1993 APT1 Conference : Identity, tradition and change

14 D: Art discourses in d iff e r en t Asian a r t cu ltu re s My work recen tly has con cen tra ted on d iff e r en t types of comparisons of modern a r t across Asian a rt cu ltu re s . Part of th is has looked at the differences between a r t d iscourses and a t the notion of pa ra lle l discourses. I offer below two e x t r a c t s as possible foci for debate from my paper: 'Yoga in Japan: Model or Exception? Modernity in Japanese a rt, l S 5 0 s - 1 9 4 0 s ' Stirrup, Sail & Plough: C on tinen ta l and Maritime In fluences on Japanese Id en tity , RsPacS, ANU, Canberra, from 2 0 - 2 3 September 1993. At the very basic leve l of discourses, the re are wide differences between a r t cu ltu re s in when they were e s tab lished and in the s t r u c t u r a l re la tion of the discourse of works to t h a t of in te rp re ta tion . If we look at China, for example, the p ro to - h i s t o r i c a l con tac ts with European a rt, which its desp ite be ing con s truc ted by Chinese l i t e r a t i as on the level of craftsmen, had some sim ila rities with such con tac ts in Japan. There were also genetic links via the influence of Suzhou pe rspec tive p r in t s on Japanese ukiyo-e in the 17 40 s . There was moreover an e labo ra te series of a rt discourses, p a r ticu la r ly in pa in ting , which could and were to be o thered in the early years of the 2 0 th cen tu ry in a similar way to Japan some 3 0 - 4 0 years earlier. Chinese n e o - tr a d ition a lism even borrowed from nihonga by inc luding techn ica l importa tions from 'Western academic rea lism’. Japan might thu s seem to be the typ ica l case of modernity in Asian art, with l a t e r v a r ia tion s in o th e r Asian a rt cu ltu res to appear merely as s u b - t y p e s in a conven ien tly diachronic developmental tree . But th is kind of use of Jap an as a model by it s e l f without mu lti­ la te ra l reference to a matrix of re la tion s in o the r Asian a r t cu ltu res would be methodologically u n a t t r a c t i v e and bo th empirically and theo re tica lly misleading. Methodologically it would lead to an assumption of common phenomena which p riv ileged one s e t of h is to rica l conditions as the an teceden t of o the r Asian cases. Empirically it is doubtful whe ther the