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286. Collecting and Imagining "Asia": Collectors, Museums, and Scholarship

Sat, March 18, 5:15 to 7:15pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: 2nd Floor, Dominion Ballroom South

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Concomitant with the formation of major portions of Asian art collections in the West, a diverse range of individuals, groups, and institutions partook of the fin de siècle impulse to promote the field of Asian art evolved from ‘Oriental’ and decorative arts. This panel seeks to assess the ways in which the conceptual hierarchy, specificity, and sub–categories of Asian art (here, mainly refers to that of China, Japan, and Korea) took shape in accordance with the diverse value and market systems, aesthetic canons, and reorganization of power dynamics. Lara Netting examines the gendered understanding of collecting Chinese antiquities in the 1930s and the shift of focus from rare, exotic, and decorative to scientific, empirical, and objective. Seung Yeon Sang probes the Institute of Oriental Ceramics and its redefinition of “Asian ceramics” in the 1920s, motivated by concerns about Japan’s political and cultural standing vis-à-vis the Western colonial powers. Monika Bincsik discusses how American collectors such as Benjamin Altman (1840–1913) formed the core views about Japanese art that persist today in art institutions and scholarship. Charlotte Horlyck investigates the role of art collecting in the formation of Korea’s national and historical identity under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945) and its impact on sales abroad. These four papers thus offer new modes of understanding biases, motives, and assessments of collecting “Asia art” in relation to the dichotomy between Western and “native” taste, Western and Japanese imperialism, and colonial modernity in East Asia.

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