Parallel Modernism: Koga Harue and Avant-Garde Art in Modern Japan by Chinghsin Wu (review)

From the first pages of Chinghsin Wu's study of the Japanese modern painter Koga Harue (1895–1933), the reader is aware of the delicate balance the author strikes as she navigates the terrain of global art history. In his short career, Koga painted in styles that were visually similar to those found in European modern art. Wu argues that like many Japanese artworks of the early twentieth century, Koga's paintings appeared to have the same form as their counterparts in Europe, but they expressed different concepts and theories. In Parallel Modernism Wu utilizes theories of quantum entanglement and parallel universes drawn from quantum physics to argue that Japanese modernism possessed its own internal reasoning and that grouping modern paintings based on style alone leads to inaccurate and biased interpretations. Through careful visual analysis, thorough archival research, and a skillful amalgamation of the sources used by the artists, including poetry, religion, art magazines, and mass media, Wu deftly exposes a lesser-known narrative in the history of modern art.

The crux of Wu's argument, and where this book makes its greatest contribution, is in the analysis of the meanings found in Japanese cubism, expressionism, and surrealism, primarily in the 1920s and 1930s. The chapters follow the arc of Koga's life, from his start in watercolor and the Pacific Art Society, to his development in cubism and expressionism, and to his later works in surrealism. Unifying his art historical training with his personal biography, Wu takes Koga's story beyond chronology and biography by integrating art theories as well as an account of translated texts, exhibitions, and artistic discourse in publications of the era that show how Koga and his peers were working through both their form and their content in a public arena. Wu denies "isms" based on stylistic similarities, making the point that analyzing paintings in this fashion has led to Japanese art being classified as unoriginal or derivative, and possibly misidentified when Japanese paintings fail to conform to European standards. Rather, throughout the book, Wu advocates for translation as a theoretical framework: the translation of both texts and visual styles as undertaken by Japanese modern artists.¹ Furthermore, Parallel Modernism builds upon the expanding field of Japanese modern art history and takes on the important tasks of expanding the dialogue into mediums that are understudied, in this case watercolor, and to artists who have received little attention in English.²

Chapter 1 provides a history of Koga's youth and the start of his career, with an overview of his initial influences. In these early years, Koga began to move away from the Meiji romanticism and academism that was popular at the time, instead turning toward artistic individualism. Chapter 2 deconstructs cubism in Japan, tying Koga's cubism to religious themes. This chapter works well in showing how Koga fused classicism and cubism. Koga was particularly interested in El Greco and viewed European classical art as fresh and not in conflict with cubism, which Japanese artists viewed as lacking in content. Koga united the two disparate styles in his early works, solving what was viewed in Japan as an absence of meaning in cubism. In this chapter Wu skillfully navigates a variety of incongruent artistic vocabularies and movements and brings them together to form a narrative that helps the reader to understand the visual environment Koga was working in. Chapter 3 addresses expressionism and parallels between Koga's artistic approach and that of the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee. Here Wu considers Koga's works that are the closest in form to another artist: Koga outright copied some of Klee's compositions, but Wu argues that Klee allowed Koga to "resolve a problem that he had already been grappling with" and that Klee provided a way forward for Koga's watercolors (p. 101).

Chapters 4 and 5 provide the most convincing arguments and the most important contributions of...