What has appeared on the fourth floor of the Seattle Art
Museum
this fall is not just a bunch of old art from Japan. It is the Japanese
gaze. It is the view of the West from Japan.
Everything looks familiar and foreign at the same time. This is not
the only thing the show does. It is a kaleidoscope in which Western
ideas about art are exploded by the same detonators that have made
modern and contemporary art so fascinating and varied: copying,
repetition, appropriation, misappropriation—and this work dates
back to the 16th century. It’s always a pleasure when art history is
torn up like a pipeline that needs replacing.
Yukiko Shirahara, SAM’s curator of Asian art, organized the show,
called Japan Envisions the West: 16th–19th Century Japanese
Art from Kobe City Museum. Most of the objects in it are from the
Kobe City Museum, which, like SAM, has its roots in a single art
collector who founded an art deco–style museum for the public in
the 1930s.
SAM’s man behind the scenes was Richard Fuller, Asian-art
extraordinaire. In Kobe, it was businessman Ikenaga Hajime, who, like
Fuller, hadn’t bought mainstream. He’d bought Japanese art created
under the influence of European culture, partly because that’s what he
could afford. Fifty years ago, Kobe became Seattle’s first sister city,
and this is the first major exhibition of Kobe City Museum’s rare
holdings in Seattle. Because the objects are fragile, almost half of
the show will be replaced at the end of November, and the show won’t
travel anywhere else. Seattle is lucky. (My only peeve is that the
Tokyo pop section of the permanent collection, recently replaced with
West Coast funk ceramics, should have stayed up during this temporary
exhibition to provide an even further-multiplied perspective on
Japanese art and culture.)
It was 1543 when the Portuguese landed in Japan, followed by the
Spanish, and the Jesuit missionaries. Rumor had it that these richly
dressed “South Barbarians,” or namban, ate children. But the
real threat to the Japanese emperor and stratified Japanese society was
Jesus Christ, since Christianity is classless and doesn’t leave much
room for a divine emperor. In 1639, the Japanese kicked out the
Portuguese and the Spanish. Only the Dutch and the Chinese were allowed
to trade with Japan, and the Dutch traders lived not in the country
itself, but on a fan-shaped, human-made island off the coast of
Nagasaki Harbor. (The fan island itself might be considered a work of
Japanese art from this time.) The Chinese lived within a walled
compound.
The Dutch were savvy: They didn’t try to bring culture or religion
to Japan, only business. But it got in anyway. That island filled with
strange-looking, wide-eyed, long-nosed, curly-haired, tobacco-smoking,
telescope-toting Dutch beckoned. The Japanese developed a craze for all
things Dutch, called hollandisme, the counterpart of European
japonisme.
At the same time, Western art’s foundations—shading, the
frame, three-dimensional perspective—crept into Japan to create a
magnificently mongrel strain of Japanese art, from paintings, ceramics,
and prints (including the great printmaker Hokusai, represented in this
show) to lacquerware, tourist tchotchkes, and “peep-show boxes” set out
on the streets.
By the middle of the 18th century, the Japanese shogunate had made
it easier to import Dutch books, and a movement of “Dutch learning”
took hold. Japanese doctors newly swayed by Western medicine, rather
than the traditional Chinese, wanted portraits of Hippocrates.
Meanwhile, the government employed painters whose sole job was to make
copies of imported Dutch paintings, which would be “evaluated” and kept
on official file—and several of those oddities are here. There
are adaptations of adaptations, loving and skeptical forgeries. In some
ways, these works have more in common with postmodern books than their
peer artworks in the European Enlightenment.
It’s engrossing trying to track the bloodlines of these artworks.
Here’s a scroll copy by a traditional literati artist, Tani Buncho,
after a copy of an original oil by a Western artist made by two
Japanese masters of Western painting technique. There’s a screen of the
Mongolian Tartar, the Grand Duke of Moscow, the Holy Roman Emperor, and
the Ottoman Sultan—all with amusingly similar faces—based
on portraits from a Dutch map adapted by an anonymous
early-17th-century Japanese artist trained in a Jesuit painting school.
Enjoy the Jabberwock. The rabbit hole. The tea party.
Certain juxtapositions are downright surreal. A piece of what looks
like Delftware with a portrait of a European town in the center is
actually an ornately curved stand made to hold a set of Japanese swords
horizontally. English roses proliferate wildly on the stand’s surface,
characterizing the breaking-out-of-bounds madness that characterizes
the energy of this whole exhibition.
Eventually, in the 1850s, American Commodore Matthew Perry arrived
in Japan—there are great portraits of agape Japanese—and
forced the country open. Japan intended to fire cannons on the
Americans, but the cannons didn’t work, partly because Japan’s
isolationism had crippled it technologically. In this new era, Japan’s
government commissioned special ukiyo-e prints to advertise
America to wary Japanese. One, by Utagawa Yoshitora, depicts Americans
as lucky-ducks who ride everywhere in hot air balloons. Another
portrait, of Washington, D.C., depicts Victorian-era Americans in their
carriages on a street in India. The artist based the view of the
American capital on an illustration of the Indian city of Agra in a
London-based newspaper. The world, already, was a mutt. 
