the view from kyoto

While I was in Seattle in December, I stopped by the newly renovated Seattle Art Museum to see the exhibition "Japan Envisions the West: 16th - 19th Century Japanese Art from the Kobe City Museum"--the online exhibition can be found here--and came away wishing I still had students, so I could order them all to go see it. There's a book available from UW Press as well.

I love maps--especially old ones--and particularly those that invert, subvert, or otherwise complicate our mental geographies (for his birthday last year I gave thariel this Hobo-Dyer projection to dizzy his students with). And the first delights of the exhibition were cartological: maps both eastern and western that charted the early encounters. Like this one, "IAPONIA", from Antwerp in 1595--



or a wonderfully puzzling "Buddhist world map" from 1710--

The latter poses the question at the heart of the exhibition: how might the world have looked, three hundred years ago, if your vantage point happened to be Kyoto, and not London or New York (or even Constantinople)? What would you see, gazing westwards? What do you make of these Portuguese and Dutch traders who start sailing into your ports at the turn of the seventeenth century?

The answer is, you make art. The seventeenth and eighteenth-century paintings, prints, screens, and objects testify a fascination with the small coterie of Dutch traders that the Tokugawa shogunate permitted to remain in Japan, on a quarantined island fort at Dejima. There are painstaking depictions of them with their lace collars and their pipes, and detailed scrolls mapping the layout of their compound, which was off-limits to all but officials, translators, and a certain number of prostitutes.

The collection carefully chronicled the impact of European artistic techniques and perspectives. But my own excitement originated more in the subject matter--and what it suggested--than in style. Two rooms of assorted objects--porcelain, tobacco boxes, furniture, weaponry, netsuke--hinted at the exotic appeal of the "southern barbarians" as subject matter for the decorative arts. It's a striking inversion of the Orientalist images and motifs so common in Western ornament. Here we go again, essentializing the other: but usual categories of representer and represented have swapped places. The pieces I found most interesting were the ones that suggested that these exotic others didn't fall into a European/Asian dichotomy--for example, the "octagonal bowl with design of Dutchmen and Chinese hermits." Perhaps, in nineteenth-century Japanese eyes, Chinese hermits and Dutchmen seemed equally quaint and foreign creatures.

The Dutchmen and Chinese, at least, could be encountered in the flesh. And after the forcible entry of Commodore Perry's black ships into Tokyo Bay in 1853, Americans and their empire, too, were tangible--Perry and his arrival were extensively depicted. Still, my favorite pieces were testaments to some artist's attempt to envision sights unseen--a detailed diagram of a European factory, drawn from imagination and secondhand reportage; or a flock of English sheep that initially escape recognition--because the painter, having never seen actual sheep, has painted them as if the size of rabbits. Or the visions of distant American cities, filled with wide streets and full-skirted women, and in one case, a rising hot-air balloon. It turns out that many of these paintings were actually based on on pictorials of European cities and landscapes published in the Illustrated London News.
And so that, above, is a painting of Washington, DC. I can't help but think of Calvino's Marco Polo, but in paint rather than print, and dreaming westwards.