Maximum Embodiment: Yōga, The Western Painting of Japan, 1912–1955 by Bert Winther-Tamaki (review)

Maximum Embodiment is a richly evocative and tightly structured study of thirteen yōga artists. Author Bert Winther-Tamaki posits “embodiment” and “disembodiment” as recurring themes of yōga during the five critical decades of the genre’s history. He argues that embodiment, the distinctly “physical nature” of yōga, was manifested in four ways: “(1) the distinctive materiality of oil paint pigments on the picture surface, (2) the depiction of the palpable human bodies, (3) identity of the act and product of painting with a somatic expression of the artist’s physical being, (4) rhetorical metaphors of political and social incorporation” (p. 14). Because of these qualities, not only did the medium of oil painting enable artists to capture the substantiality of the painted subject, but it also brought to them both concrete and symbolic encounters with bodies—of their own, of their fellow countrymen and -women, and of a “potentially global range of others” (p. 11). As the antithesis of images of embodiment, Winther-Tamaki presents images of disembodiment, which first arose as an “overriding theme of yōga” during the 1930s and depicted “wrenching physical torment of painted bodies in ways that were directly related to bitter and desperate conditions experienced by the Japanese people during and after the Fifteen Year War” (p. 128). These concepts shine a unique light on both continuities and discontinuities in the visuality of yōga from the wartime through the postwar years. They also reinforce the author’s argument for a broader understanding of yōga as an “intercultural medium” that served as “a means for facilitating and managing relations between cultures” (p. 9) and, by extension, forged a new cultural identity for artists and their audience.

Each chapter addresses a specific subject matter that exhibits the intertwining of the above four manifestations of embodiment. The first chapter focuses on self-portraits by Kishida Ryūsei (1891–1929), Murayama Kaita (1896–1919), Matsumoto Shunsuke (1912–1948), and Aimitsu (1907–1946). For these artists, who never traveled overseas during their youth, mastering the embodiment of yōga was a formidable challenge. Self-portraits, as Winther-Tamaki points out, were especially significant because they “entailed a most literal self-embodiment of otherness” (p. 25) as well as the “implicit iconography of the global self-consciousness” (p. 27) that was the hallmark of modern artists. The four artists’ self-portraits thus reveal their intense, sometimes narcissistic introspection and yearning for self-actualization.¹ The author also sheds light on another role of self-portraits by investigating them as vehicles for questioning widely accepted visions of modernity. In their later self-portraits, Kishida, Matsumoto, and Aimitsu pursued classicist styles to find alternatives to individualism and to Eurocentrism (disguised as cosmopolitanism), both of which were highly valued within their milieu. For the latter two painters, the choice of such styles partly reflected their sense of duty as artists in a nation at war. Working in the 1920s, Murayama similarly strove to capture in his art the vitality of the archetypal Yamato race, which he thought was lacking in the Japanese art of the time.

One avenue that the author could have investigated further is how these artists’ fear of death colored their perspective on Self, a theme that seems to foreshadow the intertwining of embodiment and disembodiment discussed later in the book. As he points out, blood often symbolized sensuality and youthful vigor in Murayama’s poems; it was, however, vividly connected to death as well. Having contracted tuberculosis, Murayama wrote “Playing with Death” in 1919, the year he died:

I began to play with death …My toys were my lungsI held them dearly in my handsBut death took them away …When I finally got them backThey were all torn and dripping with bloodBut I would still play with death …²

Here, the symbolism of blood highlights the duality of decadence and artistic...