Art of the Japanese Copy

General Information 
Symposium program (PDF, 425 KB)
Abstracts and biographies of speakers  (PDF, 446 KB)
 

Place: University of Zurich
Date: September 12 and 19, 2023 

The International Symposium: Art of the Japanese Copy will begin with a keynote address by Her Imperial Highness Princess Akiko of Mikasa (Kyoto Sangyo University) on Tuesday, September 12, 2023, at the University of Zürich main building's Aula Magna KOL-G-201 (Rämistrasse 71, 8006 Zürich) and will continue with a full-day program of presentations by leading and emerging scholars on Tuesday, September 19, 2023, at the University of Zurich, Room RAA-G-01 (Rämistrasse 59, 8001 Zürich). 

Presentations will be held in English and in Japanese. For presentations in Japanese, a translation into English will be provided.

The event is free and open to the public. No registration is required.

An International Symposium: Art of the Japanese Copy will take place at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, on the 12th and 19th September, 2023. This symposium will feature leading and emerging scholars from Japan, Austria, and Switzerland.      

The symposium is an attempt to widen the discussion of the “copy,” especially in regard to Japan during the nineteenth century. For too long, the popular discussion on the Japanese copy has centered on the trope that Japan copied everything from China or the West. Here, the copy has been seen as a negative act, in terms of a Japan that needed to copy from others in order to create worthwhile work. We aim to expand the discussion and look at the various ingenious ways that Japan used the idea of the copy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at a time when Japan was coming in terms with ideas from the West. We will not only look at several aspects of the idea of the copy in Japan during this time but also examine the copy as a long-established tradition. The act of copying was, for example, one of the fundamental artistic practices in Japan, and over centuries, copying was not just an important cultural technique for the appropriation and transmission of styles and techniques; it also functioned as an artistic gesture of appreciation.      

In this symposium we will look at three specific areas of the copy: 1) the copying of historical relics, and 2) the copying of Japanese architecture, and 3) the copying of the human form in the ikiningyō tradition.    

For the first example, we will examine how artists such as Kanō Tessai (1845–1925) and Niiro Chūnosuke (1869-1954) studied the culturally important artifacts at major temples and storehouses and recreated exact or reduced-sized copies of these objects. Here there were multiple purposes: preserving culturally significant objects, protecting against natural disasters, learning the techniques of previous generations, and promoting Japanese culture, inside and outside of Japan.      

As for the second example, small-scale copies were made of major temples and shrines and sent to Western institutions. There they were displayed in ethnological museums and used as models in architectural studies.  A number of these models still exist in western museums and have recently become the focus of academic inquiry.      

As for the last example, makers of the ikiningyō copied the human body and created surprisingly lifelike visions of human beings. Created not just for local fairs and commercial goals, they were also exported to the west. Hence a number of these were used in order to display Japanese life and culture within Western museums. Here, the Historical Museum of Bern holds a significant collection of these works. A number of newly discovered objects from various Swiss museums will also be discussed.      

Place: University of Zurich, Aula Magna KOL-G-201 (Rämistrasse 71, 8006 Zurich)
Time: 18:30-19:45
Flyer (PDF, 425 KB)

Keynote address

Place: University of Zurich, Room RAA-G-01 (Rämistrasse 59, 8001 Zürich)
Time: 9:30-18:00

This sysmposium is made possible with financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation and Hochschulstiftung of the University of Zurich.