Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Art, Asian Exhibitions History'

Contemporary Chinese ink art is often seen as a part of an ongoing history in the Western art world, as opposed to a part of the contemporary. This thesis addresses the history of Chinese ink, the Westernization of the Chinese art world, and the major exhibitions of Chinese contemporary ink artwork that have been held in the Western world.

This thesis examines the first seventeen years of the history of the Museum of Modern Art Oxford (MOMA), from its founding in 1965 until c. 1982. It is concerned with the changing relationships between the museum and its audience, focusing on those aspects of the museum's programming that shed light on its role as a public mediator of recent art. This provides a means to consider the underlying values and commitments that informed MOMA's emergence as a leading contemporary art institution. Chapter one examines the museum's relationship to utopian countercultures through the metaphor of the museum as 'garden'; chapter two considers the erstwhile 'permanent' collection and its connection to corporate patronage; chapter three investigates the parallel forces of institutional critique and institutionalization; and chapter four addresses didactic strains in the museum's representation of an emergent multiculturalism. Although dedicated to the history of a single regional gallery, the thematic structure of the thesis provides entry points into historical and theoretical issues of broader relevance. It is based on primary research in the previously neglected archive of what is now known as Modern Art Oxford, supplemented by interviews with artists and former staff members, and by close attention to British art periodicals and exhibition catalogues of the period. It is also informed by critical writings on museums and displays, and by artistic, social and museological histories, allowing the museum's activities to be situated within the cultural politics of these turbulent decades. The thesis suggests that institutional identity - as exemplified by the history of MOMA from 1965-1982 - is porous and discontinuous: the development of the museum over this period is animated by multiple and often contradictory ideals, continuously shaped by pragmatic considerations, and subject to a rich variety of subjective responses.

The present study is, to my knowledge, the first investigating the newly renovated and rearranged permanent art and design exhibition at Nationalmuseum, Stockholm: The Timeline. The exhibition presents Western art from 1500 to 1914 and design and portraiture from 1500 until today in a chronological arrangement. In the first chapter of the analysis, the exhibition is compared to previous arrangements of the permanent art exhibition at Nationalmuseum, as well as to historical museological trends. In the second chapter, Carol Duncan’s perspective of the ritual structure is applied in order to explore how the specific design of the exhibition affects visitors and objects, and how mening and narrative is created. The study does not primarily focus on individual objects, but on the general design and structure of the exhibition space. The study concludes that historical references can be found in the current exhibition – mainly to a sensual, intimate, and aesthetic mode of display from the early twentieth century. Some principles which have been dominating in art museums since the mid-twentieth century are challenged, including the isolation of objects; use of vast, empty spaces; division between different object categories; and sparse, single-row hanging. The varied and dynamic hanging of the current exhibition, in contrast to a repetetive one, creates different patterns of movement and object-visitor interactions. Still, the ritual structure of the exhibition works to direct visitor attention and behaviour, conveying an art-historical narrative. Meanings concerning objects’ historical context are fascilitated through the interplay between visual arrangement and textual information.

When an object is introduced to a new culture for the first time, how does it transition from the status of a foreign import to a fully integrated object of that culture? Does it ever truly reach this status, or are its foreign origins a part of its identity that are impossible to overlook? What role could the arts of that culture play in adapting a foreign object into part of the culture? I propose to address these questions in specific regard to early modern Japan (1550–1850) through a black lacquered ōtsuzumi drum decorated with a gold powder motif of intersecting arquebuses and powder horns. While it may seem unlikely that a single piece of lacquerware can comment on the larger issues of cultural accommodation and appropriation, careful analysis reveals the way in which adopted firearms, introduced by Portuguese sailors in 1543, shed light on this issue.

While the arquebus’s militaristic and economic influence on Japan has been firmly established, this thesis investigates how the Kobe Museum’s ōtsuzumi is a manifestation of the change that firearms underwent from European imports of pure military value to Japanese items of not just military, but also artistic worth. It resulted from an intermingling of Japanese-Portuguese trade, aesthetics of the noble military class, and cultural accommodation between Europeans and Japanese that complicates our understandings of influence and appropriation. To analyze this process of appropriation and accommodation, the first section begins with a historical overview of lacquer in Japan, focusing on the Momoyama period, and the introduction of firearms. The second section will go into the aesthetics of lacquerware, including the importance of narrative symbolism and use in the performing arts with a particular emphasis on the aural and visual aesthetics of the drum. Finally, I will discuss this drum in the global contexts of the early modern era, which takes into account the tension between the decline in popularity of firearms as well as the survival of the drum. Pieced together, these various aspects will help to construct a better understanding of this unique piece’s place in the Japanese Christian material culture of early modern Japan.

The work of Japanese contemporary artist Aida Makoto (1965-) has been shown internationally in major art institutions, yet there is little English-language art historical scholarship on him. While a contemporary of internationally-acclaimed Japanese artists Murakami Takashi and Nara Yoshitomo, Aida has neither gained their level of international recognition or respect. To date, Aida?s work has been consistently labeled as otaku or subcultural art, and this label fosters exotic and juvenile notions about the artist?s heavy engagement with Japanese animation, film and manga (Japanese comic book) culture. In addition to this critical devaluation, Aida?s explicit and deliberately shocking compositions seemingly serve to further disqualify him from scholarly consideration. This thesis will argue that Aida Makoto is instead a serious and socially responsible artist. Aida graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts from Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music in 1991 and came of age as an artist in the late 1980s during the start of Japan?s economic recession. Since then Aida has tirelessly created artwork embodying an ever-changing contemporary Japanese identity. Much of his twenty-three-year oeuvre explores the culturally significant social sign of the shojo or pre-pubescent Japanese schoolgirl. This thesis will discuss these compositions as Aida?s deliberate and exacting social critiques of Japan?s first and second ?lost decades,? which began in 1991 and continue into the present.

Shigeru Mizuki (1922-2015) is one of the most sophisticated and accomplished of modern manga artists. His work synthesizes ancient and modern Japanese visual artistic methods with contemporary tropes from Western graphic art to tell profound and complex stories that reflect major themes of war and the supernatural world. This thesis argues that Mizuki’s work should be reevaluated as a valuable contribution to modern art based on the following three qualities: technical mastery and innovation in visual art; socio-political and philosophical depth of content; and his impact on other contemporary Japanese artists. Such study is significant because of the popularity of manga and other graphic art in shaping both popular culture and the view of art adopted by younger generations. Thus, studying Mizuki has implications for our understanding of art and its intersection with popular culture, and raises questions regarding whether popular media like manga should be considered seriously by art historians.

Feminist art historians reassessed French Impressionist Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, a period in which her work coincidentally received steady exposure in major museum exhibitions. This thesis examines how the feminist art historical project intersects with exhibitions that give prominence to Morisot’s work. Critical reviews by Morisot scholars argue that more frequent display of the artist’s work has not correlated to nuanced interpretation. Moreover, prominent feminist scholars and museum theorists maintain that curators virtually exclude their contributions. Attending to these recurrent concerns, this thesis charts shifts in emphases and inquiry in writing centered on Morisot to survey the extent to which curators convey new constructions of her artistic, social, and historical identities. This analysis will observe how distinct exhibition forms—the retrospective, the Impressionism blockbuster, and the gendered “women Impressionists” show—may frame Morisot’s work differently according to their organizing principles.

The lengthy descriptions of tribute embassies in the Chinese dynastic histories have led to the widespread belief that the China-centered tribute system dominated the trade of pre-modern East Asia at all times. The tribute trade, however, was not the main form of trade between China and Japan. In the year 838 CE, the last Japanese embassy for nearly six centuries traveled to Tang-dynasty China (618-907). Until 1403, when the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu of the Ashikaga bakufu dispatched a delegation to the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) to resume formal diplomatic relations, the tribute trade was suspended. Even though sources are few and far between, this thesis demonstrates the Sino-Japanese trade flourished throughout these six centuries.

Buddhist trade—the commercial exchange of objects for Buddhist uses, with monks as participants—occupied a prominent position in Sino-Japanese trade between 838 and 1403. People living on the Japanese archipelago desired many continental goods, and meanwhile, Chinese consumers also sought many commodities from Japan. Some of the Japanese embassy members in the 838 delegation were already engaged in non-tribute trade, trying to purchase incense and medicines in the lower Yangzi region of China. Meanwhile, Japanese monks diligently collected Buddhist texts and ritual objects. Archaeological discoveries show that between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the Japanese repurposed various Chinese daily utensils such as ceramic jars, porcelain boxes, and bronze mirrors for religious uses. At the same time, Chinese commoners acquired Japanese goods. In addition to fine products like pearls, China also imported bulky goods from Japan such as lumber for monastery construction and for coffins.

Religious networks and commercial networks gradually became integrated as monks traveled on merchant ships and transmitted trade information. Prestigious monasteries also actively collaborated with merchants, and the trust embedded in the religious network facilitated long-distance trade. The authorities in both China and Japan realized that the shared belief in Buddhism could act as a common ground to reduce friction. The emperors of the Song dynasty (960-1276) warmly welcomed pilgrim monks from Japan.

Although the Mongol ruler Khubilai Khan (r. 1260-1294) launched two invasions of Japan, in 1274 and 1281, the commercial and religious exchanges between China and Japan continued. The Mongol Emperor Chengzong (r. 1294-1307) dispatched a Zen master as his envoy to Japan, who stayed and taught in Kamakura. Ships named for Japanese monasteries brought sulfur and other goods to China and then returned to Japan with incense, medicines, ceramics, copper coins, and books. In the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Kamakura became the center of the growing Zen Buddhist movement as well as a distribution center for continental goods.

The six centuries of commercial and religious exchanges between China and Japan left a clear legacy. When Ashikaga Yoshimitsu resumed sending tribute to the Ming dynasty in 1403, an eminent monk led the Japanese delegation. Unlike the tribute system before 838, the newly established tribute exchanges acknowledged the need for participants to make a profit. And after the resumption of the tribute trade in 1403, monks and monasteries continued to play a significant role.

This dissertation investigates how Japanese expositions held from the 1890s to the 1940s, both abroad and at home, represented Japan itself as a 'guardian of Asian culture' while promoting the expansion of its empire. Japan's governing stance over other Asian nations at expositions during the prewar period appeared to imitate the imperial exhibitions of its Western counterparts, and yet the Japanese engagement of Asia in these exhibitions was portrayed as "almost the same, but not quite" the same empire. This study thus proposes to interpret Japan's exhibitionary practices toward other Asian nations as "mimicry," borrowing Homi K. Bhabha's conception, in order to challenge the totalizing vision of the West that was commonplace at exposition sites. I argue that the preoccupation with exhibitionary techniques provided Japan with a cultural, aesthetic, and ethnic claim over other Asian nations in terms of time and space. Further to this point, I argue that the importance of the visual technologies used by Japan in their expositions – technologies that were mimicked from Western empires – lies in their spatialization of time and temporal re-organization. This study thus aims to investigate the processes whereby Japanese expositions re-contextualized the aesthetic, cultural, and racial and ethnic identities of other Asian nations in terms of time and space.This dissertation investigates multiple sites of Japan's expositions, as well as numerous major figures who were involved in these exhibition practices. Chapter 2 concerns three (pre-)exhibitionary sites where Japanese traditional art and its art history were reorganized by modern art programmers such as Okakura Tenshin and Ernest Fenollosa: national treasure survey sites, the National Pavilion at the 1893 Chicago Exposition and the Official Catalogue for the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle (Histoire de l'Art du Japon). More specifically, I argue that these three exhibitionary sites were specific instances where Japanese traditional art and Asian art became "de-territorialized and re-territorialized" through the techniques of preservation, presentation and cataloguing. Chapter 3 examines the Japanese pavilion at the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition in terms of the visual technique of panoramas. The Japanese pavilion in this show self-adjusted to the panorama technique using a Western perspective, wherein Britain emerged as the temporal norm to be emulated in the logic of imperialism while Japan was relatively viewed as a "different" empire. Yet Japan, by mimicking the temporal logic of the Western empire, re-enacted its own temporal operations toward other Asian nations. Chapter 4 explores the ways in which anthropological exhibitions rearticulated the racial and ethnic identities of Asian nations under the name of a multi-ethnic empire. The Tokyo Anthropological Association and its leader, Tsuboi Shōgorō, made extensive use of visual technologies, like Western anthropologists, such as composite photography and anthropological expositions, and I thus investigate how they attempted to redefine racial and ethnic identities by way of these modern visual technologies. Chapter 5 considers the climax of Pan-Asianist expansion at the 1940 Chosŏn Great Exposition, held in Seoul, in the middle of Asia-Pacific War. This chapter examines how the visual practice of panoramas incorporated people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds under the inclusive umbrella of a multi-cultural East Asian empire, to encourage their participation in the war. I further contend that the performance of these panoramic imageries displayed both the inclusiveness and yet the simultaneous contradictions of multi-cultural empires.
Cette thèse explore comment les expositions japonaises de type universel, tenues entre les années 1890 et 1940, au pays comme à l'étranger, représentaient le Japon lui-même comme étant « gardiennes de la culture asiatique » alors qu'elles promouvaient du même coup l'expansion de l'empire japonais. Le point de vue japonais sur les autres nations asiatiques lors de ces expositions impériales d'avant-guerre semblait imiter celui de ses homologues occidentaux, à la nuance près, qu'il a été dépeignait comme étant « semblables, mais pas tout à fait pareilles » à son empire. Cette étude propose en ce sens d'interpréter les pratiques japonaises d'exposition en ce qui concerne les autres nations asiatiques, selon l'angle du « mimétisme » – pour emprunter le terme à Homi K. Bhabha. Cela m'amène à postuler que c'est précisément cet intérêt hâtif pour ces techniques qui a permis au Japon de prétendre avoir une mainmise culturelle, esthétique et éthique sur les autres nations asiatiques. J'avance dans cette veine que l'importance des technologies visuelles utilisées par le Japon au sein de ces expositions reposait sur leur déploiement et leur réorganisation spatiotemporels. Mon étude souhaite, en ce sens, investiguer les processus à travers lesquels les expositions japonaises décontextualisaient et recadraient les identités esthétiques, culturelles, raciales et ethniques des autres nations asiatiques en lien avec l'espace et le temps.Cette thèse se penche sur plusieurs expositions menées par le Japon et s'intéresse à l'implication de différentes personnalités influentes en ce qui concerne les pratiques d'exposition. Chapitre 2 s'intéresse à trois cas de figure où l'art japonais traditionnel et son histoire furent revisités par des commissaires d'art moderne comme Okakura Tenshin et Ernest Fenollosa, notamment avec les études menées sur l'héritage national du Japon, avec le Pavillon national japonais de l'exposition lors de Chicago de 1893 et avec le catalogue officiel de l'exposition universelle de Paris de 1900 (Histoire de l'art du Japon). Plus précisément, je postule que ces trois cas ont été des moments où l'art japonais traditionnel et l'art asiatique furent « déterritorialisé et reterritorialisé » à travers des techniques de préservation, de présentation et de catalogage. Chapitre 3 se penche le pavillon du Japon lors de l'exposition Japon-Grande-Bretagne de 1910 en ce qui a trait à la technique visuelle du panorama. Lors de cette exposition, le pavillon japonais s'est inspiré de la technique occidentale du panorama, alors que la Grande-Bretagne, avec sa perspective impériale, semblait être l'exemple à suivre. En « imitant » de la sorte la logique temporelle de l'Empire britannique, le Japon recréait les mêmes types d'opérations temporelles par rapport aux autres nations asiatiques. Chapitre 4 explore comment les expositions anthropologiques réarticulaient les identités raciales et ethniques des autres nations asiatiques au nom d'un empire multiethnique. L'Association anthropologique de Tokyo, sous l'influence de son directeur Tsuboi Shōgorō, a fait un usage important des techniques visuelles telles que les photographies composites et les expositions anthropologiques, je m'intéresse à cet égard sur la manière dont l'usage de techniques modernes de visualisation a tenté de redéfinir les identités raciales et ethniques des autres nations asiatiques. Chapitre 5 traite de l'apogée du panasianism lors de la Grande exposition Chosŏn qui s'est tenue à Séoul au milieu de la guerre en Asie et dans le Pacifique. Ce chapitre examine comment la pratique visuelle du panorama, en incorporant des personnes de différentes ethnies et cultures sous l'étiquette multiculturelle de l'empire de l'Asie de l'est, tentait d'encourager leur participation à la guerre. J'affirme à cet effet que le déploiement de ces représentations panoramiques affichait une forme d'inclusion des empires multiculturels qui comportait néanmoins diverses contradictions.

The dominant narrative mode in Ainu studies today stresses an activist agenda that, although worthwhile, limits the potential for new research in the field. In this thesis, I analyze historical accounts of the development of Ainu bear carvings as a case study of the characteristics of the dominant activist mode and present an alternate narrative in order to demonstrate the need for a variety of approaches to Ainu research.

The activist narrative mode is structured to engender sympathy for Ainu people and respect for their cultural heritage. Activist accounts of Ainu bear carvings often claim that the carvers were pressured by the Japanese tourist industry to violate religious taboos against producing realistic depictions of bears. In this way, the carvings serve as a symbol of oppression of Ainu people under Japanese imperialism. At the same time, activist scholars state that the Ainu bear carvings followed a linear progression from tourist souvenirs to respected works of “fine art.” Thus, the carvings also reinforce optimistic projections regarding the future status of Ainu culture and socioeconomic condition.

My alternate narrative focuses on the complexities and ambiguities in the field and avoids judging events in moral or sympathetic terms. I explore a broad range of contextual issues, tracing the regional production of wooden bears from the paleolithic ancestors of Ainu people, examining the role of bears and woodcarving in Ainu culture, analyzing Ainu interactions with Japan, Russia, and other neighboring empires, and investigating the commodification of bear carvings as tourist souvenirs.

Activist narratives have contributed a wealth of valuable research to the field of Ainu studies and remain a useful tool for promoting social and cultural equality for Ainu people. However, automatic conformity to the dominant activist mode perpetuates the obfuscation of certain details in Ainu history, including the diversity within Ainu and Japanese cultures and institutions, instances of political cooperation between Ainu and Japanese communities, and unanswered questions regarding the complex development of Ainu cultural practices and beliefs. Although any historical account (including this thesis) inherently simplifies its subjects, varying our narrative approach helps us to identify and fill some of the gaps.

This dissertation asks how, in the context of elite medieval Japanese painting, matter could constitute meaning. This is attempted through a case study of one of the last great medieval illustrated handscrolls (Jp. emaki) yet to receive full treatment, the Genjō Sanzō-e (Illustrated Life of Xuanzang). Produced by the atelier of the enigmatic court painter Takashina Takakane (fl. ca. 1309–1330), the Genjō Sanzō-e has long constituted the mysterious jewel in the crown of the genre known as kōsōden emaki, or illustrated handscrolls of the lives of eminent monks. The work relates the life of the seventh century Chinese monk Xuanzang (ca. 602–664), who made an epic seventeen year pilgrimage from China to India to obtain sutras for translation into Chinese, thereby changing the course of Buddhist history in East Asia. The Genjō Sanzō-e comprises twelve illustrated scrolls that cumulatively measure almost two hundred meters. It was sequestered for hundreds of years at the spiritual heart of the Daijō-in imperial cloister of Kōfukuji, Nara, where it served as both icon and relic. This history of hermeticism led to the generation of an auratic narrative of a hermetic handscroll that turned on the perverse charisma of the invisible object. Already intellectually quarantined as a “very special object” by virtue of its emaki format, the scroll’s ontological complexity indirectly contributed to its further art historical isolation. Its first ever full exhibition in 2011 catalyzed this study, which interrogates the composition and function of illustrated sacred biography on both the hermeneutic and non-hermeneutic levels, as both text and sacred object. Micro-readings of the scroll texts and paintings against a constellation of self-indicated lexical and pictorial sources reveals that the source of the scroll’s efficacy as a numinous object lies in an exquisitely choreographed analogical mode of explicitly intertextual composition, producing a self-canonizing object that manipulates the expressive plasticity of the picto-textual handscroll format to deliver a customized re-telling of the life of Xuanzang. These findings challenge the conventional history of medieval Yamato-e painting, the category of kōsōden emaki, and Euro-centric conceptions of iconicity and the autonomy of the artifact.
East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This study provides the first comprehensive account of the institutional history of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) from the earliest calls for its foundation at the start of the twentieth century to the recent series of exhibitions marking its fiftieth anniversary in 2010. The SNGMA is both a unique case‐study and a useful illustrative example of the specific category of modern art museum: the account of its history sets the institution within its wider cultural context and explores the inevitable complexities facing a public gallery devoted to modern art. The study examines how the institution has balanced the need to represent a full historical survey of modern art with the desire to engage with the contemporary, and how it has addressed the question of collecting and displaying the work of Scottish artists alongside international art. By providing a close documentary analysis of the evolution of the institution, drawn from within the Gallery’s own archives, combined with extended reflections on the central dilemmas it has had to face, the study constitutes an original contribution to museum scholarship. Various methodologies are employed to assess the diverse factors that have affected the institution’s development. The narrative confirms the close correlation between the architectural frame and the public perception of the institution. It traces the evolution of the acquisitions policy and notes how this shaped the permanent collection, allowing a shift from an aspiration to universal coverage of the international trends of 20th century art to a more targeted specialisation in certain areas, primarily Dada and Surrealism. It charts the attitudes towards temporary exhibitions and the display of the permanent collection, and examines these in the light of current exhibition theory and practice. The analysis concludes that the SNGMA has been largely successful at achieving the aims and ambitions it originally defined for itself, although its role is constantly evolving in response to changes in the broader context of art museums.

This dissertation examines the history of the Durban Art Gallery from its founding in 1892 until 2004, a decade after the First Democratic Election. While the emphasis is on significant changes that were introduced in the post-1994 period, the earlier section of the study locates these initiatives within a broad historical framework. The collecting policies of the museum as well as its exhibitions and programmes are considered in the light of the institution 's changing social and political context as well as shifting imperatives within a local, regional and national art world. The Durban Art Gallery was established in order to promote a European, and particularly British, culture, and the acquisition and appreciation of art was considered an important element in the formation of a stable society. By providing a broad overview of the early years of the gallery, I identify reasons for the choice of acquisitions and explore the impact and reception of a selection of exhibitions. I investigate changes during the 1960s and 1970s through an examination of the Art South Africa Today exhibitions: in addition to opening up institutional spaces to a racially mixed community, these exhibitions marked the beginning of an imperative to show protest art. I argue that, during the political climate of the 1980s, there was a tension in the cultural arena between, on the one hand, a motivation to retain a Western ideal of 'high art' and, on the other, a drive to accommodate the new forms of people's art and to challenge the values and ideological standpoints that had been instrumental in shaping collecting and exhibiting policies in the South African art arena. I explore this tension through a discussion of the Cape Town Triennial exhibitions, organised jointly by all the official museums, which ran alongside more inclusive and independently curated exhibitions, such as Tributaries, which were shown mainly outside the country. The post-1994 period marked an opening up of spaces, both literally and conceptually. This openness was manifest in the revised strategies that were introduced to show the Durban Art Gallery 's permanent collection as well as in two key public projects that were started - Red Eye @rt and the AIDS 2000 ribbon. Through an examination of these strategies and initiatives, I argue that the central role of the Durban Art Gallery has shifted from being a repository to providing an interactive public space.

The Pretoria Art Museum opened its doors to the public on May 20, 1964. At that time the Johannesburg Art Gallery had already been established in 1910 and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town in 1895. The realization of the Pretoria Art Museum was an accomplishment of the City’s clerk’s push for the city to have a museum of its own that would enable it to showcase works that the city owned which until then had been confined to its administrative offices and the City Hall. This nucleus collection which had been inaccessible to the general public, consisted of South African Old Masters and 17 Century Dutch art. On 15 April 1964, about a month before the museum opened officially to the public, the Selection Committee of the Board of Trustees of the Art Museum instituted by the City Council of Pretoria met to deliberate on how the collection of the museum was to be built in order to expand this nucleus collection further.The result was a series of eight resolutions that favoured the acquisition of South African Old Masters and The Hague School (19thcentury Netherlandish art). In the minutes of that meeting no mention was made of the acquisition of 20thcentury South African black artists. By 1994 about 2 404 units of artworks by white artists had been acquired in contrast to about 86 units of artworks by black artists. The eight resolutions tabulated by the board, can be taken as an informal policy thatthe museum adopted during the thirty-year period of its existence from 1964 to 1994 to acquire artworks. No formal acquisition policy existed as a part of the museum’s acquisition strategy during that three decade period. Fortunately, as the collection grew, there were deviations in the ‘acquisition strategy’ because works by black artists, though collected at a far lesser frequency than those by white artists, found their place in the collection. This research paper is a homage to the contributions of 20thcentury South African black artists’ contributions to the history of South African art.
Dissertation (MSocSci)--University of Pretoria, 2020.
Historical and Heritage Studies
MSocSci
Unrestricted

Fukuda Chiyo-ni and Kiyohara Yukinobu were 17th-18th century (Edo period) Japanese women artists well known during their lifetime but are relatively unknown today. This thesis establishes their contributions and recognition during their lifespans. Further, it examines the precedence for professional women artists’ recognition within Japanese art history. Then, it proceeds to explain the complexities of Meiji-era changes to art history and aesthetics heavily influenced by European and American (Western) traditions. Using aesthetic and art historical analysis of artworks, this thesis establishes a pattern of art canon formation that favored specific styles of art/artists while excluding others in ways sometimes inauthentic to Japanese values. Japan has certainly had periods of female suppression and this research illustrates how European models and traditions of art further shaped the perception of Japanese women artists and the dearth of female representation in galleries and art historical accounts.

The once distinct roles of artist and curator have blurred dramatically in recent decades owing to a blending process in both directions, which has led to a turn towards the concept of the curator as producer and author, and the development of the hybridised figure of the ‘artist-curator’. Within my practice-based curatorial research at Meter Room and Grey Area, the 'artist-run space', as both form and content of space, is used as a critical framework for artist-curatorship. Artist-run spaces play a significant role in the cultural ecology of the UK, and this project explores the power relations involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of work within the field, in terms of both a cause and effect of a contested relationship with institutions and commercial galleries. Artist-run spaces are initiated for a number of reasons, but this project specifically focuses upon those spaces that identify with terms such as ‘independent’, 'alternative', ‘not-for-profit’, ‘DIY’, ‘self-organised’, and ‘critically engaged’. Using strategies for the development of a critical practice, such as Chantal Mouffe’s theories on ‘counter-hegemony’ and ‘agonistic space’ (2007), and Gerald Raunig's concept of 'instituent practice' (2009), this project explores how curatorial practices within artist-curator-run spaces might offer different ways of working, and be used to contest hegemonic structures within the field. I explore the role of critique within curatorial practice, specifically in relation to the struggle for autonomy, the production of subjectivity, and strategies for negating or resisting cooption by the New Institutions of post-Fordist neoliberalism. Three curatorial strategies were developed from experimental projects at both spaces, and then explored at Meter Room over a 2-year period. These strategies sought to occupy institutional structures in new ways: through the re-functioning of 'void' space, blending studio and gallery functions within a Curatorial Studio, developing a paracuratorial practice referred to as Caretaking, and re-approaching the concept of a collection-based institution through processes of layering works and their vestiges within an Artist-run Collection. The practice-based research culminated in a 5-month durational project in collaboration with five other artist-run spaces based in the West Midlands region, which explored a strategy for the creation of a new speculative artist-run institution as a dialogical process of instituting values through a critical curatorial practice.

In this thesis, I explore two works from Mail Order Brides/M.O.B., A Public Message for Your Private Life (1998) and Mail Order Bride of Frankenstein (2003), that take into account the histories and identities produced within Filipino/a American Communities. I use Sarita Echavez See and Emily Noelle Ignacio's theories on parody to analyze the performative aspects of M.O.B's artworks. According to See and Ignacio, parody can be utilized as a tool to simultaneously form solidarity within Filipino American communities. By examining these ideas, I argue that M.O.B. performs appropriated representations of their ethnic and assimilated cultures by using parody to critique and problematize often-misrepresented individual and cultural identities.

Art History
M.A.
The focus of this thesis will be the exploration of the narrative constructs around the life and work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610). This exploration will occur through the study of selected exhibitions curated on the Lombard artist from the twentieth- through twenty-first centuries. It will demonstrate how museums have played a significant role in the public’s understanding and perception of Caravaggio. In this thesis, I will argue that exhibitions on Caravaggio have supported and reshaped the general understanding and perception of the artist in crucial ways not done to the same effect in more nuanced academic scholarship. I will also argue that public exhibitions have functioned according to a different set of agendas from those addressed to academia. For example, exhibitions are conceived and function on guiding principles such as alignment with museum mission statements, audience draw and accessibility, educational outcomes, and the visitor experience. This thesis will seek to determine to what measure these principles have affected the framing of content and to clarify how in particular the selective use of Caravaggio’s biography has affected interpretation of his works within a museum context for a viewing public. The restored enthusiasm for Caravaggio in the second-half of the twentieth century also focused on his personal life due to the publication and translation by Walter Friedlaender of Lives written by his seventeenth-century biographers—Giorgio Mancini, Giovanni Baglione, and Giovanni Pietro Bellori—as well as the publication of documents and court records, which highlighted episodes of Caravaggio’s criminality, all impinging on our interpretation of his artistic merits. Although these findings support our understanding of Caravaggio as a complex individual, they also contribute to the sensationalization and romanticization of the artist as the quintessentially bohemian figure. Furthermore, doubtful attributions and disputes over execution dates problematize our understanding of the artist’s oeuvre and have at certain points reinforced a ‘Caravaggio narrative’ of the rebellious, indecorous artist. It is my intention to show how museum exhibitions have contributed to and exploited this narrative and to determine more precisely how and to what extent they have shaped it. With this exploration of Caravaggio’s narrative construction by museum exhibitions of the twentieth- to twenty-first centuries, I aim to approach and reconsider this subject, which has been dealt with heavily in scholarship, under a different lens. In the case of Caravaggio—whose persona and works have been posthumously manipulated, admired, and condemned at the hands of biographers and critics—it is necessary to approach this subject with renewed, unbiased, and objective vigor within a new frame of understanding: the museum exhibition frame. I will use a comparative method, studying three key exhibitions over time, to show how museums have presented the artist’s career development. I pay particular attention to the incorporation of biography and to the impact the inclusion of selected aspects of his Lives have had on the public view of his works. The influential format of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists set the structure and codified the model of biographical determinism that would inform Caravaggio’s later biographers in the interpretation of his works; this has persisted through the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries with the application of psychoanalytic approaches to Caravaggio. The first of the three exhibitions I have selected is Longhi’s 1951 Milan exhibition, Mostra del Caravaggio e dei Caravaggeschi, which restored public consciousness of Caravaggio’s innovative and revolutionary style, reinserting him into the artistic canon. My second example will be The Age of Caravaggio, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1985. The Met exhibition is novel for its focus on Caravaggio’s relationship with his precursors and contemporaries (the organizing committee deliberately excluded works by Caravaggio’s followers) and for its interpretation of works within their historical context. Finally, I will examine Caravaggio: L’ultimo tempo 1606–1610, held first at the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples 2004–2005, then later as Caravaggio: The Final Years, at the National Gallery, London in 2005, which focused on the more enigmatic part of Caravaggio’s late career after his flight from Rome in 1606. The London 2005 exhibition provided new insight into the artist’s stylistic changes in the last years of his life. These three exhibitions will give insight about the perception shifts of the artist that have taken place in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as a result of scholarly research spurred by museum exhibitions centered around Caravaggio.
Temple University--Theses

This dissertation traces the presence of installation-based practices among artists of Aboriginal ancestry via selected exhibitions across Canada. It begins with a methodological perspective on Canadian art history, federal law, and human science, as a means of establishing a contextual backdrop for the art under consideration. The rise of an Indian empowerment movement during the twentieth century is then shown to take on an international voice which had cultural ramifications at the 1967 Canadian International and Universal Exhibition. Nascent signs of a multi-mediatic aesthetic are distinguished in selected works in Canadian Indian Art '74, as well as through Native-run visual arts programs. First Nations art history is charted via new Canadian art narratives starting in the early 1970s, followed by the development of spatial productions and hybrid discourses in New Work By a New Generation in 1982, and Stardusters in 1986. The final chapter opens with a history of installation art since the Second World War, as related to the pronounced presence of multi-mediactic works in Beyond History in 1989. Post-colonial and postmodern theories are deployed to conclusively situate both the artistic and political concerns featured throughout this study, and lead into the analysis of selected installations at Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives and Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada. These 1992 shows in the national capital region ultimately confirm the maturation of a particular socio-political aesthetic that tested issues of Canadian identity, while signifying Aboriginal sites of difference.

This dissertation examines the transformation of the South Indian city of Kanchipuram into a major cosmopolitan sacred center during the course of the eighth through twelfth centuries. In this pivotal five hundred-year period, Kanchipuram served as the royal capital for two major dynasties, the Pallavas and then the Cholas. Both dynasties sponsored the production of prominent sacred monuments built from locally sourced stone. These temples were crowned with pyramidal towers, adorned with sculpted and painted figures of deities amid groves and palatial landscapes, and elegantly ornamented with courtly Sanskrit and Tamil inscriptions. Over time, the temples functioned as monumental statements of power, sites of devotion, and municipal establishments where diverse social groups negotiated their claims to political authority and economic prosperity. In Kanchipuram, temples also played a crucial role in defining urban space by demarcating the city's center and borders, marking crucial junctions, and orienting the gods towards avenues, hydraulic features, and royal establishments. As religious monuments, they also fostered vibrant circuits of pilgrimage and travel that were integrated with a broader Indian Ocean network.

The dissertation argues that the construction of temples fundamentally shaped and reordered landscape. The four chapters, organized chronologically, address the expanding geography of Kanchipuram and its widening sphere of influence. The first two chapters trace the city's shifting contours and the emergence of a major pilgrimage route that led precisely through the urban core. The city was radically reconfigured around this new central road, which functioned as a processional pathway that created relationships between monuments both inside the city and beyond its borders. The third chapter reveals patterns of movement linking the city with its rural and coastal hinterland, and considers connections with Southeast Asia. Temples in more remote areas disclose links to Kanchipuram through their use of shared architectural forms, a standardized iconographic program, and inscriptions that detail economic and political ties to the urban hub. The fourth chapter focuses on colonial-era encounters with Kanchipuram and the city's role in the broader production of colonial knowledge. As a site of antiquarian interest and military history, Kanchipuram was subject to competing narratives about India. Whereas European officials and surveyors such as James Fergusson saw in the city's monuments India's past glory and inevitable decline, other travelers found no evidence of rupture or disrepair. I read these conflicting representations against the grain to expose Kanchipuram's continuity as a flourishing cosmopolitan center. The dissertation's goal is twofold. First, it documents Kanchipuram and maps its monuments spatially and chronologically in relation to each other, the city, and features of the natural environment. Second, it situates the temples within their ritual and civic functions as agentive establishments that both served and fostered a growing urban landscape.

The history of collection at the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, illustrates concepts of race in the development of museums in Canada from before Confederation to today. Located at intersections of Art History, Museology, Postcolonial Studies and Native Studies, this thesis uses discourse theory to trouble definitions of nation and problematize them as inherently racial constructs wherein 'Canadianness' is institutionalized as a dominant white, Euro-Canadian discourse that mediates belonging. The recent reinstallations of the permanent Canadian historical art galleries at the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts are significant in their illustration of contemporary colonial collection practices. The effectiveness of each installation is discussed in relation to the demands and resistances raised by Indigenous and non-Native artists and cultural professionals over the last 40 years, against racist treatment of Indigenous arts.

This thesis investigates the intersection of art, feminism and postwar memory in Japan through lens of artist Yoshiko Shimada. Coinciding with unprecedented geopolitical shifts occurring in the final thaw of the Cold War, the year 1989 marks a fraught moment in Japan when spectres of the nation's imperialist past and its historical entanglements acquired renewed potency in the wake of Emperor Hirohito's death. Born in 159, Shimada gained international prominence in the 1990s for her critique of the national body, in particular, the relationship between women and the imperial wartime state. Her work, which unapologetically confronts Japan's WWII aggressions in Asia, its wider histories of occupation, and issues such as the fiercely contested legacies of former 'comfort women' vitally reflects on the social role and agency of art and artist in a climate of political unease emergent at Showa's close. Based on extensive interviews with the artist and research into her primary archive, this is the first comprehensive survey chronicling Shimad;s twenty-five year oeuvre. It situates her practice between two vectors: feminism in Japan and its engagement with Western scholarship, and traces the 1990s 'feminist turn' led by art historians such as Chino Kaori, who began to champion the application of gender perspectives in the study of Japanese art. Within the wider Asian region, the concurrent development of transnational women's art' networks, exhibitions and publications dovetailed with the burgeoning of performance art was protest. As one of the most outspoken feminist art activists of her generation, Shimada has borne key witness to the changing cultural conditions informing women artists' organised activities and the writing of their social histories. This interdisciplinary study incorporates a range of perspectives drawn from art history and gender studies, film and performance theory, memory and trauma studies, Japanese studies and cross-cultural scholarship. It highlights the formal and conceptual interactions between printmaking, performance, installation and lens-based media in Shimada's practice, and demonstrates the plural ways in which her reflexive aesthetics and visual strategies express the tensions and complexities characterising processes of remembering, forgetting and representing the past. By interweaving arguments about the crucial role of feminism in challenging dominant narratives of nation, race, sex and ethnicity, with critical perspectives central to discourse on postmodern Japan, questions are raised concerning the implications of gender, tradition and popular culture for art produced in this age of anxiety. The recent proliferation of problem-oriented, politically engaged practices following the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami marks an ostensible 'return to the social' and departure from privileged tropes of 'Japaneseness' in artistic experimentation. Taking this into account, this thesis proposes that revisiting the recent history of feminist art interventions reveals valuable insights into the role of art in understanding and addressing trauma, and engaging marginalised histories and communities. This is exemplified by Shimada's work, which offers a powerful vantage point from which to contemplate art's political inflections, its social potential and the urgency of memory work both in Japan, and in our contemporary societies today.

The subject of this qualifying paper is an Edo Period Nō theater chōken. Upon receipt, this choken was in very poor condition. There were six types of damage that needed treatment.

First, there was extensive warp breakage along the full length of the shoulders and sleeve bottoms and one area of full loss to the base fabric, exposing wefts. Second, a couched metallic thread was used as an outline to five vase motifs and as patterning for four butterflies. All used ‘urushi,’ better known as Japanese lacquer, for an adhesive binding a metal foil its paper substrate. This couched thread had either loss to the metallic surface, to the combined metallic and lacquer surface, or was hanging, and at times twisted back upon itself. Third, there was a cut and finely woven, metallic coated paper used for some of the leaf and insect wing motifs that was tattered, unaligned, had loss to its metallic surface, and was not secure to the base fabric. Fourth, there were areas of weft breakage exposing warps. Fifth, the six exposed selvages that run the full length of the two sleeves and one body panel all needed to be strengthened. Sixth, there was one 3 by 4 inch area in the lower back of the body panel which had complete fabric loss.

Untreated areas were: areas of warp distortion in the front body panel; a few loose embroidery threads throughout the five floral/vase motifs; and a small amount of loss due to insect infestation.

Research was done and methods developed in order to find treatment techniques for the lacquer based metallic thread, the cut and woven paper motifs, and the extensive warp breakage extending along the shoulders and sleeve bottoms.

Due to the difficulty of finding English equivalents to Japanese textile terminology, I included a Comparative Glossary that I hope will be useful to other researchers in this field.

This project proved to be challenging, but in the end, very rewarding with a new body of knowledge concerning materials used in this type of cultural object.

This research investigates anusmr&dotbelow;ti (Sanskrit), rjes su dran pa (Tibetan), anussati (Pāli), and considers how this term might serve as a link for finding a commonality in practices in Hīnayāna, Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna traditions. The research was inspired by the work of Buddhist scholars Janet Gyatso, Paul Harrison, and Matthew Kapstein. Each of them has noted the importance of the term anusmr&dotbelow;ti in Buddhist texts and Buddhist practice. Harrison sees a connection between Hīnayāna practices of buddhānusmr&dotbelow;ti and a host of Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna practices. He notes that buddhānusmr&dotbelow;ti can be seen as a source of later, more elaborate Vajrayāna visualization practices ("Commemoration" 215). Gyatso investigates contextual meanings of the term anusmr&dotbelow;ti and cites meanings that include an element of commemoration and devotion. She notes that varieties of anusmr&dotbelow;ti are considered beneficial for soteriological development and are deliberately cultivated for that purpose (Mirror of Memory 2-3). Matthew Kapstein refers to a type of anusmr&dotbelow;ti that is the palpable recovery of a state of being or affect. This, he says, is not simply the memory of the experience but the recovery of the sense of being in that state ("Amnesic Monarch" 234). Essential to the research were the teachings of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche and Anam Thubten Rinpoche on Buddha-nature and Pure Vision.

In this study I have coined the terms "Buddha-nature anusmr&dotbelow;ti" and "Pure vision anusmr&dotbelow;ti." Though these terms do not appear in the literature, they may be seen as useful in investigating core remembrances (anusmr&dotbelow;ti) in the Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna traditions respectively. "Buddha-nature anusmr&dotbelow;ti " refers to a key remembrance or commemoration in Mahāyāna Tibetan literature and practice. "Pure Vision anusmr&dotbelow;ti " refers to a key remembrance or commemoration in Vajrayāna Tibetan literature and practice. This dissertation cites passages from key texts and commentaries to make the point that these coined terms meaningfully reflect a major aspect of their respective traditions. They describe that which is worthy and important, that which should be remembered and commemorated.

This paper examines the connection between art and nationalism in Chinese culture and asserts that the recent market boom and price jump in Chinese fine art reflects a concerted yet conflicted effort by the Chinese government and Chinese society as a whole to reconcile with a problematic twentieth-century past. The paper first delves into the historical practice of utilizing art to construct political narratives though Ming-Qing dynasties before examining how antiquarianism was utilized by Mao Zedong himself and by the modern day Chines Communist Party.

Philosophy
Ph.D.
Even though viewers typically experience multiple artworks at a time, philosophers have tended to parse visual art experiences into individuated experiences with singular objects, rather than incorporate the role exhibitions play in contextualizing objects over time. Since visual art experiences typically occur in the context of exhibitions featuring multiple artworks, whether in a museum, commercial gallery, or artist's studio, there are numerous problems associated with considering visual art experiences individuated experiences with single objects. I aim to show how this approach not only produces problems for the philosophy of art, but also perpetuates misunderstandings regarding the visual artist's practice, as well as its reception. My focus on reception poses problems for curators who relish curatorial authority. I prefer practices to products, since it establishes a relationship between each contributor's actions and his/her outcomes, which gain meaning over time, unlike products that arrive ready upon delivery, independent of directed consciousness. Rather than convey an activity particular to sight, the term "visual art experience" distinguishes this type of art experience from types such as theater, film, or musical performances. Such multi-sensorial perceptual experiences, whether indoors or outdoors, accompany one's experiencing artworks, monuments and buildings alike. The philosophical convention of treating artworks as singular objects has led philosophers to exaggerate: 1) the artist's intention (Arthur Danto), 2) artworks' atemporal features (Nelson Goodman), and 3) artworks' expressive/symbolic capacities (Robin Collingwood, Danto, Goodman, and Roger Scruton) inviting aestheticians to treat artworks like texts, penned by a lone author. One consequence of the "lone-author" view is that book reading is the prevailing analogy for visual art experiences, eschewing obviously coauthored analogies such as walking in the park, attending a sporting event, or dining with friends. Books whose advance readers and editor(s) influence their contents before being published are no less coauthored than typical nonart experiences. That exhibitions are coauthored has multiple implications for aesthetics, since it acknowledges the way visual art experiences involve multiple inputs: some combination of curator, spectators, exhibition, milieu, environment, and the facility. The curator typically works with other producer(s), whether artists or exhibition staff, to create some environment, a temporal surrounding comprised of thematically arranged artworks, specifically designed for spectators inhabiting a particular milieu, housed in some facility, which includes the physical surroundings, such as the gallery's conditions, its wall colors, lighting, and scale. This text explores all aspects of curatorial practice from exploration to reception. In differentiating curated exhibitions from non-curated exhibitions, I aim to explain how curators generate frames that visibilize each artwork's nonexhibited features, which seems so obvious in hindsight that particular frames later appear embodied from the onset.
Temple University--Theses

The objective of this project was to establish a provenance for two Indian manuscripts that were recently discovered in the collections at Scripps College. Based on their illuminations, script, and binding structure, I was able to conclude that these two manuscripts are Hindu religious texts created around the 19th or 20th century. To determine an approximate origin and the significance of these volumes, my research focused on the syncretism of religion, material history, and power dynamics in India. Their context was specifically framed within the history of manuscript construction and conservation.

This dissertation identifies a paradox at the heart of the visual culture of Song-dynasty (960-1279) Buddhism. On the one hand, as the celestial pantheon expanded, it was conceptualized in ever more bureaucratic ways, mirroring the growth of the terrestrial government itself. On the other hand, the boundary separating that supramundane realm from the human world became decidedly more permeable; ghosts and deities became an omnipresent part of daily life. How to treat these two contradictory phenomena--one pointing to rational orderliness, the other pointing to unpredictable unruliness--posed a distinct problem for Song visual artists, spurring the development of new strategies of pictorial representation and forcing reflection upon the nature of representation itself. Chinese Buddhist art was never to be the same again. I argue that the key to understanding these new forms of art lies in the Water-Land Retreat (Shuilu zhai), a massive, icon-filled ritual of decidedly cosmic pretensions. The patterns of practice and strategies of visual representation associated with this ritual constitute a system that radically broke with earlier Chinese tradition. Practitioners of the liturgy created an open ritual syntax that allowed it to take on myriad forms in accordance with its sponsors’ needs, while also allowing it to absorb deities and practices from non-Buddhist traditions. This dissertation examines these phenomena in three parts. Part 1 excavates the social place, methods of practice, and visual profile of the Water-Land Retreat in and around the Song. Relying extensively on paintings from the Jiangnan region, cliff carvings from Sichuan, and numerous liturgical manuscripts, I argue that image and practice are inextricably bound in this ritual. Part 2 focuses on the motif of the cloud in Water-Land-related images and texts. Through an examination of images of cloud-borne descending deities, I contend that this nebulous motif became the locus for reflection on the mediational nature of representation. Finally, Part 3 addresses the bureaucratization of ritual practice and pictorial production in Song Buddhism. I argue that practitioners of the Water-Land Retreat simultaneously embraced and transcended a bureaucratic idiom drawn from Daoism and contemporary government to create a new Buddhist vision of the cosmos.
History of Art and Architecture

This thesis focuses on the modern Japanese artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934) and his diverse range of graphic production, from illustrations in socialist newspapers and magazines with images of anti-war and leftist sentiment to fashionable images of beautiful women, referred to as "Yumeji-style beauties" (Yumeji-shiki bijin) in newspaper illustrations, coterie magazines, postcards, frontispieces, posters, and advertisements. Such works circulated widely and within the context of a growing female readership and the emergence of a new media environment that transformed the print medium from its "floating world" profile of the previous century into a technically diverse medium of modern visual culture and avant-garde pictorialism. Yumeji's graphic works participated in the generation of new kinds of modern identity. An extensive consideration of Yumeji's life and works reveals his role in the cultivation of a new demography of viewers and readers.
History of Art and Architecture

Every four years, in the middle of a cold winter night, devotees bearing images of 126 Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and other important deities assemble in the Nepalese city of Patan for an elaborate gift giving festival known as Samyak Mahādāna (“The Perfect Great Gift”). Celebrated by Nepal’s Newar Buddhist community, Samyak honors one of the Buddhas of the historical past called Dīpaṅkara. Dīpaṅkara’s importance in Buddhism is rooted in ancient textual and visual narratives that promote the cultivation of generosity through religious acts of giving (Skt. dāna). During Samyak, large images of Dīpaṅkara Buddha ceremoniously walk in procession to the event site, aided by a man who climbs inside the wooden body to assume the legs of the Buddha. Once arranged at the event, Dīpaṅkara is honored with an array of offerings until dusk the following day. This dissertation investigates how Newar Buddhists utilize art and ritual at Samyak to reenact and reinforce ancient Buddhist narratives in their contemporary lives. The study combines art historical methods of iconographic analysis with a contextual study of the ritual components of the Samyak Mahādāna to analyze the ways religious spectacle embeds core Buddhist values within in the multilayered components of art, ritual, and communal performance. Principally, Samyak reaffirms the foundational Buddhist belief in the cultivation of generosity (Skt. dāna pāramitā) through meritorious acts of giving (Skt. dāna). However, the synergy of image and ritual performance at Samyak provides a critical framework to examine the artistic, religious, and ritual continuities of past and present in the Newar Buddhist community of the Kathmandu Valley. An analysis of the underlying meta-narrative and conceptualization of Samyak suggests the construction of a dynamic visual narrative associated with sacred space, ritual cosmology, and religious authority. Moreover, this dissertation demonstrates the role of Samyak Mahādāna in constructing Buddhist identity in Nepal, as the festival provides an opportunity to examine how Newar Buddhists utilize art, ritual, and performance to reaffirm their ancient Buddhist heritage.

A presente investigação examina a atuação de duas instituições museológicas paulistas o MASP e o MAC USP enfocando os pensamentos e práticas de seus dirigentes Pietro Maria e Lina Bo Bardi e Walter Zanini especialmente entre fins da década de 1960 e início da década de 1970. Através do estudo de textos desses diretores e de exposições por eles concebidas junto a essas instituições busca-se entender como suas concepções de arte e museu foram colocadas em prática. O frutífero histórico de ações e reflexões que envolveram as atuações do casal Bardi no MASP e de Zanini no MAC USP compuseram nessas instituições ambientes condizentes com a ideia de museu entendido como espaço vivo e atento à manutenção do diálogo com as suas funções sociais e com a dinâmica do meio no qual está inserido.
This research examines the performance of two museological institutions in São Paulo MASP and MAC USP focusing on the thoughts and practices of their directors Pietro Maria and Lina Bo Bardi and Walter Zanini especially between the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Through the study of these directors texts and exhibitions designed by them in these institutions we seek to understand how their conceptions of art and museum were put into practice. The fruitful historic of actions and reflections involving the actings of the couple Bardi in MASP and Zanini in MAC USP composed in these institutions environments harmonized with the idea of the museum understood as living space and attentive to the maintenance of the dialogue with its social functions and with the dynamics of the environment in which it is inserted.

In the Hindu tradition of the Indian subcontinent, worship of the goddess has long been practiced as supreme embodiment of the divine. Around the second century, a Sanskrit Purana (ancient Hindu text that extols deities) titled the Markandeya Purana details the battles of the supreme Goddess Durga against the illusions and negative energy in the universe. This textual version of the Devi Mahatmya “Praise of the Goddess” serves as the foundation for the nineteenth century Nepalese illustrated Devi Mahatmya, commissioned by Tej Bahadur Rana from Pokhara district in Nepal. Because the folios closely follow the textual Devi Mahatmya, the illustrations’ amalgamation of styles demonstrates a double entendre of religious and political frameworks represented through Indian religious iconography with localized motifs and styles from Nepal. In this study, I argue that the illustrated Nepalese Devi Mahatmya indicates a shift in power from the Shah aristocracy to Rana oligarchy. This Devi Mahatmya contextualizes the social, religious, and historical events of nineteenth century Nepal, as a unique extension to the current scholarship about the Devi Mahatmya since it is dated and has a known patron. The intentional amalgamation of previous Newar styles, localized elements, and European décor reveals the mythical being contemporized, that is, drawing from English modernism to empower the Rana family, adding a unique flair to this manuscript as opposed to previous Devi Mahatmyas of Indian Guler or Newar style. Within the nineteenth century Nepali Devi Mahatmya, the background of this Devi Mahatmya is Guler-inspired, utilizing lightly hued backgrounds and landscapes, suggesting that the artist(s) had observed Guler compositions prior to this commission. The Nepali and Newar motifs contextualizes the Devi Mahatmyas commissioning in Pokhara, as these elements comment on the clan patriarch Jung Bahadur Rana and uncle of the patron usurping power from the Shah king, asserting a new Rana oligarchy that would last until 1951. As a result, this Devi Mahatmya is used as an offering to the goddess to legitimize Prime Minister Jung Bahadur Rana and the nephews that would follow his legacy.

From the late nineteenth century, works inspired by Western art spread to China and Korea through Japan. Thus, Western art came to be accepted in China and Korea as a reinterpretation of Japan’s development of Western art, rather than a direct transmission from Western sources. This act of reinterpretation went on to have a lasting effect on the practice of Western-style painters in East Asia with their own acceptance modes. This thesis provides a study of self-portraits and nude paintings, two categories of painting without precedent in East Asia prior to the late nineteenth century, created by Kuroda Seiki, Li Shutong, Go Hui-dong, and Kim Gwan-ho in order to illustrate how East Asian countries established their own versions of modern art.

Imagined Sceneries is a work written by composer Dr. Koji Nakano of Burapha University, Thailand for two sopranos, koto, light percussion, narrations, soundscapes recorded in Kyoto, Japan in December 2015, and digital projections of Ebina Masao’s 1953 print series Tale of Genji. Imagined Sceneries’ reimagining and “re-sounding” of Heian Kyoto relies on a balance between what is imagined and what is experienced in performance. Its many elements collectively explore multiple layers of Japanese histories, soundscapes, environments, and sensibilities. Using Michel de Certeau’s concepts of the city, this thesis journeys through Nakano’s imagined spaces.