Marketing Chinese art in the Tokugawa World: painting manuals in early modern Japan

Thesis

This dissertation investigates how “Chinese” and “Chinese-style” art were constructed, contested, and redeployed within Japan’s evolving cultural landscape from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The project shows how socially expansive engagements with continental models not only challenged elite monopolies of high culture, but also helped constitute art as an increasingly public field in early modern Japan. Bringing together approaches from art history, book studies, and social history, I analyze the unprecedented publishing boom of painting manuals in early modern Japan as a dynamic site of cultural negotiation. This boom unfolded during a time when strict socio-political control was challenged by commercial growth, cultural aspiration, and maritime exchange, and when both public access to art and the social function of artistic practice underwent dramatic change. My project examines how these publications appropriated, adapted, or rejected Chinese models and contributes to broader debates on transculturality, materiality, and knowledge formation in a global context.

Authors: Chen, X

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-g2qg8jdmp
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Subjects: history of art; book studies; Japanese studies; East Asian studies; cultural history; Chinese studies