The Painted King Wins Historic Hawaii Preservation Award

The Painted KingThe Painted King: Art, Activism, and Authenticity in Hawai‘i, by Glenn Wharton, will be among the books receiving this year’s Historic Hawai‘i Foundation Preservation Media Award.

The award ceremony will be held on Friday, May 11, 2012, at the Neal S. Blaisdell Center in Honolulu in the Pīkake Room at 4:00 pm. A reception will follow the presentation program. Tickets to the awards ceremony may be purchased for $45 each (HHF members) or $60 (general admission). Visit http://www.historichawaii.org/ for more information.

Evil and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy in Medieval Japanese Buddhism

The Seven Tengu ScrollsThe Seven Tengu Scrolls: Evil and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy in Medieval Japanese Buddhism, by Haruko Wakabayashi, is a study of visual and textual images of the mythical creature tengu from the late Heian (897–1185) to the late Kamakura (1185–1333) periods. Popularly depicted as half-bird, half-human creatures with beaks or long noses, wings, and human bodies, tengu today are commonly seen as guardian spirits associated with the mountain ascetics known as yamabushi. In the medieval period, however, the character of tengu most often had a darker, more malevolent aspect. Wakabashi focuses in this study particularly on tengu as manifestations of the Buddhist concept of Māra (or ma), the personification of evil in the form of the passions and desires that are obstacles to enlightenment. Her larger aim is to investigate the use of evil in the rhetoric of Buddhist institutions of medieval Japan. Through a close examination of tengu that appear in various forms and contexts, Wakabayashi considers the functions of a discourse on evil as defined by the Buddhist clergy to justify their position and marginalize others.

“Haruko Wakabayashi gives us a meticulously researched, entertaining, and thought-provoking study of the image of the tengu. Using a wealth of written and visual sources, she is able to show that this odd long-nosed or bird-like figure, often avoided in scholarship as a sort of hobgoblin of marginal folk belief, was in fact an important figure, absolutely essential to the polemics and self-conception of central institutions and actors in medieval Japanese Buddhism.” —Hank Glassman, Haverford College

April 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3416-6 / $50.00 (CLOTH)

Art, Production, and Display in Edo Japan

Obtaining ImagesThe Edo period (1603–1868) witnessed one of the great flowerings of Japanese art. Towards the mid-seventeenth century, the Japanese states were largely at peace, and rapid urbanization, a rise in literacy and an increase in international contact ensued. The number of those able to purchase luxury goods, or who felt their social position necessitated owning them, soared. Painters and artists flourished and the late seventeenth century also saw a rise in the importance of printmaking. Obtaining Images: Art, Production, and Display in Edo Japan, by Timon Screech, introduces the reader to important artists and their work, but also to the intellectual issues and concepts surrounding the production, consumption and display of art in Japan in the Edo period.

April 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3613-9 / $50.00 (CLOTH)

More March Author Events

Sunday, March 18, 2-3:30 pm, Native Books/Nā Mea Hawai‘i: Wendy Arbeit, author of Links to the Past: The Work of Early Hawaiian Artisans, will give a free talk on how she researched Links, what she discovered, and why drawings can offer more information than photographs. The discussion will be preceded by live demonstrations by cultural practitioners and followed by a book-signing by the author and light refreshments. Books will be available for purchase at the shop, located at the ‘ewa end of Ward Warehouse, 1050 Ala Moana Blvd. (phone: 596-8885).

Monday, March 19, 6:30-7:30 pm, Thinking Out Loud: Talking Issues, Taking Action (KZOO-AM 1210): Don Hibbard, coauthor of Hart Wood: Architectural Regionalism in Hawai‘i and other books on architecture, will be interviewed by radio host Willa Tanabe. The program is sponsored by the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai’i.

Yoga, the Western Painting of Japan, 1912-1955

Maximum EmbodimentMaximum Embodiment: Yoga, the Western Painting of Japan, 1912–1955, by Bert Winther-Tamaki, presents a compelling thesis articulating the historical character of Yoga, literally the “Western painting” of Japan. The term designates what was arguably the most important movement in modern Japanese art from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Perhaps the most critical marker of Yoga was its association with the medium of oil-on-canvas, which differed greatly from the water-based pigments and inks of earlier Japanese painting. Yoga encompassed both establishment fine art and avant-gardist insurgencies, but in both cases, as the term suggests, it was typically focused on techniques, motifs, canons, or iconographies that were obtained in Europe and deployed by Japanese artists.

Balancing critique and sympathy for the twelve Yoga painters who are its principal protagonists, Maximum Embodiment investigates the quest for embodiment in some of the most compelling images of modern Japanese art.

January 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3537-8 / $32.00 (CLOTH)

Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism

The Face of JizoStone images of the Buddhist deity Jizo—bedecked in a red cloth bib and presiding over offerings of flowers, coins, candles, and incense—are a familiar sight throughout Japan. Known in China as a savior from hell’s torment, Jizo in Japan came to be utterly transformed through fusion with the local tradition of kami worship and ancient fertility cults. In particular, the Jizo cult became associated with gods of borders or transitions: the stone gods known as dosojin. Although the study of Jizo is often relegated to the folkloric, The Face of Jizo: Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism, a highly original and readable book by Hank Glassman, demonstrates that the bodhisattva’s cult was promoted and embraced at the most elite levels of society.

“By wrapping the Japanese images of the bodhisattva Jizō in their intriguing individual and collective stories, The Face of Jizō emphasizes the movement of this deity, who not only protects travellers but also treks between hell and paradise in his quest to save sentient beings. Professor Glassman has created a major contribution to studies of cult images that extends well beyond art historical analyses to delve into other fascinating areas of inquiry. The author’s thorough research, lively writing style, and deft exposition of exciting tales guide readers on a magnificent journey through the history, literature, performance, and visual culture related to Jizō in Japan from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. From lavishly colored paintings and sculptures to simple stones, beloved images of Jizō are brought to life in the pages of this book.” —Sherry Fowler, University of Kansas

January 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3581-1 / $25.00 (PAPER)

The Painted King Author Interviewed

Glenn Wharton, author of The Painted King: Art, Activism, and Authenticity in Hawaii, recently spoke about his book, queer conservation, and the complexities of community-based cultural engagement. The interview appeared online in both San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter and Chicago’s Windy City Times.

On Wharton’s attraction to Hawai‘i: I’ve always been attracted to Hawaiian culture, in part because of the falsetto singing, ukulele music, and storytelling through dance, but also because of the gentle nature of many Hawaiians that I’ve met over the years. As an island culture, everything moves more slowly. People in semi-rural areas like the one that surrounds the Kamehameha I sculpture embrace outsiders with warm aloha, but only after the outsider has proven that they have a genuine love for the culture and the land.

On the decision to restore the Kamehameha statue to its painted form: “As I got deeper into the community, I learned there were many voices, and they didn’t all agree on the sculpture’s meaning or how to go about conserving it. Indeed, some of my colleagues on the mainland did accuse me of ‘going native’ in that I was sharing professional authority with people who didn’t ‘understand art history,’ and that we should honor the original artist’s intention no matter what local residents think today. Maintaining the rather quirky tradition of painting the sculpture in life-like colors that’s evolved since its 1883 installation was going a bit too far for some of my colleagues.”

New in the Critical Interventions Series

Uneven ModernityPostsocialist China is marked by paradoxes: economic boom, political conservatism, cultural complexity. Uneven Modernity: Literature, Film, and Intellectual Discourse in Postsocialist China, Haomin Gong’s dynamic study of these paradoxes, or “unevenness,” provides a unique and seminal approach to contemporary China. Reading unevenness as a problem and an opportunity simultaneously, Gong investigates how this dialectical social situation shapes cultural production.

Critical Interventions
December 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3531-6 / $47.00 (CLOTH)

Art, Activism, and Authenticity in Hawai‘i

The Painted KingFor more information on The Painted King author events in Hawai‘i this month, go to: http://uhpress.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/the-painted-king-book-launches./

The famous statue of Kamehameha I in downtown Honolulu is one of the state’s most popular landmarks. Many tourists—and residents—however, are unaware that the statue is a replica; the original, cast in Paris in the 1880s and the first statue in the Islands, stands before the old courthouse in rural Kapa‘au, North Kohala, the legendary birthplace of Kamehameha I. In 1996 conservator Glenn Wharton was sent by public arts administrators to assess the statue’s condition, and what he found startled him: A larger-than-life brass figure painted over in brown, black, and yellow with “white toenails and fingernails and penetrating black eyes with small white brush strokes for highlights. . . . It looked more like a piece of folk art than a nineteenth-century heroic monument.”

The Painted King: Art, Activism, and Authenticity in Hawai‘i is Wharton’s account of his efforts to conserve the Kohala Kamehameha statue, but it is also the story of his journey to understand the statue’s meaning for the residents of Kapa‘au.

The Painted King will be essential reading for creators, curators, and devotees of public art.” —David Lowenthal, University College London; author of The Past Is a Foreign Country

“A path-breaking volume in conservation studies, The Painted King is certain to prompt readers to think further about the relationship between community and conservation in Hawaiian art, identity, and history.” —Stacy L. Kamehiro, author of The Arts of Kingship: Hawaiian Art and National Culture of the Kalākaua Era

November 2011
ISBN 978-0-8248-3495-1 $42.00 (CLOTH)
ISBN 978-0-8248-3612-2 / $19.00 (PAPER)

A Cultural History of Kanaky-New Calendonia

Nights of StorytellingNights of Storytelling: A Cultural History of New Caledonia, edited by Raylene Ramsay, is the first book to present and contextualize the founding texts of New Caledonia, a country sui generis in the relatively little-known French Pacific. Extracts from literary, ethnographic, and historical works in English translation introduce the many voices of a diverse culture as it moves toward “independence” or the “common destiny” framed by the 1998 Noumea Agreements. These texts reflect the coexistence of two major cultures, indigenous and European, shaped by the energies and shadows of empire and significantly influenced by one another.

Nights of Storytelling is a collaborative work complemented by La nuit des contes, a subtitled DVD of images and text, which features key works read or spoken, generally in the original French. It provides visual and aural access for the book’s Anglophone readers to the specific cultural, linguistic, and geographic contexts of these historical and literary works.

November 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3222-3 / $49.00 (CLOTH + DVD)

The Work of Early Hawaiian Artisans

Links to the PastThe work of Hawaiian artisans at the time of Western contact was woven seamlessly into their everyday lives and culture—the details of which are now lost. Although we can no longer comprehend the objects left to us with the same depth of understanding as early Hawaiians, we can appreciate their aesthetic qualities and the skill used in their construction, particularly when numerous pieces of the same type are viewed together. Links to the Past: The Work of Early Hawaiian Artisans, by Wendy S. Arbeit, makes this possible by reuniting more than a thousand eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Hawaiian artifacts from over seventy institutions and collections worldwide.

November 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3476-0 / $75.00 (CLOTH)

The Painted King Book Launches

The Painted KingNew York art conservator Glenn Wharton will visit Hawai‘i to launch The Painted King: Art Activism, and Authenticity in Hawai‘i, which recounts his experiences conserving the original King Kamehameha statue in Kohala.

Sunday, November 20, 2 pm:
The North Kohala Community Resource Center will sponsor a panel with the author at the Senior Center in Kapa‘au on the island of Hawai‘i.

Tuesday, November 22, 3-4:30 pm: 
Queen Lili‘uokalani Center, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, Room 412
Dr. Wharton will give a brief presentation on his book, followed by comments from UH faculty Karen Kosasa and Ty Tengan. Professor Geoffrey White will moderate the discussion.

Tuesday, November 22, 6:30-8:30 pm:
Native Books/Nā Mea Hawai‘i
Hawai‘i Arts Alliance will join UH Press in celebrating The Painted King with a short talk by the author, followed by a booksigning and refreshments. The Arts Alliance supported Wharton’s work on the monument.