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100 C H a p t E R  Creating Oriental Beauty Chinese Passages to Imperial Yōga The previous two chapters have demonstrated how the Eurocentrism of the Yōga self-portrait and nude was neutralized by transferring the focus of these genres from European bodies to Japanese bodies, paradigmatically those of the male Self and the desirable female. It might seem that endowing Yōga with a persuasive sense of Japanese authenticity through such means should be gratifying in and of itself from a nationalist perspective. Yet, with victories in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and subsequent imperial expansion, nationalist energies were increasingly focused on territories, peoples, and cultures beyond the shores of the Japanese archipelago. Thus, parallel to the process of reconfiguring Yōga to more closely reflect national culture, Yōga painting was also extended to the foreign objects of Japanese colonization and military intervention such as Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, China, the South Pacific, and Mongolia. Among these various Asian others, China was fraught with unique significance to imperial Japan because of Japan’s peripheral status vis-à-vis the political and cultural primacy of China throughout much of the East Asian past. Japanese art history reflects this centrality of Chinese culture in its development through frequent transmissions of models and techniques from China over many centuries. Thus, Yōga painters who sought to modify the Western foreignness of their medium by incorporating references to past Japanese art inevitably encountered areas of ambiguous distinction between Japanese and Chinese art. Proponents of Yōga now sought to exploit this past to construct an imperial visuality that encompassed China under Japanese direction. This chapter assesses the amplification of the Yōga movement into an imperial Creating Oriental Beauty 101 Japanese art form in the period when Japan displaced China as the leading force in Asian culture and politics by tracing various Chinese threads through the work of four well-known Yōga painters.1 Political developments in Sino-Japanese relations as well as art historical circumstances contributed to the proliferation of tropes of China in early- and mid-twentieth-century Yōga. Much of the development of Yōga falls within a period bracketed by two Sino-Japanese wars. In 1894–1895 and again in 1937–1945, Japanese forces fought to expand the Japanese Empire at the expense of the Qing and, later, Nationalist and Communist regimes of China. Formosa was removed from the Chinese sphere of influence and ceded to Japan in 1895; Korea was similarly extracted from Chinese power when it became a Japanese protectorate in 1905 and was annexed by Japan in 1910; a Japanese puppet regime was installed in Manchuria in 1932; and much of northern China was invaded by Japanese forces in 1937. This Japanese expansion at the expense of China had important ramifications for Yōga painters . French-style art exhibition salons, patterned after that held annually in Tokyo since 1907, were established by the Japanese colonial bureaucracy in Korea (1922), Taiwan (1927), and Manchuria (1938), and Japanese painters were dispatched from Tokyo to serve as jurors in these salons.2 Thus, artists who had spent years in Europe and knew little about Asian cultures outside of Japan found themselves traveling to China and other parts of Asia, where their interests were piqued by the people, culture, and scenery they encountered and painted. Among the Chinese episodes of the expansion of the purview of Japanese art, for example, was a surge of interest in the fifth- and sixth-century Buddhist murals and carvings at Yungang in Shanxi Province among Japanese artists, archaeologists, journalists, and tourists after the occupation of this site by the Japanese army in 1937.3 The political expansion of Japanese domain and the enlargement of Yōga’s field of vision were driven by imperialism, an ideology that was energized by the realization that China, which had dominated Asia for centuries, was now subordinated within the Japanese Empire. Tropes of China in early-twentieth-century Yōga were manifested in the same four interrelated aspects of embodiment that, as I have been arguing, denote the distinctive visuality of Yōga: bodies variously identified with Chinese people or culture were painted in oil on canvas; oil-paint matière was rearticulated through ideals and methods associated with Chinese painterly tradition; the artist’s imagined somatic presence in the painting was likewise associated with ideals of Chinese painting tradition; and, finally, China became an...

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