The Making of Japanese Art History in the 20th Century

Book Talk

The Irony of Nationalism

Stephanie Su (Associate Professor of Asian Art, University of Colorado Boulder)

Nationalism draws sharp lines between self and other yet depends on the cross-border exchange it claims to reject. This talk exposes that paradox in modern East Asian art, recovering overlooked materials that reveal how artistic production in Japan and China was far more entangled than nationalist narratives admit. At the center are two painters working in the 1930s: Japan’s Nakamura Fusetsu and China’s Xu Beihong. Comparing their history paintings, self-portraits and artistic sources, this talk uncovers a striking irony: works long celebrated as national pride were, in fact, shaped by models borrowed from one another. Drawing on artists’ writings, journals, newspapers, photographs, and exhibition reviews from both countries, this talk traces these dynamics of exchange that nationalism worked hard to erase. The result is a compelling case for a regional approach to East Asian art history, moving beyond nationalist frameworks to reveal how deeply connected these histories actually were.

Stephanie Su is Associate Professor of Asian Art at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research interests include the 20th century East Asian art, the Sino-Japanese relationship, global modernism, Japanese prints and papers. She has been a fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, and the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures. Her publication includes a monograph History Painting Crossing Borders: A Transnational History of Modern Art in Early Twentieth Century China and Japan (Brill, 2025), and articles in the Art Bulletin, Japan Forum, and the Review of Japanese Culture and Society, among others.

Closing Keynote

Japanese Art History, Today, and Tomorrow

Maki Fukuoka (Associate Professor, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds)

Maki Fukuoka’s research and teaching interests are coordinated by two broad axes: histories of seeing and alternative modes of knowing. She explores the praxis through photographic histories, histories of collections and exhibitions, and gender and art. Most recently, she has also been a part of a research team on Frank S. Matsura, a Japanese emigrant who became a professional photographer in Okanogan, Washington in the early twentieth century. The collaboration resulted in a feature-length documentary film Our Mr. Matsura (2025), and an edited book, Frank S. Matsura: Iconoclast Photographer of the American West (2025). Her translation of Suzuki Hiroyuki’s Antiquarians of Nineteenth-Century Japan: the Archaeology of Things in the Late Tokugawa and Early Meiji Periods was published in 2021. She served as the 30th Ishibashi Foundation Visiting Professor, and currently teaches at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds.

What Makes a Colour Print? Innovation-Centrism and Canon Formation in Ukiyo-e Studies

Sabine S. Bradel (Assistant Professor, Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University)

The nineteenth-century importation of Edo-period woodblock prints, especially ukiyo-e and illustrated books, into Europe and North America broadened public access to Japanese objects and initiated a more systematic study of Japanese art that replaced mere connoisseurship. Lacking tools to analyse East Asian print materials, Euro-American art historians applied domestic art academic assessment methods that privileged innovation in printing technology and categorised works according to genre hierarchies. Particularly impactful in ukiyo-e studies was the labelling of prints produced before the introduction of nishiki-e multicolour printing in the mid-1760s as “primitive,” and the privileging of pictures of beautiful people over depictions of kabuki actors. Although contemporary scholarship has adopted a more critical stance, the canon established by these methods remains widely accepted and rarely questioned. To demonstrate how this innovation-centrism in art historiography has shaped the understanding, collecting, and exhibiting of ukiyo-e, this paper introduces Torii Kiyomitsu (1735–1785), the third head of a school specialising in prints for the kabuki theatre, and Suzuki Harunobu (1725–1770), the first artist to exploit the potential of nishiki-e printmaking. In Harunobu’s case, the dominant narrative has obscured the first five years of his career, during which he designed limited-colour prints of kabuki actors and monochrome books. Kiyomitsu, by contrast, has been largely forgotten as he stands between the first two generations, who pioneered monochrome and hand-coloured printmaking, and the fourth generation, which turned to nishiki-e depictions of beautiful people. However, when lingering nineteenth-century biases are set aside, a fuller understanding of mid-Edo colour woodblock printmaking becomes possible.

Sabine S. Bradel is Assistant Professor at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study (WIAS), Waseda University, Tokyo. After earning her doctorate at the University of Zurich, she documented Swiss and German ukiyo-e collections and assisted with their exhibitions. Her postdoctoral research project (JP25K22939) investigates how technological innovation-centrism in art historiography has affected the collecting and exhibiting of ukiyo-e and sheds light on the careers of artists behind the so-called “canon.”

Competing Histories of Sōsaku Hanga: Onchi Kōshiro, Ono Tadashige, and Postwar Canon Formation

Maria Puzyreva (PhD Candidate, History of Art Department, University of Pennsylvania)

The sōsaku hanga, or creative print, movement, which transformed Japanese printmaking in the early twentieth century, has been largely historicized through postwar American scholarship. Responding to the taste of American print enthusiasts such as William Hartnett and Oliver Statler, this narrative, reproduced in both Western and Japanese scholarship, marginalized other formative influences, notably Japanese-Russian printmaking exchange. These connections survived primarily through participant documentation: proletarian printmaker and art historian Ono Tadashige recorded them in two books on modern Japanese print history, articulating an alternative framework absent from dominant accounts. While recent Japanese scholarship has begun to address Japanese-Russian artistic relations, particularly through the work of art historian Omuka Toshiharu, its role in the early formation of sōsaku hanga—and its exclusion from most histories—remains unexamined. This paper investigates how the sōsaku hanga canon was constructed in the postwar period by contrasting two competing narratives: one co-produced by American collectors and the artists of Onchi Kōshiro’s circle, and the other articulated by Ono Tadashige. By analyzing how these actors framed the movement’s early development, the paper reveals how Japanese print artists and art historians, operating within specific material and political circumstances, actively shaped how their art would be historicized. In doing so, the paper proposes a new framework for understanding sōsaku hanga’s early development, restoring transnational entanglements that the received narrative, defined by its American reception, has long obscured.

Maria Puzyreva is a PhD Candidate in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in the history of modern printmaking in Japan. Her dissertation examines sōsaku hanga artists’ participation in transnational artistic networks, tracing the movement’s connections to printmakers from Europe, Russia, China, and the postwar United States. She is currently a Dreesmann Fellow at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Her essay on Japan-Russian printmaking exchange appeared in Pictures of Friendship: Festschrift for Evgeny Steiner (2025). She curated an exhibition on the modern Japanese print in America at the Michener Art Museum and is now completing a catalogue.

History Lessons: Itō Chūta and the “Age of Public Architecture”

Matthew Mullane (Assistant Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture, Radboud University, Nijmegen)

In 1905, the Japanese architect and historian Itō Chūta concluded a three-year trek around the globe. He had traveled further than any architect before him to collect evidence that proved a bold hypothesis: that Japanese architecture was demonstrably connected not only to the West, but to the world as a whole. Once home, he committed himself to transforming his theory of an “interconnected” architectural history into built form. He named this new architectural style “Gandharan” architecture, arguing that imperial Japan had become the modern crucible of Western and Eastern cultures. But would everyday people understand the historical references embedded in his houses, memorials, and civic buildings? Itō, like other imperial bureaucrats, worried that citizens were ignorant of the growing Japanese empire. In response, he declared that the “age of public architecture” required a new type of architecture that simultaneously served civic functions and taught passersby about the country’s present, past, and future. His “Gandharan” architecture, full of references to Japanese and world history, would do just this. In this presentation, I show how Itō leveraged his globe-spanning research trip to popularize world architectural history and quell imperial anxiety. I argue that Itō’s work in both text and concrete shows that the discipline of architectural history was more than a classroom activity in the first quarter of the twentieth century, it was a national duty exercised in the streets.

Matthew Mullane is an Assistant Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at Radboud University in Nijmegen, NL. After receiving his PhD from Princeton University, he was a postdoc at Harvard University, and Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo. His book, World Observation: Empire, Architecture, and the Global Archive of Itō Chūta (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), offers an alternative origin for global architecture history in nineteenth-century Japan. His writing has appeared in Architectural Theory Review, The Journal of Architecture, Future Anterior, Clara, AA Files, Log, gta papers, Public Domain Review, and others.

The Discourse Surrounding the Hōryūji Studies of the 1900s

Kengo Matsui (Master student, Graduate School of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Waseda University)

Kōhon Nihon Teikoku Bijutsu Ryakushi (The Brief History of Art in Imperial Japan), the first officially compiled art history in Japan and the source text for the French Histoire de l'art du Japon published for the 1900 Paris Exposition, presents Hōryūji Temple — as a case embodying Japanese art “constituted by gathering the essence of East Asian art” — through a series of international comparisons. Four argumentative threads are developed: the stylistic affinity between the kondō (Main Hall) murals and the Indian Ajanta cave paintings; the identification of entasis in the temple's columns with Greek architectural practice; the claimed resemblance between the Tamamushi Shrine's arabesque ornament and Arabian and Byzantine art; and the connection of its mitsuda patterns to the Greek honeysuckle motif. This paper critically examines these four arguments with respect to sources, authorship, and reception. The most noteworthy is the entasis argument which was advocated by Itō Chūta (伊東忠太, 1867-1954). Despite Itō himself failing to obtain empirical confirmation during fieldwork, the hypothesis achieved wide currency through Watsuji Tetsurō (和辻哲郎, 1889-1960)'s Pilgrimages to Ancient Temples (古寺巡礼, Iwanami Shoten, 1919), making it a telling example of how a single researcher's conjecture can become naturalized as common knowledge. These comparative frameworks functioned as a discursive strategy to position Japan — as the legitimate synthesizer of Indian and Chinese cultural inheritance — as a civilizational subject capable of representing Asia against the West at Paris. The paper concludes by asking whether such structures persist in contemporary frameworks for the international promotion of Japanese art, thereby opening the political valences of art-historical language to critical scrutiny.

Kengo Matsui is a first-year Master's student in the Graduate School of Letters, Arts and Sciences at Waseda University. Under the supervision of Professor Satomi Yamamoto, he has been working on the historiography of Japanese art history. His undergraduate thesis, titled “The Modernity of Hōryūji Studies,” surveyed the debate over Hōryūji's reconstruction—contested from 1900 until its provisional resolution in 1940—and traced the formation of art-historical methodology in modern Japan. His current research examines how an “antiquarianism (好古, kouko)” mode of inquiry, rooted in Edo-period traveling exhibitions of Hōryūji, shaped its scholarly study in the Meiji era.

Displaying Japan in Interwar Vietnam: Transimperial Encounters at the Musée Khai-Dinh, 1942

Diệu Ly Hoàng (PhD student, History of Art at the University of Oxford)

Founded in 1923 in Huế, the Musée Khai-Dinh was established under French colonial rule as a museum dedicated to the collection, classification, and display of material culture associated with the former Vietnamese empire. Existing scholarship has primarily examined the institution as a product of French colonial knowledge production and cultural policy. This paper proposes a different perspective by focusing on a little-studied episode from the museum’s wartime history. Archival documents from 1942 record visits by several Japanese diplomats and military officers. Following these visits, museum reports noted plans for a special display case to exhibit a Japanese sword, reportedly “on the suggestion of Japanese personalities who had visited the museum.” While the provenance of the sword remains unclear, this episode raises broader questions about the role of the museum during the period of overlapping French and Japanese authority in Indochina from 1941 to 1945. Using this microhistorical case study, the paper investigates how the Musée Khai-Dinh functioned as a space of transimperial cultural diplomacy. Rather than treating the museum solely as an instrument of French colonial rule, I examine it as a site in which multiple imperial projects intersected and were negotiated through practices of display, collecting, and representation. By tracing the circumstances surrounding the display of the Japanese sword, this work-in-progress contribution sheds light on a hitherto understudied episode in the history of the Musée Khai-Dinh and contributes to a broader understanding of museum histories in Vietnam under Japanese occupation.

Diệu Ly Hoàng recently completed her M.A. in Art Studies at Technische Universität Berlin, where her research focused on colonial museum histories, heritage-making, and transnational knowledge production in French Indochina. Her master's thesis examined the Musée Khai-Dinh in Huế as a colonial museum and explored its role in shaping cultural and historical narratives under French rule. Beginning in October 2026, she will pursue a DPhil in History of Art at the University of Oxford, researching the fragmentation and dispersal of Cham art in colonial Indochina. She has presented her work at international conferences in Europe and North America and is the author of an article in Histoire de l’Art.

Picturing Defeat as History: Ihara Usaburo (1894–1976) and the Visual Construction of the Hong Kong Surrender, 1941

Kary Chan Ka Wai (MA Student, Kyushu University)

Following the British surrender on 26 December 1941, [jp.] Hon Kon Senryōchi Sōtokubu 香港占領地総督部 (Governor-General’s Office of Occupied Hong Kong) formally brought Hong Kong under Japanese occupation (December 1941–August 1945). Drawing on official archival sources and newspapers, this study focuses on bunka seisaku 文化政策 (cultural policies) implemented by the administration from 1942 onward, that aimed to develop Hong Kong’s cultural infrastructure while repositioning the city as a cultural centre of Tōyō 東洋 (the East). Yet this project also became a site of contestation. In 1943, several Japanese cultural figures publicly criticised these activities in Hon Kon Nichinichi Shimbun 香港日報 (Hong Kong Daily News), prompting anonymous responses from government officials and opening a wider debate over the role of culture in wartime occupation. This presentation focuses in particular on the proposals of jūgun gaka 従軍画家 (war artist under the Army commission) Ihara Usaburō 伊原宇三郎 (1894–1976), who advocated for the construction of an art museum in Hong Kong and for exhibitions of sensō kirokuga 戦争記録画 (war record paintings). Although his ideas were never realised by the Office, this tension reveals competing visions of wartime cultural policy and of how art should function within the occupation. As part of the author’s MA research, it further explores how wartime painting transformed events that just happened into legible visual narratives. Centring on Ihara’s Hon Kon ni okeru Sakai Shireikan, Yangu Sōtoku no Kaiken 香港に於ける酒井司令官、ヤング総督の会見 (Meeting between Commander Sakai and Governor Young in Hong Kong), alongside Rikugun Bijutsuten 陸軍美術展 (Army Art Exhibition, 1944 at Tokyo-to Bijutsukan 東京都美術館), it argues that war record paintings did not merely document events but actively constructed surrender as a stable visual form of imperial authority and historical memory.

Kary Chan Ka Wai is graduate student in Japanese Art History at Kyushu University, who has a strong interest on the representations of war and battle, involving Qing frontier minorities and Sino-Japanese relation. Her current research focuses on Japanese artworks depicting Hong Kong during the occupation (1941–1945). She also works as a research assistant for the Hong Kong Japanese Occupation Spatial Project at Hong Kong Baptist University. Before beginning her graduate studies, she worked as a research assistant at City University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where she contributed to projects on the history of the Qing southwest frontier, court painting, and diplomatic gift exchange.

Peripheral Artforms and the Introduction of “Bijutsu”: Visual Media in the Formation of the Art Canon during the Meiji—taishō Period

Arend Bucher (PhD student and educational assistant, Japanese and Korean Studies, KU Leuven)

A myriad of creative products, which we would now call “art,” can be found in Japan throughout its history with each their respective contemporaneous status. However, the overarching concept of “art” was only introduced to Japan in the Meiji period. Within the context of the modernization of Japan, the term bijutsu was coined in 1872 as an equivalent for “fine arts” and a series of government initiatives were launched to establish a Japanese art canon. Domestic and international exhibitions, competitions and art magazines helped to stimulate the domestic art scenes, forming yet another political move to put Japan on the stage of world politics. Simultaneously this process molded a public consciousness of what “art” is, should or could be, intentionally or not. This paper investigates how reprographic visual media that were originally regarded as mere vulgar images (woodblock prints), documentation (photographs), or educational illustrations (lithographs) fought to survive throughout a rapidly evolving society with many technological and ideological changes. Aside from the discrepancy between foreign and domestic views on these “peripheral artforms,” they were also domestically sandwiched between the concept of “fine arts” on the one hand, and the rhetoric of “authenticity” in media on the other. I argue that these media/artforms had to continually shapeshift and reinvent themselves during the Meiji and early Taishō period in order to survive in the media landscape, and perhaps find a way into the world of “art,” which also became the major field in which these works have been studied ever since.

Arend Bucher is a PhD student under the guidance of Prof. Jan Schmidt and Prof. Hilde Van Gelder, and is educational assistant at Japanese and Korean Studies, KU Leuven. He received his bachelor's and master’s degree in Japanese studies at KU Leuven and studied a year at Kyoto University. Subsequently, he completed the post-graduate in Korean studies at KU Leuven and worked half a year at the 2025 World Exhibition in Osaka. As a researcher, he specializes in Japanese visual media, focusing on woodblock prints, lithographs and photographs that depict the First Sino-Japanese War, Russo-Japanese War and First World War.

Periodizing the Past: Yokoi Tokifuyu’s Engei-kō and the Birth of Japanese Garden History

Oana Loredana Scorus (Instructor and Course Leader for Japan Studies, Hirao School of Management Konan University (the Cube), Japan)

While the historiography of Japanese painting and sculpture has been extensively examined, the disciplinary formation of Japanese landscape architecture as a field of art-historical knowledge remains under-explored. This paper addresses that gap through Yokoi Tokifuyu's Engei-kō (1889), the first systematic history of Japanese gardens, reading it as a case study in how a sub-discipline of Japanese art history was discursively constituted in the Meiji period. Yokoi Tokifuyu (1859–1906) has recently received attention for his contribution to the Japanese painting canon (Sastre de la Vega 2019). This paper turns to Engei-kō, arguing that it functioned as a foundational mechanism for discourse and canon formation in the history of the Japanese garden. Yokoi introduced an approach that still governs Japanese garden theory today: a period-based stylistic narrative that organized the fluid history of gardens into discrete periods, each defined by a characteristic style, a framework aligned with Meiji nationalist ideology. He also shaped the emerging canon by judging individual gardens and styles, and Engei-kō is among the first texts to define the Japanese garden as “naturalistic” in opposition to “Western” gardens, a transcultural act of identity-construction. As a first attempt at systematizing garden discourse, Engei-kō represents thorough research grounded in the materials then available. By indexing 103 gardens and 177 texts, it marked a shift from hereditary trade secrets toward an open, academic discipline, transforming how art-historical knowledge of the garden was produced and transmitted. I will analyze Engei-kō's content and its significance in the Meiji period, and assess its longer-term impact.

Oana Loredana Scorus graduated from the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Bucharest with a diploma in Japanese and French, and came to Japan in 2012 as a research student. She obtained her PhD from Kyoto University in 2024, with a dissertation on the birth of modern landscape architecture in Japan as seen through Meiji-period garden texts. She has published and presented on topics such as the aesthetics of the Meiji-style garden and its relationship to the English garden, Meiji-period horticulture, and landscape gardening. Since 2024, she has been a faculty member at Konan University, coordinating the Japan Studies course.

Tradition for Modern Markets: Redefining Japanese Art History through Zuanshū Publishing

Naoko Adachi (Japan Foundation Assistant Curator of Japanese Art, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art)

From the mid-nineteenth century, Japan’s cultural and economic exchanges with the West spurred a restructuring of arts education and exhibition systems. This called for defining and disseminating Japanese art history among domestic audiences. My presentation explores how publishing culture in this period responded to this transitional period, particularly focusing on zuanshū as a tool to educate domestic audiences about Japanese art and culture. Zuanshū, often translated as pattern books or design books, is a genre of books that became popular from the 1890s to the 1900s. With bold compositions and layers of colors, they offered design inspirations for textile production. Zuanshū has been discussed within the context of textile design, particularly as an evolution of kimono design books, hinagatabon. However, I consider zuanshū within a broader bibliographic culture, examining its stylistic and functional similarities to painting manuals (gafu) that had shaped ideas about artistic masters and exemplary paintings since the Edo period. I argue that these mass-produced design books served educational roles by reimagining traditional themes and motifs with a modern twist for artists, merchants, and general audiences. Close analysis on the design publications reveals that ancient and classical motifs in traditional art reached wide audiences as ideas for fashion and other commercial products. While scholarship on the development of arts education and exhibition systems has presented the theoretical framework for understanding modern interpretation of Japanese art history, this presentation examines how these ideas were translated into actual images for practical use in the Meiji era.

Naoko Adachi is the Japan Foundation Assistant Curator of Japanese Art. She joined the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in 2025. Specializing in Japanese prints, photographs, and crafts of the nineteenth century, she is particularly interested in the representation of Japanese identity for international audiences. She received her MA and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She has previously held positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Tokyo National Museum.

Neues Sehen experimented: Reconsidering Yamawaki Iwao’s Bauhaus Photographs

Youri Hammache-Sigour (assistant curator, Centre Pompidou)

Between 1930 and 1932, the Japanese architect Yamawaki Iwao (1898–1987) studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau alongside his wife Michiko. During this formative period, he produced more than one thousand photographs, most of which remain unpublished and largely unexamined today. Although a small number of prints have entered major museum collections, Yamawaki’s photographic practice has occupied only a marginal place in both Japanese and international histories of modern photography. Drawing on ongoing archival research in Germany, the United States, and Japan, this paper examines how Yamawaki’s photographs challenge established narratives of twentieth-century Japanese art history. Rather than approaching his work solely as evidence of Bauhaus influence in Japan, I argue that these images reveal a more complex process of transcultural negotiation in which Japanese actors actively participated in the production and circulation of modernist visual languages. Positioned between pedagogical experimentation and autonomous artistic practice, Yamawaki’s photographs complicate conventional distinctions between center and periphery, originality and transmission, national and international modernisms. The paper also reflects on the historiographical conditions that contributed to the relative invisibility of this corpus. Long dismissed as student exercises and neglected by their creator himself, the photographs expose mechanisms of canon formation that have shaped the writing of both Japanese art history and the global history of modernism. By reconstructing Yamawaki’s networks—including his exchanges with Josef Albers and other Bauhaus figures—and situating his work alongside contemporaneous Japanese avant-garde photography, this study proposes a reassessment of his role as a mediator between European and Japanese modernisms. More broadly, the case of Yamawaki invites us to reconsider how twentieth-century Japanese art history has been constructed through transnational encounters, disciplinary exclusions, and the circulation of artistic knowledge across cultural boundaries.

Youri Hammache-Sigour is an assistant curator (Centre Pompidou) and art historian based in Paris. A graduate of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, the École du Louvre, and the Universität Heidelberg, his research focuses on transnational artistic networks and forms of cultural exchange, from the historical avant-gardes to the 1960s. He has contributed to exhibition projects in international institutions such as the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, and the Académie de France à Rome – Villa Medici. His writings have appeared in the Revue internationale de la Critique d’Art and several exhibition catalogues contributions, including Gribouillage: de Leonardo da Vinci à Cy Twombly (2022), Histoires de pierres. d’après Roger Caillois (2023), Kandinsky. La Musique des couleurs (2025), and Kandinsky face aux images (2026).

Mediating Japan: Zoom, le magazine de l’image (1970-1991) and the French Reception of Contemporary Japanese Photography

Louise Lartillot (PhD Candidate, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne)

The exhibition New Japanese Photography (1974) at the Museum of Modern Art brought contemporary Japanese photography to international attention. In France, its presence can be traced back to the Biennale des Jeunes Artistes (1967, 1969 and 1971), the Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles from 1975 onward, and the activities of specialized galleries. Since the renewal of the photographic scene in France from the 1970s, contemporary Japanese photography has emerged as an important subject. Yet, at first, references to it remained relatively scarce in the French press, with the notable exception of Zoom, le magazine de l’image. As an editorial project, Zoom raises questions of selection, exclusion, and emphasis in its representation of contemporary Japanese photography. Japan was first mentioned through stereotypical advertisements, before being presented through portfolios, interviews, and essays, culminating in 1977 with the landmark issue Spécial Japon, curated by the artist Terayama Shūji (1935–1983). Although Zoom also addressed other national contexts, Japan remained prominent with four additional issues and portfolios. This attention reflected increasing cultural exchanges, exemplified by events such as the Tokyo Franco-Japanese Cultural Summit (1984) and the exhibition Japon des avant-gardes (1986) at the Centre Pompidou. By resituating Zoom as a medium for artists and other actors of contemporary Japanese photography, one can better understand the political and commercial interests embedded within the French reception of photography, as well as how contemporary Japanese photography was introduced to a broader public within both national and transnational frameworks.

Louise Lartillot is a PhD candidate in contemporary art history at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. She holds a BA in Art History from the École du Louvre, a MA in Heritage and Museum Studies from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, and a MA in International Cultural Projects from Paris-Saclay University. Her research focuses on the history of photography and the reception of Japanese photography in France. She is also a member of the Association de Recherche sur l’Image Photographique (ARIP).

Artistic Agency and National Representation: The 1922 Exhibition of Japanese Art at the Grand Palais

Roxanna Maas (Master student, Art History, Utrecht University)

The largest exhibition of Japanese art in Paris after the Exposition Universelle of 1900 took place at the Grand Palais in 1922. The exhibition was organised by the Salon de la Société nationale des beaux-arts, which annually invited a group of artists to represent a different country, with Japan as the focus that year. The project was initiated by Japanese artists living in Paris at the time, together with Edmond Aman-Jean. However, after the Japanese government became aware of the project, Kuroda Seiki was appointed to lead the exhibition. The display was the first to include contemporary Japanese art movements, as earlier exhibitions of Japanese art had included only historic Japanese art — as part of the wider French Japonism movement, which considered historic art as more “authentic”. The Japonist movement had a fascination with Japanese culture while simultaneously ignoring the country’s own cultural initiatives, revealing the orientalist presuppositions of that time. Despite growing research on modern Japanese art, the limited amount of scholarship on the exhibitions echoes the Japonist gaze. Therefore, this paper aims to counter this scholarship by focusing on the section of modern art presented at the 1922 exhibition. Even though Japanese artists themselves initiated the project, it remained the smallest section. The exhibition, originally intended to be entirely dedicated to Japanese modern art, ultimately became a curated initiative to represent the country. This paper reveals the tensions the Japanese artists faced from the Parisian public and the Japanese government when seeking to showcase their art.

Roxanna Maas is a Research Master’s student in Art History at Utrecht University. She completed her bachelor’s degree in Art History at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels). Her research focuses on the period 1850–1950, with particular interest in global artistic connections and the circulation of objects between Europe and East Asia. She explores how these exchanges shaped artistic production, exhibiting and collecting practices.

An Almost Forgotten Exhibition? Altjapanische Kunst at the Pergamonmuseum 1939

Jennifer Höhne (PhD Candidate, Research Assistant at the Deutsche Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte –Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, Philipps-Universität Marburg)

This article examines the exhibition of Japanese art held at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum from 28 February to 31 March 1939. It illustrates how art and art history were used to promote bilateral cultural policy and for propaganda purposes in Germany. Both the plans for the exhibition and its concrete realization provide insights into the motives of both countries; German reporting during the show ultimately brings them to light: the construction of a supposed friendship between the two nations and the presentation of Japan as a suitable ally to the German population. The emphasis on cultural similarities and the demonstration of Japan’s rich history and ancient art are clearly central elements of the exhibition’s motivation. The oldest exhibit, a Buddhist sculpture, dates from the 7th century, whilst the most recent is a scroll painting by Hokusai (1760–1849), which is dated to around 1820. The Japanese side emphasises that the selection of works was made in accordance with the specific wishes of the “anspruchsvollen Berliner Stellen”, who regarded above all Buddhist painting and sculpture, Yamato-e and more recent decorative painting as the “Wesentliche der japanischen Kunst”. The acquisition was complicated by Japanese legislation on cultural property, which prohibits its export outside the country’s borders. It was only with the signing of the Kulturabkommen on 25 November 1938 that a suitable legal basis could be established.

Jennifer Höhne is a research assistant at the Deutsche Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte – Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, where she is pursuing a PhD under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Hubert Locher. Her doctoral research focuses on Image des Japanischen – Ausstellungen japanischer Kunst in Deutschland 1845–1954. Her interest in this topic developed from her research focus on art during the Nazi era and her broader engagement with global art history. She studied Book Studies and Art History at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, where she later completed a Master’s degree in Digital Art History. During her Master’s studies, her research interests crystallised further in her final thesis on Hermann Kaspar’s Frau Musica in the Meistersingerhalle in Nuremberg.

Exhibiting Nihonga in Postwar Germany: Nationalism and Cultural Diplomacy

Nana Tazuke-Steiniger (Research assistant and PhD candidate, Department of Art History, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.)

Hostility towards modern art in Germany can be traced back to the reception of French Impressionism, which was already denounced as “degenerate” by the art historian Henry Thode in 1907. Under National Socialism, modern art and art collections owned by Jewish collectors were systematically confiscated, exhibited in propagandistic contexts, sold abroad, or destroyed. In contrast, artists such as Arno Breker and Adolf Ziegler were promoted as representatives of a state-sanctioned “German” art. Since the 1970s, German institutions have critically engaged with the definition, legacy, and afterlives of Nazi art. However, comparatively little attention has been paid to the reception of art from Japan up to 1945 in art history in Germany, originating from a political ally of the German Reich. How was such art exhibited, contextualized, and interpreted until 1945 and in postwar Germany? Who were the stakeholders, and what narratives shaped its reception? This paper addresses these questions by focusing on Nihonga, a neo-traditional form of Japanese painting that was closely entangled with nationalist discourses in early twentieth-century Japan. Drawing on the works of Takeuchi Seihō and Yokoyama Taikan, and building on recent scholarship by Eguchi Minami, Wei Sun, and Yasumatsu Miyuki, the paper examines how Nihonga functioned as a form of cultural diplomacy in Germany until the post-war period. By situating these artistic practices within institutional frameworks in Germany, it contributes to a critical perspective on how nationalist art from Japan, in contrast to modern and avantgarde art, remained largely unchallenged in transnational postwar contexts.

Nana Tazuke-Steiniger is a research assistant and PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. In her academic work, she focuses particularly on reception of Japanese art in Germany in the 20th century. As a curator, she realised among others “HERE AND NOW at Museum Ludwig: together for and against it” (2021/2022) and “border/less” (2024) at the Japanese Cultural Institute in Cologne. She also served as assistant curator for the exhibition “ISAMU NOGUCHI” (2022) at Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Currently, she is working on the upcoming exhibition “ASIA POP” at NRW-Forum in Düsseldorf.