Sapin gives talk on "asserting the local in art historiography" in Slovenia

Department of Art Chair Julia Sapin will present “Reasserting the Local: The Art Journal Kokka and Self-Representation in Japan in the Late Nineteenth Century” at the 14th triennial international conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies (EAJS), which will be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, at the University of Ljubljana.

This paper will argue that that the visual reformulation of Japanese art history in Meiji Japan, as seen in the art journal Kokka (National Essence), provided visual “evidence” of both the antiquity and ingenuity of Japanese visual culture, resulting through its various art historical foci in a Japanese self-representation for domestic audiences distinct from the nation’s internationally focused self-representations. The art historiography evident in the choices made to create Kokka exemplifies the particularities of different “historicities” applied in Japanese domestic and international settings, suggesting the plurality of cultural definitions that existed in late nineteenth-century Japan, a paradoxical plurality that continues to the present day.