Abstracts and biographical information

Clare Pollard

An underglaze blue landscape vase by Miyagawa Kōzan I: a spotlight on transcultural exchange in Japanese ceramics of the Meiji era (1868-1912)

An early twentieth century landscape vase by the renowned potter Miyagawa Kōzan I (1842-1916) provides an ideal case study to explore transcultural perspectives in the rapidly changing world of Meiji ceramics. Drawing on a range of Japanese, Chinese and European artistic sources, the vase gives an intriguing insight into the complex and ever-evolving relationship between Japanese ceramics, China and the West.

Clare Pollard is Curator of Japanese Art at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Her research has focused mainly on Meiji ceramics and textiles and she has also developed a series of exhibitions and catalogues highlighting the Ashmolean’s Japanese woodblock print collections. Her publications include Master Potter of Meiji Japan: Makuzu Kōzan (1842–1916) and his Workshop (2003), Threads of Silk and Gold: Ornamental Textiles from Meiji Japan (2012), and Plum Blossom & Green Willow: Japanese surimono poetry prints from the Ashmolean Museum (2018) and Tokyo: Art & Photography (2021). She is currently preparing an exhibition of costumes belonging to the legendary kabuki actor Bandō Tamasaburō V.

Jens Sejrup

A local universal modernity: Le Corbusier’s building for the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo as World Heritage

This presentation analyzes the decade-long process of having Le Corbusier’s building for the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

The Japanese authorities originally founded the museum in 1959 in response to French-government preconditions for returning the renowned Matsukata collection to Japanese ownership after the Second World War. At first, the Japanese authorities did not consider Le Corbusier’s building an important cultural property, but in 2007, the building became part of a French tri-continental serial nomination involving buildings by the renowned architect in seven different countries. Over the ensuing decade, the building took on new meaning to the Japanese public as government and local agents vigorously pursued its World Heritage inscription. After its first inception in 2007, the initiative failed twice before finally obtaining UNESCO inscription in 2016. The inscription of the building as World Heritage reveals the emergence and consolidation of a paradoxical double symbolism: On the one hand, Le Corbusier’s building has become internationally acknowledged as a testament to a universal global modernity. On the other hand, the building has achieved local recognition as a symbol of an innate national capacity for localization and for Japan’s post-war reconstruction and peaceful democratic national identity.

Jens Sejrup is an Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Copenhagen, dually appointed by the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies and the Department of Anthropology. His research interests include contemporary Japanese museum exhibitions and architecture, cultural heritage and present-day instrumentalisations of the historical past.

Asato Ikeda

The Politics of Art Collecting: Canada’s Museum Building and the Japanese Empire

This presentation scrutinizes the role of Japonisme (the craze for things Japanese) in Japan’s cultural diplomacy and production of soft power and Canada’s complicity in Japan’s expansionism. I will show examples from a large collection of early modern Japanese prints now housed at the Royal Ontario Museum. The collection consists of an approximately one thousand woodblock prints, including portraits of prostitutes and kabuki actors as well as landscape prints. The collection was amassed by Sir Edmund Walker (1848-1924), an influential businessman and philanthropist in Toronto who was President of the Canadian Bank of Commerce (now CIBC) and the founder of major museums in Eastern Canada, including the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the National Gallery of Canada, to name a few. After his visit to Japan and its empire in 1919, he became an Honorary Consul General of Japan and made a widely-publicized public speech in 1920 supporting Japan’s territorial expansion into the Asian continent.

Asato Ikeda is an Associate Professor of Art History at Fordham University, New York, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation Visiting Professor in Art & Art History at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen for the year 2023-2024. She is the author of The Politics of Painting: Fascism and Japanese Art during the Second World War (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2018), the curator of A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints (The Royal Ontario Museum, 2016; Japan Society, 2017), and the co-editor of Art and War in Japan and its Empire: 1931-1960 (Leiden, Brill, 2012). Her second book manuscript, Japan in Canadian History: The Art and Visual Culture of Transpacific Crossings, is currently under review by a university press.

Gunhild Borggreen

Exhibiting Japan in 1933: Cultural Entanglements in the Design Museum Archive

This presentation will look into the history of exhibitions of Japanese art at the Design Museum Denmark (formerly known as the Danish Museum of Decorative Art). This museum has shown more than 80 exhibitions about Japan since 1896, far more than any other museum in Denmark. My approach will be to look at transcultural exchanges in the flows of objects, persons, and ideas that constitute the framework for exhibitions of Japanese art and culture. I take as an example the archival material from an exhibition on Japanese art and craft in 1933. The exhibition offers multiple perspectives of cultural entanglements, ranging from the circulation and display of tangible objects to the curatorial approach and claim of expertise, and the inclusion of ephemeral audience experiences such as lectures and dance performances. The exhibition catalogue as well as letters, notes, newspaper clippings, and photographs from the archive provide us with a glimpse of the ideologies and practical procedures behind the conceptualization and display of Japanese art in Denmark at that time. The exhibition exemplifies a close cultural relationship between Denmark and Germany in the pre-war period, and reveals how broader geopolitical issues were part of constructing a certain fictional narrative of an “Other” culture.

Gunhild Borggreen is an Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. She is the Principal Investigator of the research project Transcultural Modernism: Artistic Interchange between Denmark and Japan, 1945-1970, supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. She is the co-editor of Dead or Alive! Tracing the Animation of Matter in Art and Visual Culture (Aarhus University Press, 2020), and has published on issues related to gender, technology and cultural identity in contemporary Japanese visual arts in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture (Routledge, 2020), Cultures of Participation: Arts, digital Media, and Cultural Institutions (Routledge, 2020), and numerous journals.