Category: art & visual culture

Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868-2000

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Since MeijiResearch outside Japan on the history and significance of the Japanese visual arts since the beginning of the Meiji period (1868) has been, with the exception of writings on modern and contemporary woodblock prints, a relatively unexplored area of inquiry. In recent years, however, the subject has begun to attract wide interest. As is evident from this volume, this period of roughly a century and a half produced an outpouring of art created in a bewildering number of genres and spanning a wide range of aims and accomplishments. Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868-2000, edited by J. Thomas Rimer, is the first sustained effort in English to discuss in any depth a time when Japan, eager to join in the larger cultural developments in Europe and the U.S., went through a visual revolution. Indeed, this study of the visual arts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suggests a fresh history of modern Japanese culture—one that until now has not been widely visible or thoroughly analyzed outside that country.

October 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3582-8 / $28.00 (PAPER)

Transformations of Cultural Traditions in Oceania

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Changing ContextsChanging Contexts, Shifting Meanings: Transformations of Cultural Traditions in Oceania, edited by Elfriede Hermann, sheds new light on processes of cultural transformation at work in Oceania and analyzes them as products of interrelationships between culturally created meanings and specific contexts. In a series of inspiring essays, noted scholars of the region examine these interrelationships for insight into how cultural traditions are shaped on an ongoing basis.

September 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3366-4 / $58.00 (CLOTH)

Restoring the King

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Glenn WhartonGlenn Wharton, the author of the forthcoming UH Press book The Painted King: Art, Activism, and Authenticity in Hawai‘i, was back in Kapa‘au on the Big Island to celebrate Kamehameha Day (June 11). His visit was covered in the North Hawai‘i News: http://northhawaiinews.com/news/restoring-the-king.html.

The Painted King 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. His book will be published in September.

Masterpieces from the Papua New Guinea National Museum

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Living Spirits
On the eve of Papua New Guinea’s attainment of independence from Australia, Chief Minister Michael Somare referred to the new nation’s cultural treasures as “living spirits with fixed abodes.” He was referring to the prevailing belief of Papua New Guineans that everything is invested with spirit, not least the objects carved, modeled, or constructed for ceremonial, and often everyday, use. The Masterpieces Exhibition includes the most significant cultural treasures on display at the Papua New Guinea’s national museum. Living Spirits with Fixed Abodes, edited by Barry Craig, gives the reader a thorough account of each of the exhibition’s 209 pieces.

April 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3151-6 / $80.00 (CLOTH)

The Art and Identity Crisis of Yasuo Kuniyoshi

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Becoming American
On December 8, 1941, artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953) awoke to find himself branded an “enemy alien” by the U.S. government in the aftermath of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The historical crisis forced Kuniyoshi, an émigré Japanese with a distinguished career in American art, to rethink his pictorial strategies and to confront questions of loyalty, assimilation, national and racial identity that he had carefully avoided in his prewar art. As an immigrant who had proclaimed himself to be as “American as the next fellow,” the realization of his now fractured and precarious status catalyzed the development of an emphatic and conscious identity construct that would underlie Kuniyoshi’s art and public image for the remainder of his life.

Drawing on previously unexamined primary sources, Becoming American? The Art and Identity Crisis of Yasuo Kuniyoshi, by ShiPu Wang, is the first scholarly book in over two decades to offer an in-depth and critical analysis of Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s pivotal works, including his “anti-Japan” posters and radio broadcasts for U.S. propaganda, and his coded and increasingly enigmatic paintings, within their historical contexts.

May 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3418-0 / $56.00 (CLOTH)

Hart Wood Receives Historic Hawaii Foundation Award

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Hart WoodHart Wood: Architectural Regionalism in Hawaii, by Don Hibbard, Glenn Mason, and Karen Weitze, will be recognized with a Preservation Honor Award at Historic Hawai‘i Foundation’s 2011 Awards Ceremony on April 19. This is the 36th year of the Preservation Honor Awards, which are Hawai‘i’s highest recognition of preservation projects that “perpetuate, rehabilitate, restore or interpret the state’s architectural, archaeological and/or cultural heritage.”

“With insightful text and 200 illustrations, Hart Wood traces the life and work of a significant Hawai‘i architect who resided and practiced in the islands from the 1920s to the 1950s. The wide range of buildings he designed has special significance for us today, as fine examples of this period’s distinctive regional style of Hawaiian architecture. The book is the culmination of years of extensive research, documentation, and the compilation of photographs and materials, which was first initiated in the 1980s. The University of Hawai‘i Press worked closely with the authors to design and produce a volume to match their vision. . . . [An] outstanding contribution to Hawai‘i’s preservation efforts.” —Hawai‘i Historic Foundation award letter

John Layard, Fieldwork, and Photography on Malakula

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Moving ImagesIn 1914–1915, Cambridge anthropologist John Layard worked in Malakula, New Hebrides (Vanuatu). This was one of the earliest periods of solitary, intensive fieldwork within the developing discipline of British social anthropology. Layard worked enthusiastically with his local assistants to document and understand the customary lives of the people, taking copious notes and over 450 photographs. His collection of objects and glass plate negatives are housed in the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Moving Images: John Layard, Fieldwork, and Photography on Malakula since 1914, by Haidy Geismar and Anita Herle, contains over 300 of these evocative images, most previously unpublished, united for the first time with Layard’s field notes and captions. They provide an extraordinary record of the elaborate ritual and culture of Small Islanders and reveal photography’s role as an evidential and subjective medium vital to the practice of social anthropology.

February 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3503-3 / $90.00 (CLOTH)
254 duotones

New in Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia’s Vernacular Architecture

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Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-ArtsIn the early twentieth century, Chinese traditional architecture and the French-derived methods of the École des Beaux-Arts converged in the United States when Chinese students were given scholarships to train as architects at American universities whose design curricula were dominated by Beaux-Arts methods. Upon their return home in the 1920s and 1930s, these graduates began to practice architecture and create China’s first architectural schools, often transferring a version of what they had learned in the U.S. to Chinese situations.

Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts, edited by Jeffrey W. Cody, Nancy S. Steinhardt, and Tony Atkin, examines the coalescing of the two major architectural systems, placing significant shifts in architectural theory and practice in China within relevant, contemporary, cultural, and educational contexts. Fifteen major scholars from around the world analyze and synthesize these crucial events to shed light on the dramatic architectural and urban changes occurring in China today—many of which have global ramifications.

Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia’s Vernacular Architecture
Published in association with Hong Kong University Press
January 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3456-2 / $52.00 (CLOTH)
208 illus., 60 in color

Polynesia Events in October

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PolynesiaThe visual arts of Polynesia offer a richly diverse and relatively little known body of work, covering an enormous geographical area yet linked by shared artistic conventions. The collection of Mark and Carolyn Blackburn, one of the greatest private collections of Polynesian art in the world, encompasses this broad field of artistic endeavor. It features both ceremonial and functional traditional forms in diverse media, from delicate ivory ornaments and decorated barkcloth to formidable weaponry and imposing sculpture in coral, wood, and stone. In Polynesia: The Mark and Carolyn Blackburn Collection of Polynesian Art, by Adrienne Kaeppler, for the first time, these unique works of art are on display, fully described and annotated, for the enjoyment and appreciation of scholars, collectors, and interested readers alike. Celebrate the publication of this handsome volume, which features more than 800 color illustrations, this month at the following events:

Thursday, October 28, 6-8 p.m., Native Books/Na Mea Hawai‘i
Author Adrienne Kaeppler, curator of Oceanic ethnology at the Smithsonian, will give a talk on private collecting and be available to sign copies of her book. View demonstrations by cultural practitioners, and enjoy music and refreshments.

Saturday, October 30, 11-12 noon, Academy Shop, Honolulu Academy of Arts
Dr. Kaeppler will sign copies of Polynesia.

Sunday, October 31, 2-4 pm, East-West Center Gallery (Burns Hall, adjoining UH Manoa)
Dr. Kaeppler completes her visit to Honolulu with an illustrated lecture on Polynesia. Books will be available for purchase. Attendees are welcome to view the current gallery exhibition, Kyrgyzstan: Nomadic Life in the Modern World, and enjoy refreshments.

Learn more about Polynesia:
–Listen to an interview with collector Mark Blackburn on Radio Australia: Click here for the podcast.
–Read an article in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser: http://www.staradvertiser.com/features/20101024_book_celebrates_art_of_polynesia.html

October 2010 / ISBN 978-1-883528-38-6 / $100.00 (CLOTH) / ISBN 978-1-883528-40-9 / $150.00 (SLIPCASED)
Distributed for Mark and Carolyn Blackburn

Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China Now in Paperback

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Cinema, Space, and Polylocality
Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China, by Yingjin Zhang, is now available in paperback. In this milestone work, Zhang, a prominent China film scholar, proposes “polylocality” as a new conceptual framework for investigating the shifting spaces of contemporary Chinese cinema in the age of globalization. Questioning the national cinema paradigm, Zhang calls for comparative studies of underdeveloped areas beyond the imperative of transnationalism.

Critical Interventions
October 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3408-1 / $26.00 (CLOTH)

The Decorative Object in Early Modern China

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Sensuous SurfacesSensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China, by Jonathan Hay, is a richly illustrated and in-depth introduction to the decorative arts in Ming- and Qing-dynasty China. Hay explores materials and techniques, as well as issues of patronage and taste, which together formed a loose system of informal rules that affected every level of decoration in early modern China, from an individual object to the arrangement of an entire residential interior. By engaging the actual and metaphoric potential of surface, Hay contends, this system guided the production and use of the decorative arts during a period of explosive growth, which started in the late sixteenth century and continued until the mid-nineteenth century. This understanding of decorative arts in China made a fundamental contribution to the sensory education of its early modern urban population, both as individuals and in their established social roles. Sensuous Surfaces is also an elegant meditation on the role of pleasure in decoration. Often intellectually dismissed as merely pleasurable, Hay argues that decoration is better understood as a necessary form of art that can fulfill its function only by engaging the human capacity for erotic response.

September 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3361-9 / $63.00 (CLOTH)

Rethinking Pattern and Mind in the Pacific

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Lines That ConnectBuilding on historical and contemporary literature in anthropology and art theory, Lines That Connect: Rethinking Pattern and Mind in the Pacific, by Graeme Were, treats pattern as a material form of thought that provokes connections between disparate things through processes of resemblance, memory, and transformation. Pattern is constantly in a state of motion as it traverses spatial and temporal divides and acts as an endless source for innovation through its inherent transformability. Were argues that it is the ideas carried by pattern’s relational capacity that allows Pacific islanders to express their links to land, genealogy, and resources in the most economic ways. In doing so, his book is a timely and unique contribution to the analysis of pattern and decorative art in the Pacific amid growing debates in anthropology and art history.

August 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3384-8 / $38.00 (CLOTH)

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