Symposium: Taisho chic: Japanese modernity, nostalgia and deco
 

Saturday 24 May 2008
9.30am – 4.30 pm
Domain Theatre, Lower level 3
Art Gallery of New South Wales

$80 non members
$70 members
Includes lunch and exhibition viewing

Program

• 9.30 - Registration
• 10.00 - Welcome Jackie Menzies, Head curator of Asian art, AGNSW
• 10.15 - Taisho chic: the historical setting, Elise Tipton, University of Sydney
  The men who selected the name ‘Taisho’ for the reign of the emperor who came to the throne in 1912 hoped for a period of rectification and stabilisation after the revolutionary changes of the Meiji period (1868-1912).  In fact, however, the Taisho period proved to be full of dynamic changes and conflict. Much ambivalence surrounded not only these political developments, but also the flood of social and cultural ideas and practices from the West.  These challenged traditional conceptions of family and gender and introduced cultural styles that rejected artistic and literary conventions. 
• 11am - The Modern Girl in Imperial Japan, Vera Mackie, University of Melbourne
  In the culture of 1920s and 1930s Japan, the figure of the modern girl (moga) appeared in illustrated magazines, satirical cartoons, literature and cinema. With her bobbed hair, cloche hat and short skirts she had much in common with similar figures in other metropolitan centres such as London, New York, Paris or Shanghai. The modern girl was a focus for attitudes to modernity, and her presence reflected beliefs about Japan’s place in the world, as an imperial power in East Asia. She was associated with imported commodities and with the practices of sports, dancing and travel.
• 11.45 - Morning tea
• 12.15 - Moderating the Modern Girl: Identity and Style in Pictures of Women 1920-1940, Kendall H. Brown, exhibition curator
  Mixed cultural messages are evident in paintings and woodblocks prints depicting women during the late Taisho and early Showa eras in Japan. In this period tensions between self-conscious ‘Japaneseness’ and implicitly western modernity often played out in terms of female fashion. Feminine style was both fashioned by women, in their choice of clothing and hairstyles, and by artists and cultural critics in their visual and verbal creations. These discourses intersect in pictorial depictions of actual women, where the sitter commissioned the portrait.  Using works in the Taisho chic exhibition where the literal identity of the subject is known, allow investigation of the complex and often contradictory construction of social identity.
• 1.15 - Lunch and exhibition viewing
• 2.30pm - The Imperial Hotel and the beginning of modernism in Japanese architecture , Marco Pompili, architect
  On display in the Taisho chic exhibition is a tile of the Imperial Hotel (1913-1923), the building designed by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) and completed in Tokyo shortly before the Great Kanto Earthquake (1923). The presence of this object invites discussion of the influence of Wright’s building in the development of a modern Japanese architecture, the fortunes of the building and Wright himself in Japan and the main directions of architecture during the transformative Taisho period.
• 3.15pm - The Best of Taisho: A Search for Decorative Furnishings, Patricia Salmon, collector
  While collecting Japanese screen and scroll figurative paintings of the Taisho period I came to realize that decorative objects and furnishings also played an important part in the new life style of the populace. Some of these objects changed in response to a general move of many people to urban areas where space limitations were imposed and others were influenced by new styles, both local and imported, that became the mode.  The flea markets of Tokyo and Kyoto became one of the best sources of these treasures.
• 4.00pm - Exhibition viewing

Speakers

Dr Kendall H. Brown is exhibition curator for Taisho chic: Japanese modernity, nostalgia and deco. He is Professor of Asian Art History, California State University, Long Beach, California and Curator of Collections, Exhibitions and Programs at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California. He is currently working on a book on the history of Japanese gardens outside Japan. His initial work on 16th and 17th century painting is published in several essays and the book The politics of reclusion: painting and power in Momoyama Japan (1997). Later his interest turned to the 20th century and to woodblock prints. His recent work on Kawase Hasui was published in Kawase Hasui: The complete woodblock prints (2003).

Professor Vera Mackie is Australian Research Council Australian Professorial Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne Major publications include Feminism in modern Japan: Citizenship, embodiment and sexuality (2003) and Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender, Labour and Activism, 1900-1937 (1997).

Dr Marco Pompili is a registered architect (OAPPC-Rome) practising with Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects. He is the author of  Dojunkai Apartments: Tokyo 1924-1934, Collective housing in Japan and the modern city (2001), and of several publications on Japanese architecture. His interest and research are concerned with the theory of architecture and Japanese architecture, with a focus on the development of collective housing from the early 20th century onwards.

Patricia Salmon lived in Tokyo from the early 1960s -90s and her collection of early 20th century Japanese art now at the Honolulu Academy of Arts forms the bulk of the current exhibit Taisho Chic: Japanese modernity, nostalgia and deco.  She is the author of Japanese Antiques, With a Guide to Shops (1975) and during her years in Japan contributed to Arts of Asia magazine as well as many other periodicals  including a weekly article for the English language Mainichi Daily News on Japanese, Korean and Chinese art.

Dr Elise Tipton is Associate Professor and Chair of Japanese Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Modern Japan:  A Social and Political History, Second Edition (2008) and co-editor of Being Modern in Japan:  Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s (2000). Her research focuses on the relationship between society and the state during the interwar years, especially regarding attitudes and experiences of modernity in every day life.