Visual Vocabulary in Translation: Pictures of Weaving Women in China, Korea, and Japan

• In Event: Cultural Transmissions and Shared Pictorial Language in Early Modern East Asian Painting

Abstract

Pictures of Silk-Production, a Song-dynasty imperial painting-theme depicting women rearing silkworms and weaving silk-textiles, was introduced to Japan and Korea in the fifteenth century. Numerous pictures from late Joseon and Edo periods can be traced back to as reproductions of models from the Ming and Qing dynasties. While this kind of pictorial reproduction along east Asia has been researched widely in regard to religious or literati themes, Pictures of Silk Production make a particularly interesting case study of transmission, because they focus on female figures of lower echelons laboring in a domestic sphere.
The paintings were originally technical and referred to issues of economic production, but as Francesca Bray discussed extensively in her "Technology and Gender" (1997), the discourse of technical production by women is also a discourse of social hierarchies and of patriarchal values.
Such Pictures were reproduced in various fashions in Edo-period Japan. Some of these pictures maintain the Chinese atmosphere, while others “Japanize” the original pictures and portray Japanese figures in local landscapes. Korean painters utilized the Chinese paintings in a similar fashion— while paintings produced for the Joseon court relied heavily on Chinese models, pictures in popular fashion tend to depict local women and men and are categorized today as “genre paintings.” While much scholarship exists on Pictures of Silk Production in each of the three nations, my talk aims not only at a comparative historical survey, but at a comparative assessment of “Japanization” and “Koreanization” of Chinese painting themes, and particularly of the later assessment of genre-paintings as an expression of the traditional past of the nation.

Author

• Shalmit Bejarano, Hebrew University