Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts

From Kishida Ryusei to Miyazaki Hayao
Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-0-231-17292-9
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 256 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 486 g

Reihe: Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture

The idea that Japanese art is produced through rote copy and imitation is an eighteenth-century colonial construction, with roots in Romantic ideals of originality. Offering a much-needed corrective to this critique, Michael Lucken demonstrates the distinct character of Japanese mimesis and its dynamic impact on global culture, showing through several twentieth-century masterpieces the generative and regenerative power of Japanese creativity.

Choosing a representative work from each of four modern genres painting, film, photography, and animation Lucken portrays the range of strategies that Japanese artists use to re-present contemporary influences. He examines Kishida Ryusei's portraits of Reiko (1914;1929), Kurosawa Akira's Ikiru (1952), Araki Nobuyoshi's photographic novel Sentimental Journey Winter (1991), and Miyazaki Hayao's popular anime film Spirited Away (2001), revealing the sophisticated patterns of mimesis that are unique but not exclusive to modern Japanese art. In doing so, Lucken identifies the tensions that drive the Japanese imagination, which are much richer than a simple opposition between progress and tradition, and their reflection of human culture's universal encounter with change. This global perspective explains why, despite its non-Western origins, Japanese art has earned such a vast following.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lucken, Michael

Weitere Mitwirkende

Simkin, Francesca

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunststile Asiatische Kunst
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

IntroductionPart I. A Historical Construction1. Copycat Japan2. The West and the Invention of Creation3. The Denial, Rejection, and Sublimation of Imitation4. No Poaching5. Seen from Japan6. The Logic of Reflection in Nakai MasakazuPart II. A New Place for Imitation7. Kishida Ryusei's Portraits of Reiko, or, How Can Ghosts Be at Work?8. Kurosawa Akira's Ikiru, or, the Impossibility of Metaphor9. Araki Nobuyoshi's Sentimental Journey Winter, or, Eternal Bones10. Miyazaki Hayao's Spirited Away, or, the Adventure of the ObliquesNotesSelect BibliographyIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Michael Lucken is a professor at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris. A French and art historian, his work explores the long-term trends of Japanese modernity through visual materials and aesthetic discourses, and he defends the possibility of the radically nonexotic approaches of non-Western cultures. He is the author of L'Art du Japon au vingtième siècle (Japanese Art in the Twentieth Century), which was translated into Japanese in 2007, and a coeditor of Japan's Postwar.