The 37th International Symposium on the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Property
Session 3 That Which Supports Form
Résumé

14:10-14:20 Session 3 Introduction

　Materials that make up form, techniques and tools that enable form, individual or group consciousness or philosophy that stand in the background of form, corporeality, social trend or political situation contexts, or those things which surpass all such considerations and can only be called chance; supported by all manner of things, form is born by people at a certain time and is recognized by people of that and other times.

　This session will bring together studies that approach the question of form by transcending individual considerations such as genre, period and region. Whether actual object or simply image, we take an awareness of form as the starting point, then must broaden our consideration to that which surrounds form, and in the end, once again return to the issue of form. The gathering of a number of examples reveals the expansive nature of these issues related to form, and this session will delve into the issues and potential of such methodologies themselves.

14:10-14:20 Paper 1

　Proselytizing religious beliefs and memorializing historical events are not only intimately connected, they also share the tendency to take on spatial and material form. Such forms can be described as what historian Pierre Nora called lieux de mémoire “Realms of Memory.” These sites of memorializing history serve to enhance social coherence in the present and on into the future. This paper seeks to apply Nora’s concept on local productions of karmic origin scrolls of the Hachiman deity.

　Research on the breadth and depth of illuminated handscrolls narrating and depicting the Karmic Origins of the Hachiman Deity (Hachiman engi emaki) is still in its infancy. These scrolls are mentioned in twelfth-century documents, but the earliest extant version dates to 1322. Myriad copies and reinventions of this textual and visual medium were created thereafter. The first part of the narrative recounts the pregnant, pre-historic Empress Jingu’s alleged conquest of the three Korean kingdoms with the help of the Sumiyoshi deity. The second part relates Jingu’s giving birth to the future Emperor Ôjin, his posthumous manifestation as the Hachiman Deity, and miraculous appearances at various sacred sites of his worship. The illuminated scrolls of the medieval period served various ends, but donated to “shrine-temple multiplexes” (Allan Grapard) related to Hachiman veneration as they were, they served as a tool for proselytizing, as a plea for prosperity and peace, as well-guarded and legitimizing treasures, and some were saturated with political significance.

　In 1985/6, art historian and pioneer Miya Tsugio introduced a number of extant medieval Hachiman handscrolls, and categorized them into type A and B, dividing them along the lines of textual coherence, script type, and aesthetic judgements. Thereafter, scholars have come up with diverging text versions, which challenge Miya’s two-type theory (e.g. Kuroda/Tsutsui).

　This paper expands on the A / B - type dichotomy by looking at two examples of Hachiman scrolls, which reveal specific strategies to imbue their imagery with a distinct local identity, departing from models they purport to be copying. The first example is a body of scrolls created in the Suô region of today’s Yamaguchi Prefecture during the second half of the fifteenth century. Even though these scrolls would technically belong to Miya’s type A, they diverge from earlier and contemporaneous depictions on a compositional, iconographic, and stylistic level. The result is the creation of new iconographies, which allude to different contexts. The second example is the Hakozaki Hachiman engi set of two scrolls dated to 1672. Although most scenes follow the established A-type of iconographies, others are re-interpreted or added, giving rise to an obvious emphasis on the locality and geographic distinctness of the Hakozaki shrine in Fukuoka Bay.

　These two case studies of Hachiman engi productions show that these scrolls take on specific forms so as to cater to a local audience in the sense of Nora’s lieux de mémoire, going beyond Miya’s A/B-type dichotomy.

14:50-15:20 Paper 2

　Craft is another word for vessel. Since the early 1990s, the ordinary vessels started to be considered as a category of art. This was the result of early vessels gaining the name of cultural assets by modern studies of archaeology following the tendency of preference over Goryeo celadon, and the Choson Art Exhibition of the 1930s allowing crafts to join the ranks of art. The perception of vessels changed dramatically since the scholar-art world cooperated in seeking the historical and artistic values of it.

　While its artistic values have enhanced after being subjected as an art-historical context, the vessel’s substantial truth as an ordinary and daily object seems to have diminished. This is due to the concentrated effort on pulling up its formative significance, resulting in the lack of attention on revealing the basic essentials of the vessels including the methods of production and structural forms related to the usage of the vessels. The key point of the problem is that the crafts history responsible for the study of vessels is in the range of the art-historical field that has concentrated in researching forms. Troubles from the study methods or the crafts history of this era most likely would have triggered it.

　Vessels before the modern times were rarely created without fulfilling its purposefulness. A purposeful craft leads to an intimate co-relationship with everyday life. And it is obvious that us humans ultimately take part as consumers. Hence, a new attempt on thorough research, viewing the vessel as it is, is needed.

　For this, a new research outline and a point of view that exceeds the existing rigid history are necessary. The scope of vision is expanded over the boundaries of art history with its basis on the history of crafts. If needed, analytic methods of studies such as anthropology, ethnology or ergonomics should be applied. The phrase of Modernism that ‘the form follows its function’ is not only restricted to objects after the modern era. If the usage reflected in the form is a fine record of time, the attempt of revealing its fundamentals is a priority in fulfilling its scholar-art evaluations.

　This article will focus on restoring the original ‘truth’ of vessels hidden behind the inertia of modern studies. Questions on how the usage affects its form and the correlation between closely placed objects will be dealt thoroughly. The form of the vessel is nevertheless a scope looking through the lives of the era. I believe that the spectrum of total directional vision derived from the form of vessels will lead us closer to everyday lives hidden beneath art.

　From this perspective, early modern photographs of traditional lives provide crucial evidence for an all-rounded study of vessels. If the form of the vessel is a reflection of living and existence, the object and the life styles of its consuming people become essentials when analyzing it. It is the ordinary demands of the consumer group of the era rather than the craftsman who decides the form. The craftsman’s role is to mediate social messages through his detailed craftsmanship. This is why the vessels can be seen as bearers of cultural memory. If this attempt is correct, it could be an opportunity to widen views and complement original studies.

15:30-16:00 Paper 3

　Wu Bin, active at the end of the Ming dynasty, is a painter who was heralded in the 20th century as a major Eccentric School painter. Michael Sullivan’s article in 1970 followed by James Cahill’s study in 1982 spearheaded this interest, reevaluating Wu Bin in terms of the unusual historical conditions of the late Ming–early Qing period, and as an individualist painter linked to modernity in Chinese painting. And yet, the true image of this painter cannot be fully understood from the few related remaining documentary sources. He has continued to be enveloped in the multilayered, complex valuation systems that have existed from his lifetime to the modern era. This paper will attempt to clarify the changes in the multilayered value construct regarding Wu Bin’s distinctive “forms.”

　The painting under discussion is the Road to Shanyin (1608, Shanghai Museum). The entire length of the handscroll was displayed during the Treasures of Chinese Painting from the Shanghai Museum exhibition held at the Tokyo National Museum in 2013, providing an opportunity to understand the forms of this painter not available from previous reproductions of the work. The handscroll begins with a spring scene bathed in morning light, followed by a humid summer scene effectively employing the “ox hair” texture strokes 牛毛皴 developed by the Yuan dynasty painter Wang Meng and the Mistyle landscape methods of the Southern Song painter Mi Youren. Shifting to an autumn evening scene, Wu Bin used the “egg-rock” texture strokes 卵石皴that had been featured effects in the works of the Yuan dynasty Huang Gongwang, and Dong Yuan and Juran active in the Five Dynasties through Northern Song dynasty. The scroll ends with a wintry dusk scene in the style of the Tang dynasty painter Wang Wei and employing the expansive, lyrical painting methods of Zhao Lingrang and Li Cheng. The title of the painting, Road to Shanyin 山陰上道図, is essentially and completely unrelated to an actual scene, and here Wu Bin displays his stance as a painter who freely employs historical styles, as if boasting of his own painterly prowess and deep understanding of Chinese painting history.

　Of further importance is the fact that this work was created for Wu Bin’s greatest patron, Mi Wanzhong of Beijing. Wu Bin met Mi in 1601 (Wanli 29) and moved to Beijing some time before around 1610 (Wanli 38) where he painted Landscape of Shaoyuan for Mi. According to Wu Bin’s own inscription, Mi, who had become the governor of Tanghe district in Jiangsu, commissioned the Road to Shanyin handscroll in 1607 (Wanli 37), and Wu completed it the following winter. Wu Bin’s inscription notes that it was painted “in the brush styles of the various masters of the Jin, Tang, Song and Yuan.” In Chinese traditional painting the fact that both the creator of a work and its admirer are highly cultivated is the basis for the creation and appreciation of calligraphy and painting, and painters based their “imitating the old” stance on such standards. For that reason, in this instance Wu Bin was applauding his patron’s noble character by creating this painting as a reconstruction of the history of Chinese painting for presentation to that patron.

　Regardless, Wu Bin’s art has been evaluated as “eccentric,” “individualistic,” and “modernism” amidst the modern structure of critical evaluation. In this evaluation his works and their context have been greatly skewed, and the “form” of Chinese landscape painting can be seen as having been greatly changed through the complex changes in context, from painter to patron, China to America, late Ming–early Qing to modern era, and the history of calligraphy, painting and art. Through the example of Wu Bin’s Road to Shanyin, this paper will attempt a clarification of one aspect of the structure of the critical evaluation of “form” as it occurs in Chinese painting.

16:00-16:30 Paper 4

　In recent years scholarly attention has focused on the cultural history of the West’s early modern era (15th century through the beginning of the 17th century). This period saw a succession of dramatic events that smashed the static worldview that had lasted up until the preceding medieval period — from the revival of ancient cultures to the invention of printing techniques, discovery of new continents, religious reform, and on and on. And as a result, this period can be seen as the time in which new political, economic, cultural and religious frameworks that still continue today were formed.

　What characterized the culture of the time was the excess of information. Great numbers of cultural artifacts were flowing into the marketplace from newly discovered continents and Asia. And a massive amount of new knowledge was being distributed thanks to the new medium of printing.

　Memory strengthening methods, “Ars Memorativa,” descend from ancient debating and logic arts. What can be called the art of memory, was a set of mnemonic principles widely used by the intelligentsia of the day as a prescription against what today we would term information overload. The technique involved was the orderly combination of space and image. The person who practiced these “mnemotechnics” would impress upon their minds an appropriate space or architectural structure which would serve as the base image. Upon or within this would be superimposed the duly organized associative images of the content to be remembered. Using the power of the visual image they were able to effectively compact the massive amount of written information. This series of images was usually placed within a set group of spaces in good order inside the previously memorized architectural space. When they wanted to recall data, they would meditate, move through the architecture in their mind and as they encountered each image stored there, they would extract the information entrusted to that image.

　The virtual architecture that served as the means for memory storage and recall can be considered the “forms” of the memory. Continuing this image, the form of the information ordering inside the minds of these early modern era people can be seen inside these imaginary spaces. Investigation of the great number of memory method manuals published at the time reveals that the majority of them present actual world architecture or streetscapes as models for memory devices. And yet, there can also be seen works that offer absolutely imaginary spaces. The major example of this type can be seen in Cosimo Rosselli’s Thesaurus Artificiosae Memoriae (1579).

　Rosselli’s memory model bears a close resemblance to Dante’s The Divine Comedy, with a path progressing from hell up to heaven, with specific forms depicted for each individual space. These literally imaginary constructs within the mind can thus be seen as offering the ideal container for storing memory images. For example, if we look at hell we can see a geometric construct that looks like a round theater, with Lucifer enthroned in the center. The spaces containing sinners and devils are all divided in an orderly fashion. Heaven is the same way, centered on Christ with angels and saints arrayed amidst a space divided in a radiating geometric form. This study reconstructs these imaginary spaces of memory and by exposing their characteristics, aims to gain a vantage point for investigating the forms of early modern era memory and psyche.