Summaries of Scholarly Symposia 1.2

The Trans-Asia Photography Review is pleased to publish summaries and reviews of symposia, conferences, panels and workshops on topics related to photography in Asia. In addition to the symposia summarized here, summaries of the symposia on 19th Century photography in India held at the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts can be found via their website at www.acparchives.com http://www.acparchives.com and abstracts from the Facing Asia conference (National Gallery of Australia, August 2010) can be downloaded at http://hrc.anu.edu.au/events/facing-asia. Please send information on other meetings that could be summarized to the Editor at asianphotography@hampshire.edu.

This issue features two summaries and two commentaries:

1. Facing Asia: A Report, by Geoffrey Batchen
2. Global Photography and Its Histories (Rutgers University, February 8, 2011)
3. Transcultural Visuality: Photography in East Asia (College Art Association Annual Conference, February 2011)
4. Commentary on the "Transcultural Visuality" Panel, by Mikiko Hirayama

Facing Asia: a Report

Geoffrey Batchen

Facing Asia: Histories and Legacies of Asian Studio Photography An International Conference. Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra

August 21-22, 2010

Graciously organized by Luke Gartlan and Gael Newton (the first an expert on Japanese Meiji photography who teaches at the University of St Andrews in Edinburgh, and the second the Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra), this conference brought together scholars from Australia, the USA, Canada, India, Japan and Europe to present papers on various aspects of Asian photography. It was immediately striking that “Asian Photography” is a very broad category, apparently encompassing photographers in Australia and the United States as well as practitioners working in India, China, Japan, Indonesia and Thailand. Every talk focused on vernacular photography. Even a presentation on her own work by Bangalore artist Pushpamala N. could be described in these terms, given the degree to which that work draws on already popular Indian conventions and codes. The conference therefore made a statement from the outset, presuming that the most distinctly Asian elements of the photography produced in that region of the world are to be found in commercial and ordinary practices, rather than in fine art.

The papers varied widely in topic, although almost all of them were based on new research, such is the nascent state of the field. Sebastian Dobson, for example, tried to displace the usual emphasis in Western histories of Japanese photography on the treaty port of Yokohama by looking instead at the career of a Tokyo-based photographer named Matsuzaki Shinji. Matsuzuki was particularly notable for publishing a pamphlet in 1886 titled Shashin Hitsuyo: shakyaku no kokoroe [The Essentials of Photography: Dos and Don’ts for the Photographic Customer]. This text, Dobson argued, “is particularly useful in analyzing the extent to which a distinctively ‘Japanese’ approach to studio photography developed.” Susie Protschky, in contrast, looked at photographs of Theeuurtje or “tea time” taken as family portraits by Asians and Indo-Europeans in colonial Indonesia, images that frequently appear in albums from that period. Protshcky presented these family snapshots as “ego documents” or self-representations in which a European status was insistently reiterated and performed for the camera. Richard Kent examined a number of portrait photographs made in China in the early twentieth century that include a colophon and inscription with the image, as if to extend a more familiar painting tradition in which text and image often interact. Such inscriptions, one of which listed every thing the subject wore, and even the color of those things, forestall any erasure of identity through the reduction of this subject to a type, turning these photographs into family mementos with both personality and emotional resonance.

Suryanandini Narain presented a genre of portrait photograph commissioned in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by women seeking a suitor in Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta. These portraits, many made both for and by women, were carefully designed to enhance beauty and hide any flaws. Their study, Narain suggested, helps give visual form to “the dynamics of gender in a period of historic transformation in the subcontinent.” Lady Erb Bunnag, a favored concubine of King Chulalongkorn in Siam, also practiced photography, documenting domestic life within the royal palace. As Leslie Ann Woodhouse explained, one series of eight photographs documented the ethnic differences exhibited by another concubine, Dara Rasami. These photographs represent, therefore, a local cataloguing of difference, even within this intimate setting. Difference was also central to Gartlan’s presentation, focused as it was on the sometimes tense relations of Japanese and Western photographers in the Meiji era. He contrasted Baron Raimund von Stillfried, who at one point ensured that each of his 38 Japanese studio assistants was assigned a specialist task so that none could leave and set up in competition, with Usui Shusaburo, who ended up employing a foreigner, David Welsh, to work for him in 1879 (to sell Usui’s prints in hotels catering for Westerners). According to Gartlan, Usui’s work imitated that of von Stillfried at first, but then sought to challenge this received aesthetic by establishing his own.

Wendy Garden’s paper again addressed itself to tensions between the West and indigenous culture, in her case concentrating on photographic portraits of two Indian princes, Sir Mahtub Ali Kahn, Nizam of Hyderabad, and Maharaja Ram Singh II of Jaipur. These portraits were made after 1857, in response to British anxieties about the loyalty of the indigenous ruling class, and often featured the wearing of British medals. Some, however, stressed a local dress and pose and were taken by Indian-born photographers, as if to insist on their difference. This talk was nicely complemented by a display by Newton of recently acquired Indian portraits at the National Gallery of Australia. Other papers looked in detail at particular studios. Yi Gu, for example, analysed the Baoji Studio in Shanghai, established in 1888, and in particular discussed its attempt to establish “aesthetic standards of photography that were unmistakeably Chinese.” Roberta Wue focused on the portrait work of Milton M. Miller, an American photographer active in Hong Kong, Canton and Japan in the early 1860s, work, she said, that presents “an intriguing and unique investigation into issues of group identity.” Maki Fukuoka looked more broadly at the area known as Asakusa in Tokyo, a suburb occupied by as many as 40 studios in the 1880s, businesses that, she argued, were “themselves spaces of performance.” H. Tiffany Lee drew attention to a peculiar photographic genre mentioned in a 1925 essay by the Chinese scholar Lu Xun, involving the making of portraits of “twos.” Lee argued, among other things, that “the figure of the double functioned as a cipher for the technology of photography and its properties for mechanical reproduction.”

As this very partial selection suggests, the photographic practices highlighted by this conference were diverse and thought provoking. A concluding roundtable of participants agreed that there was a surprising amount of overlap between presentations from otherwise different parts of the world. The focus on the studio as a site of commercial practice gave speakers some common ground, as well as some temporal boundaries, with most papers looking at work from the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. The studio was found to be a space that was simultaneously personal, theatrical, political and economic, often demonstrating fraught relations between each of these possibilities. Another frequent emphasis was on the photograph’s symbiotic relationship to texts, whether these be manuals, signatures, captions, advertisements, inscriptions or titles. Although speakers were excited by the richness of the field sketched by the conference, many also conceded that a huge amount of research remained to be undertaken, especially on the technical development of photography in particular parts of Asia.

John Clark, a specialist in modern Asian art, raised a troubling but crucial question during his otherwise idiosyncratic summation. Does the introduction of photography indeed mark a turning point of some kind in modern Asian cultural life? Or is photography’s significance—the very significance assumed and reiterated by this conference, and indeed by this journal—an invention of Asian photo-history itself, insisted on by a field of academic inquiry still insecurely seeking to establish a distinctive identity and reason for being? Clark argued that the most important dates for the development of Asian culture in the nineteenth century were 1857, the Indian Uprising, and 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal, with the advent of photography having little discernable effect. Indeed, he suggested that a focus on a single medium is to misunderstand the multi-media nature of Asian cultures, and especially the way that images are disseminated within them. The conference finished, therefore, by posing a question about it own most basic premise, asking whether “Asian photography” is even a category that can or should be distinguished from the broader field of visual culture in that region. Is there anything unique about photographs, such that they deserve to be studied in a ghetto? It is surely a question worthy of further debate, perhaps at some future conference or within these pages.

Geoffrey Batchen

Geoffrey Batchen teaches the history of photography as Professor of Art History at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.

Note: The abstracts of papers presented at the Facing Asia conference can be downloaded at http://hrc.anu.edu.au/events/facing-asia>.

Global Photography & Its Histories

A symposium held on Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick

Transcultural Visuality: Photography in East Asia

Panel Presentation at the College Art Association 99th Annual Conference

Panel organizer: Ayelet Zohar, PhD, Lecturer, University of Haifa

Commentary on the “Transcultural Visuality” Panel, CAA Conference, February 2011

Mikiko Hirayama University of Cincinnati

This panel, chaired by Dr. Ayelet Zohar, revealed an alternative approach to photography in modern East Asia that was not necessarily predicated on indexicality or representational authenticity. The papers were intertwined almost like renga or Japanese linked verse, illuminating the intricate cross-cultural dialogue in early East Asian photography. My commentary will therefore extract the common thematic threads between them, addressing “visuality” as “vision as a social fact” after Hal Foster.

The papers by Hye-ri Oh and Jeehey Kim both drew our attention to the trans-Asian discourse embedded in Korean photographic and intellectual history. Hye-ri Oh investigated the transition of the concept of sajin, which came to be adopted as the term for photography in Korea. It became clear that the pre-existing esteem for lifelike portraiture paved the way for the reception of photography, encouraging the Koreans to acknowledge and value the “seemingly natural and direct” portrayal of reality in photography. She also shed light on the transition from the early interpretation of sajin to a more utilitarian, positivist view inspired by the Practical Learning School (sirhak) in the eighteenth century, which led to the adoption of photography as a diplomatic tool in the relations with Japan. Her presentation demonstrated that the early history of Korean photography needed to be investigated in relationship to the autonomous development of Korean art and culture. On the other hand, significant overlaps between Korean and Japanese visual culture emerged from her analysis as well: shared appreciation for lifelike portraiture and the adoption of the Chinese term for such portraiture, xiezhe n (写真), as their word for photography in the nineteenth century. What was outside of these overlaps, and where China would fit into the picture, are topics that require further research.

Jeehey Kim also argued for a more sensitive approach to the interaction of visual and memorial cultures in Korea and Japan. Her paper addressed Korean responses to the display of three different funerary photo portraits: of Emperor Showa, of Japanese soldiers who died in WWII, and of General MacArthur. Based on these images, Kim contended that East Asian photographic culture deviated from the Barthesian notion of how photographed images collapse life and death, a point Yi Gu also touched on in her paper. Funerary portrait paintings had been a well-established practice in East Asia, but as Kim pointed out, the medium of photography gave rise to an entirely new type of visual culture for memorializing the dead. On the one hand, such funerary photo portraits re-invoked the magico-religious implications of portraiture in East Asian art despite its association with modern visuality. On the other hand, this magico-religious quality also allowed the Japanese authorities to effectively incorporate funerary photo portraits into state mourning rituals for the war dead. Kim thus brought to light how such funerary photo portraits in Japan were co-opted into a modern political agenda of colonization and cultural subjugation. Her analysis of the funerary images also illuminated the arbitrary nature of identity construction, whether for the nation-state or the individual. In addition, she rightfully pointed out that the political implications of funerary photo portraits of the casualties from WWII have not been adequately investigated by Japanese art historians. One additional factor in the continued controversy over Emperor Showa’s funerary photo portraits is the history of imperial portraits in Japan. Until the 1870s, imperial portraits were seldom made available to the public. This tradition changed with Emperor Meiji (1852-1912), who became the first Japanese monarch whose portraits in photography and lithography became accessible to the public even before he was dead.[1] Treated as a sacred object containing his spirit, the emperor’s official portrait (goshin’ei 御真影 or venerable true shadow, 1889) essentially functioned as a totemic image that visually affirmed Japan’s national polity.

Yi Gu’s examinations of the images of death by Pan Dawei also suggested an alternative to the Barthesian conceptual framework. Her analysis of Pan’s skull image, in relationship to the historical context of early twentieth-century Chinese politics, uncovered the traumatic experience of a failed revolution and Pan’s resulting obsession with death. It was evident that his later works, especially his strongly performative self-portraits as a dead man, still fell into the pictorialist idiom in a broader sense. But at the same time, as Gu demonstrated, he utilized photography’s ability to visualize “the illusionary,” particularly “the boundary between life and death.” He cultivated this anti-positivist approach to photography through the idea of the Mysterious School (shenmipa i 神秘派), a concept that is extremely evocative and deserves more elaboration vis-à-vis contemporary Chinese photography and painting. Pan’s work thus harkened back to the magico-religious origin of portraiture in East Asian art--in other words, the idea of “conveying the spirit by reproducing the appearance” (chuanshen xiezhao 伝神写照). His artistic principles are also akin to those by Kishida Ryūsei (岸田劉生 1891-1929), a Japanese oil painter known for eerily tactile images of still life and portraiture. In the mid-1920s, he wrote extensively about “Inner Beauty” (uchinaru bi 内なる美) and explored the realm of intangible beauty through his hyper-real paintings. He was heavily indebted to bird and flower paintings of the Song and Yuan Dynasties and even used the word “mystery” (shinpi; Ch. shenmi 神秘) in his essays frequently.[2] Such parallels in the re-examinations of modernity by artists of different cultures and different media represent another instance of trans-cultural visuality.

Furthermore, the papers by Yi Gu and Jeehey Kim, seen together, yield meaningful insight into trans-Asian photographic practices. Again, Barthes’ theory serves as a point of comparison. Barthes observed that photography could collapse two disparate realms of life and death, so the sitter in a photograph is already dead and to be dead at the same time. As Kim described, a photographed image thus represents “present absence.” By contrast, funerary photo portraits of the war dead visually stabilize the posthumous transformation of the deceased into a god. What is represented therein, in Kim’s words, is “absent presence.” By departing from this world, and not being in the viewer’s physical presence, the deceased attains new existence as a god. Pan Dawei’s photographs, on the other hand, seem to intentionally hover between life and death rather than collapsing these two realms, representing “absent presence” and “present absence” simultaneously. Thus, Gu and Kim revealed different mechanisms of representation at work in East Asian photography. The role it plays in mourning the dead, both figuratively and metaphorically, is markedly different from the photograph of Barthes’ mother. Further analysis is warranted on this issue.

Namiko Kunimoto’s paper on the images of foreigners as Tibetan Lamas also highlighted the performative nature of self-portraits. She revealed how photographs in the books by Theos Bernard, Alexandra David-Néel, and Kawaguchi Ekai represented Tibet as a place of spiritual transformation and also portrayed the authors as spiritually transformed beings. Their portraits reflected dual functions of photography. One was to authenticate their acceptance in Tibetan society and the local Buddhist organization, exploiting people’s association of photography with unmediated reality, and the other was to legitimize their spiritual accomplishment. The latter in fact evokes, yet again, the traditional idea of “conveying the spirit by reproducing the appearance.” Because of its claim to capture tangible reality faithfully, photography was expected to act as a conduit to the intangible spiritual realm. As Kunimoto showed, through these dual functions, the images of Tibet by the three authors managed to emphasize both intimacy and exoticization at the same time. Perhaps a little more explanation of what Tibet meant in early twentieth-century Euro-American popular culture would help us better understand how their photos maintained this hybrid image and satisfied the readers’ desire for a spiritual “other.” In addition, it may be well to acknowledge that Bernard, David-Néel, and Kawaguchi all used similar tactics with their self-portraits despite the obvious difference in Kawaguchi’s identity as an Asian man and an ordained Buddhist priest. Elaborating on these contrasts may bring into sharper relief the colonialist implications in the cultural cross-dressing by the “white lamas.”

Such a colonialist narrative was also present in the work by Horino Masao, which Toda Masako examined. Her paper focused on the images of women in Horino’s 1939 book, How to Photograph Feminine Beauty (Joseibi no utsushikata), and how the concepts of femininity, colonialization, and center/periphery played out in it. Horino’s explorations of feminine beauty reveal how the notion of modernity was redefined and co-opted into the colonialist agenda in wartime Japan. First, Toda contextualized Horino’s interest in feminine beauty, showing us that the rise of avant-garde theater and dance foregrounded women’s bodies as the locus of modernity and glamorized gender ambiguity during the 1920s. She then demonstrated that many of Horino’s images of women in his book, as exemplified by that of a Mongolian woman on horseback, had a somewhat de-sexualized appearance, which subverted the stereotypical image of colonized peoples. It seems to me that this atypical image of the Mongolian woman reflects interest in claiming her strength as the paragon of East Asian vigor. Horino’s goal, in other words, was not to depict Mongolia as a subjugated colony but to utilize it to represent the prosperity of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. Toda then argued that Horino’s concept of feminine beauty as shown through his images of Mongolian, Chinese, Korean, and Ōshima women resulted from his pursuit of a wholesome, robust beauty among Asian women that could rival the western ideal of feminine beauty. Again, these images imply that the new, modern beauty of Japanese women needed to involve non-Japanese ethnic groups, so as to symbolize the permeation of Japan’s power to the rest of Asia. Though I gathered that Horino recognized modernity in women who exuded self-confidence and individuality, what “modern” ultimately meant to him remained somewhat vague throughout Toda’s paper. One way to help clarify this issue may be to look for parallels in how Japanese art critics, such as Araki Sueo (荒城季夫 1894-death date unknown) and Yokokawa Kiichirō (横川毅一郎 1895-1973), were also forced to re-package their modernist aesthetics as nationalistic statements during the 1930s. Contemporary arguments for eugenics and the promotion of fertility could also provide some insight into Horino’s idea of feminine beauty.

The representation of spiritually and ideologically charged issues such as death, colonization, and nationhood in the work by the photographers discussed on this panel flattened the dichotomy of the national and regional, east and west, self and other, real and imagined, alive and dead, spiritual and secular, and center and periphery. We may recognize as the basis of such a non-dichotomous approach the concept of advaitism or non-duality, which Karatani Kōjin explained as “the oneness of that which is different and manifold.”[3]Furthermore, two pre-modern East Asian aesthetic concepts figured prominently throughout the panel: “conveying the spirit by reproducing the appearance” (Ch. chuanshen xiezhao; Kr. chŏnsinsajo; Jp. denshin shashō) and “transcribing truth” (Ch. xieshen; Kr. sajin; Jp. shashin). But the ways in which they were manifested were by no means uniform. Photographers such as Pan Dawei consciously harkened back to these ideas, resisting the positivist vision of photography. Others, especially Theos Bernard, exploited the magico-religious implications of the medium as well, but also made very astute use of photography as a modern, mimetic representational apparatus. As this panel showed, these pre-modern concepts, which had given rise to gradations in the meanings of reality in East Asian visual culture, also generated diversity in the way early East Asian photographers represented so-called “reality”. Acknowledging these shared values, aesthetics, and epistemology as simultaneous internal developments opens up an avenue for a more levelized narrative of East Asian art history that has broader implications beyond our discipline. The papers on this panel thus challenge us to reconfigure our understanding of photographic representation.

Mikiko Hirayama is Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Cincinnati.

Notes

1. Flusser, Villem (1983). Towards a Philosophy of Photography, London: Reaktion Books.

2. Wang Wei (699-759), [夫画道之中，水墨最为上。] from:画学秘诀; Wu Yong (吴蛹) (Tang poet), Mi Fu (米芾) (1051-1107), and Huang Gongwang (黃公望) (1269—1354), Nine principles for Painting Landscape, Trees and Rocks, are all quoted in: Siren Osvald (1968). The Chinese on the Art of Painting, New York: Schocken Books.

3. Krauss, Roaslind (1984). ‘A Note on Photography and the Simulacral’, October 31, 49-68.

4. Deleuze, Gilles (1983). ‘Plato and the Simulacrum’, October 27, 45-56.

5. Green, David (2007) ‘Indexophobia’, in James Elkins (ed) Photographic Theory, London: Routledge, 244-248;

6. Green, David & Joanna Lowry (2003), ‘From presence to the performative: rethinking photographic indexicality’, in: Where Is The Photograph? David Green (ed.), Brighton: Photoworks/ Photoforum, 47-60.

1. See Mikiko Hirayama, “Emperor’s New Clothes: Japanese Visuality and Imperial Portrait Photography,” in History of Photography vol. 33, no. 2 (May 2009), pp. 165-184.

2. See, for example, “Uchinaru bi,” in Kishida Ryūsei, Bi no hontai (Tokyo, Kodansha), 1985, p. 38.

3. Karatani Kōjin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, translation edited by Brett de Bary (Durham, NC, Duke University Press), 1993, p. 43.