East–West Interchanges in American
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Mills, Glazer, and Goerlitz Glazer, Mills, Editors East-West Interchanges Cynthia Mills in American Art Lee Glazer Amelia A. Goerlitz A Long and Tumultuous Relationship Editors in American Artin American Interchanges East-West The East–West Interchanges in American Art symposium is part of a series of Terra Symposia on American Art in a Global Context, which are supported by a generous grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. The symposium was convened at and organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in partnership with Smithsonian American Art Museum the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program. Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press P.O. Box 37012 MRC 957 Washington, D.C. 20013-7012 Scholarly Smithsonian Institution www.scholarlypress.si.edu Pr ISBN: 978-1-935623-08-3 ess Download a pdf of this publication through www.scholarlypress.si.edu. Request print copies by email: [email protected] East–West Interchanges in American Art A Long and Tumultuous Relationship Cynthia Mills Lee Glazer Amelia A. Goerlitz Editors A Smithsonian Contribution to Knowledge Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press Washington, DC 2012 The East–West Interchanges in American Art symposium was convened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on October 1–2, 2009. It is one of a series of Terra Symposia on American Art in a Global Context, which are supported by a generous grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. The Smithsonian American Art Museum organized the symposium in partnership with the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program. Cover Image: Detail of Black Stone and Red Pebble by Seong Moy, ca. 1970s. Color woodcut 3 7 on paper, 29 ⁄4 × 19 ⁄8 in. 1989.77.9. Smithsonian American Art Museum, a gift of Ruth and Jacob Kainen. Published by SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION SCHOLARLY PRESS P.O. Box 37012 MRC 957 Washington, D.C. 20013-7012 www.scholarlypress.si.edu Text and images in this publication may be protected by copyright and other restrictions or owned by individuals and entities other than, and in addition to, the Smithsonian Institution. Fair use of copyrighted material includes the use of protected materials for personal, educational, or noncommercial purposes. Users must cite author and source of content, must not alter or modify content, and must comply with all other terms or restrictions that may be applicable. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data East–West Interchanges in American Art Symposium (2009 : Smithsonian American Art Museum) East–West interchanges in American art : a long and tumultuous relationship / Cynthia Mills, Lee Glazer, and Amelia A. Goerlitz, editors. p. cm. “A Smithsonian contribution to knowledge.” Includes index. ISBN 978-1-935623-08-3 (alk. paper) 1. Art, American--Asian influences--Congresses. 2. Art, Asian--American influences--Congresses. 3. United States--Relations--Asia--Congresses. 4. Asia-- Relations--United States--Congresses. I. Mills, Cynthia, 1947- II. Glazer, Lee (Lee Stephens) III. Goerlitz, Amelia. IV. Title. N6505.E25 2009 704.03’95--dc23 2011026013 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48–1992. Contents Introduction 2 Cynthia Mills Colonialism and Cosmopolitanism 19 Frameworks for Considering Cultural Exchange: The Case of India and America 20 Partha Mitter Destructive Creation: The U.S.–Philippine Relationship in American Art 38 J. M. Mancini Before Zen: The Nothing of American Dada 52 Jacquelynn Baas Knowledge and Hierarchy 67 Global Knowledge in the Early Republic: The East India Marine Society’s “Curiosities” Museum 68 Patricia Johnston Images of American Racial Stereotypes in Nineteenth-Century Japan 80 Nicole Fabricand-Person “A Semi-Chinese Picture”: Hubert Vos and the Empress Dowager of China 96 Virginia Anderson v Performing Identity 111 Overtly, Covertly, or Not at All: Putting “Japan” in Japanese American Painting 112 Bert Winther-Tamaki Chinese Painting Comes to America: Zhang Shuqi and the Diplomacy of Art 126 Gordon H. Chang New Negro on the Pacific Rim: Sargent Johnson’s Afro-Asian Sculptures 142 John P. Bowles Encounters and Transference 159 “Gold Mine in Southeast Asia”: Russel Wright, Vietnamese Handicraft, and Transnational Consumption 160 Jennifer Way ROCI East: Rauschenberg’s Encounters in China 176 Hiroko Ikegami Artistic Tropes: Some Cases of Mutual Chinese–American Influence 190 Ding Ning Cultural Translation and Creative Misunderstanding in the Art of Wenda Gu 204 David Cateforis Curating Asia / America 215 Stories of the Beautiful: Narratives of East–West Interchange at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery 216 Lee Glazer From La Farge to Paik: Research Resources at the Smithsonian American Art Museum 232 Amelia A. Goerlitz Reflections on The Third Mind 248 Alexandra Munroe Teaching American Art in East Asia 260 Eunyoung Cho About the Authors 272 Index 276 Introduction Cynthia Mills In his book The Asian American Century, historian Warren Cohen describes how the world has witnessed in recent decades not only the Americanization of Asian cultures but also the Asianization of Americans’ daily lives—from food to film, and from music to cars and medicine. Moreover, Asian Ameri- cans are a rapidly growing demographic group; population analysts predict that at least one in 10 U.S. residents will be of Asian heritage by the middle of the twenty-first century.1 These new realities continue and complicate the long-interwoven eco- nomic and political relationships of the United States and Asian nations. They also carry implications for scholars interested in the history of Ameri- can art, which has in the past focused on such questions as what qualities of U.S. art are distinctly “American” and what lines of influence can be traced to European forebears across the Atlantic Ocean. Today scholars of the vi- sual arts are constructing an expanded field, one in which they see “American art” as an amalgam of many influences and currents, and consider the plural nature of an America made up of more diverse populations. In crossing both national and disciplinary boundaries to achieve their goals, they are contributing to an international turn in American art scholarship. While scholars continue to raise many questions about U.S. artists’ interchanges with Europe—the subject of most of the work done to date on transna- tional exchange—they also, partly in response to our real-world concerns, are expressing a greater, more multifarious interest in our growing connec- tions with Asia. This was the subject of the Smithsonian’s 2009 conference A Long and Tumultuous Relationship: East–West Interchanges in American Art, which was organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 3 partnership with the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery as well as the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program, with the generous support of the Terra Foundation for American Art. This book of proceedings, co-edited with Lee Glazer and Amelia A. Goerlitz, brings together papers from the symposium that offer new avenues for research on Asian–U.S. artistic exchange. The contributors to this volume—art historians, curators, and historians from Britain, China, Ireland, Japan, and Korea as well as the United States—provide an array of perspectives. Each essay explores some aspect of the many ways in which American and Asian artists have interacted from the eighteenth century to the pres- ent day and considers some of the specific locations where these interchanges took place. A key point of the conference and of this volume is to demonstrate through the presentation of provocative and original research that artistic ideas did not flow primarily in one direction (from Asia to the United States—or as Beijing scholar Ding Ning notes, from the country with the longer history to the newer culture), but rather that they circulated through a variety of dynamic international relation- ships—sometimes personal, sometimes commercial or governmental, philosophical or pedagogical. In addition, the essays included here discuss an expanded geography of contact zones (including, for example, not only the Pacific Northwest, China, and Japan, but also India, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Salem, Massachusetts) in an attempt to enrich and complicate our understandings of these ever-shifting global relationships. They engage a wide range of media, including postcards, maga- zines, handicrafts, and buildings as well as “high art” forms. Cross-racial themes emerge at home and abroad, and strategies used by artists and viewers to envision and construct identities, both of self and other, are discussed. The results of the symposium as laid out in this book are exciting and eclectic, with participants not offering any one coherent narrative but struggling with the vastness and diversity of the many Easts that exist and of America itself. Some of the work presented is in a preliminary stage and will be developed further over time. The organizers did not in general select papers that give priority to the immigrant experience, another broad area where considerable research is under way today, but sought instead a range of approaches to transnational interchange in a variety of places, with the hope of provoking a productive dialogue for the future.2 Some of these come together visually in Theodore Wores’s compelling 1881 painting The Chinese Fishmonger (Figure 1), which was chosen to grace the cover of the conference program and website. Here an American-born artist who had just completed years of training in Munich found a window on multiple global currents in San Fran- cisco’s busy Chinatown, where he painted with careful dignity a fishmonger engaged in a picturesque act of daily commerce—an Asian with whom he had made actual 4 East–West Interchanges in American Art 3 1 1.