Japanese Empire in Motion: 1930s Art Exhibitions on the Global Stage

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

World fairs and art exhibitions epitomized the global circulation of artists and artworks. With great visibility among broad audiences, exhibitions constituted a crucial part of international diplomacy and vernacular daily life at the dawn of the World War II. This panel explores novel approaches to the study of art and visual culture in modern East Asia by focusing on the dynamic role of exhibitions as sites of negotiation between competing interests. In particular, this panel examines the role of exhibitions in the making, marketing and contestation of the Japanese Empire in the 1930s.

This panel focuses on select exhibitions organized in transnational and/or colonial settings: the official annual Imperial Fine Arts Exhibition in Tokyo (1919-1935), the South Manchuria Railway Company art photography exhibit at the World’s Fair in Chicago (1933), the Chinese Art Exhibition in Paris (1933), and the Old Japanese Art Exhibition in Berlin (1939). These cases demonstrate well how different agents promoted and contested narratives of Japanese empire internationally as part of larger colonial, imperial, and capitalist matrices. Moreover, they reveal the idealism at work in stories of empire and, as some reactions to the exhibitions demonstrate, the failure of this idealism to translate fully across cultural and geopolitical lines. This panel draws on interdisciplinary approaches to art history, museum studies, and intellectual histories in order to reconfigure the multivalent ways in which we think about the construction of empire and modern visual culture of East Asia in a global setting.

Area of Study

• Northeast Asia

Session Organizer

• Kari Shepherdson-Scott, Macalester College

Individual Presentations

• “Korean Prodigy” - Lee In-sung’s (1912-1950) Artistic Career - Magdalena Kolodziej, Duke University

• Manchuria through an Aesthetic Screen: Japanese Art Photography at Chicago’s A Century of Progress World’s Fair, 1933 - Kari Shepherdson-Scott, Macalester College

• A Sino-Japanese Relationship on Display: The Chinese Art Exhibition in Paris, 1933 - Stephanie Su, Bard Graduate Center

• Display of Partnership: Installation Strategies of the Old Japanese Art Exhibition in Berlin, 1939 - Minami Eguchi, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

Discussant

• Ming Tiampo, Carleton Univerisity