers as accessories for the home. Thus, in both these contexts, do articles from Japan take on ideological significance that they never had in their country of origin.