Category: art & visual culture

Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s

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Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, by Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, is the first intensive study of Japanese cinema at a time when the country’s film industry was at its most prolific and when cinema played a singular role in shaping Japanese modernity. During the interwar period, the signs of modernity were ubiquitous in Japan’s urban architecture, literature, fashion, advertising, popular music, and cinema. The reconstruction of Tokyo following the disastrous earthquake of 1923 high lighted the extent of this cultural transformation, and the film industry embraced the reconfigured space as an expression of the modern. Shochiku Kamata Film Studios (1920–1936), the focus of this study, was the only studio that continued filmmaking in Tokyo following the city’s complete destruction. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano points to the influence of the new urban culture in Shochiku’s interwar films, acclaimed as modan na eiga, or modern films, by and for Japanese.

“Devastated by the 1923 earthquake, Tokyo re-built itself in symbiosis with an image of modernity concocted by its own film studios. Nippon Modern renders that image, aspect after fascinating aspect, in sharp detail. Scores of films make up that image, a few resurrected in this volume for intense and delightful analysis. A sensitive viewer and an honest resourceful historian, Wada-Marciano lays out what she’s found in relation to other studies of this precious period, and she does so without hyperbole and without a glaring agenda. She makes you understand how, after Tokyo would again be devastated in 1945, these ‘modern’ films could become objects of nostalgia. Such is the care she gives her subject and such the fragility of that subject.” —Dudley Andrew, Yale University

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3182-0 / $50.00 (CLOTH)

The World of Maori Tattoo

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In the traditional Maori world, the moko, the facial or body tattoo, was a sign of great mana and status. Male warriors wore elaborate tattoos on their faces and bodies; women took more delicate chin tattoos. After almost dying out in the twentieth century, Maori tattooing is now experiencing a powerful revival, with many young Maori wearing the moko as a spectacular gesture of racial pride. Mau Moko: The World of Maori Tattoo, by Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, with Linda Waimarie Nikora, is a lavishly illustrated look at the moko, from pre-European times to the present day.

December 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3253-7 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context

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Post-Enlightenment notions of culture, which have been naturalized in the West for centuries, require that art be autonomously beautiful, universal, and devoid of any practical purpose. The authors of What’s the Use of Art? Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context, edited by Jan Mrázek and Morgan Pitelka, seek to complicate this understanding of art by examining art objects from across Asia with attention to their functional, ritual, and everyday contexts. From tea bowls used in the Japanese tea ceremony to television broadcasts of Javanese puppet theater; from Indian wedding chamber paintings to art looted by the British army from the Chinese emperor’s palace; from the adventures of a Balinese magical dagger to the political functions of classical Khmer images—the authors challenge prevailing notions of artistic value by introducing new ways of thinking about culture.

December 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3063-2 / $58.00 (CLOTH)

Reflections on Asian Bodies in Diaspora

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Approximately twelve hours’ difference lies between New York and Beijing: The West and the East are, literally, night and day apart. Yet East-West Montage: Reflections on Asian Bodies in Diaspora, by Sheng-Mei Ma, crosscuts the two in the manner of adjacent filmic shots to accentuate their montage-like complementarity. It examines the intersection between East and West—the Asian diaspora (or more specifically Asian bodies in diaspora) and the cultural expressions by and about people of Asian descent on both sides of the Pacific.

November 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3181-3 / $27.00 (PAPER)

“East-West Montage possesses a unique vision that promises to push discussions of globalization, cultural production, ethnic identity, and bodily metaphors in powerful new directions. Ma is to be praised for his sound scholarship and innovative interpretations. Indeed where others specialize in either the collection of details or the unpacking of text, Ma weaves a strong analytic exegesis rooted in thorough research.” —Richard King, Washington State University

Visual Modernity in China

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The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China, by Laikwan Pang, analyzes the multiple and complex ways in which urban Chinese subjects saw themselves interacting with the new visual culture that emerged during the turbulent period between the 1880s and the 1930s. The media and visual forms examined include lithography, photography, advertising, film, and theatrical performances. Urbanites actively engaged with and enjoyed this visual culture, which was largely driven by the subjective desire for the empty promises of modernity—promises comprised of such abstract and fleeting concepts as new, exciting, and fashionable.

October 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3093-9 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

“This book presents a careful historicization of the ‘visual.’ Rather than take the act of seeing as natural, Pang brilliantly argues that the visual is a modern phenomenon, linked to but extending and transforming indigenous cultural forms of seeing and looking. Equally meticulous in its theoretical and empirical coordinates, this book is eminently readable and consistently insightful. A wonderful look at how modern Chinese came to see.” —Rebecca E. Karl, New York University

Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art

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Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art, 1600–2005, by Patricia J. Graham, explores the transformation of Buddhism from the premodern to the contemporary era in Japan and the central role its visual culture has played in this transformation. Although Buddhism is generally regarded as peripheral to modern Japanese society, this book demonstrates otherwise. Its chapters elucidate the thread of change over time in the practice of Buddhism as revealed in temple worship halls and other sites of devotion and in imagery representing the religion’s most popular deities and religious practices. It also introduces the work of modern and contemporary artists who are not generally associated with institutional Buddhism and its canonical visual requirements but whose faith inspires their art.
157 illustrations, 46 in color

October 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3126-4 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

Patricia J. Graham is the author of Tea of the Sages: The Art of Sencha, also published by University of Hawai‘i Press. 

Interview with Bruce Connew

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New Zealand photojournalist Bruce Connew is the author of Stopover, a book of dutones documenting the Indian-Fijian sugar cane settlement of Vatiyaka and one extended family’s story of migration. Connew discussed his latest project in an interview with New Zealand’s Sunday Star-Times. Read the interview here.

Stopover is published and distributed outside New Zealand by University of Hawai‘i Press.

“The way I see it, their dislocation is less from India, their country of heritage, than Fiji, the country of their birth, where they are second-class citizens. Sometimes, you must cut your losses and move on. Today, we are witness to that migration.”

Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China

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Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Culture of Ming China, 1368–1644, by Craig Clunas, is an innovative and accessible history of a high point in Chinese culture, seen through the riches of its images and objects. Not a simple emperor-by-emperor history, it instead introduces the reader to themes that provide stimulating and original points of entry to the culture of China: to ideas of motion and rest, to the position occupied by writing and objects featuring writing; to ideas about pleasure, about violence and ageing.

Craig Clunas is the author of Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China and Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming, both published by University of Hawai‘i Press.

August 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3149-3 / $59.00 (CLOTH)

Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan

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Since the mid-1990s Taiwanese artists have been responsible for shaping much of the international contemporary art scene, yet studies on modern Taiwanese art published outside of Taiwan are scarce. The nine essays collected in Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan, edited by Yuko Kikuchi, present different perspectives on Taiwanese visual culture and landscape during the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945), focusing variously on travel writings, Western and Japanese/Oriental-style paintings, architecture, aboriginal material culture, and crafts.

August 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3050-2 / $60.00 (CLOTH)

Late Buddhist Sculpture from Indonesia

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The mention of Buddhism in Indonesia calls to mind for many people the Central Javanese monument of Borobudur, one of the largest Buddhist monuments in the world and the subject of extensive scholarly scrutiny. The neglect of scholarship on Buddhist art from later periods might lead one to assume that after the tenth century Buddhism had been completely eclipsed by the predominantly Hindu Eastern Javanese dynasties. Yet, as the works discussed here illustrate, extraordinary Buddhist images were still being produced as late as the fourteenth century. Violence and Serenity: Late Buddhist Sculpture from Indonesia, by Natasha Reichle, offers a close examination of some of the impressive works from East Java and Sumatra and explores their political and religious roles.

July 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-2924-7 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

Stopover, the Story of Indian-Fijian Migration

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Since 1976 New Zealand artist Bruce Connew has travelled widely, undertaking documentary photography projects around the world. Stopover is a haunting book of photographs from the tiny Indian-Fijian sugar cane settlement of Vatiyaka, taken by Connew during seven visits between June 2000 and November 2003. Connew’s narrative captions and a story by Brij V. Lal take the reader to the heart of an extended family inside the story of migration. The Stopover photographs will be exhibited at PATAKA, Porirua, Wellington, New Zealand, from August 18, 2007.

July 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3198-1 / $39.00 (CLOTH)

“Connew’s work combines haunting images with a text that is poetic, elegant, and moving in its clarity. There is a power and persuasion to his work that even the most scholarly and responsible analyses cannot match.” —David Hanlon, University of Hawai‘i

Brij V. Lal is the author of Broken Waves: A History of the Fiji Islands in the Twentieth Century; editor of Pacific Places, Pacific Histories and The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora; and co-editor of The Pacific Islands: An Encyclopedia (with Kate Fortune) and Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation (with Doug Munro and Edward D. Beechert), all published by Univerisity of Hawai‘i Press.

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