Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Asian Studies|Art Criticism|Art History“

Cartoon art is a form of visual communication that can effectively convey a message and social criticism. In the Malaysian context, the editorial cartoons have been proven as effective since the beginning of independence until now. Even so, the form and style of criticism have always been changing through the time and are influenced by environmental, socio-political, legal and media ownership factors. Through formalistic and contextual analysis of selected works from Malaysia, particularly in Lat cartoons, this paper seeks survey and examines the existence of Asian cartoon style role towards the formation of the Asian community.

AbstractIn response to Sato and Sonoda's “Asian Studies ‘inside out’: research agenda for the development of Global Asian Studies,” members of the Global Asias Collaborative at Rutgers University – comprised of a diverse group of scholars of Asia and the Asian diaspora located in history, literature, art history, geography, among other disciplines – offer responses to this generative prompt to remap the place and field of “Asia” in its heterogeneous and interwoven temporalities and topologies.

Humane literacy? An essay on undergraduate education? Isn't it a solecism to broach such concerns in this special issue ofThe Journal of Southeast Asian Studieswhere contributors are invited to take stock of the current state of scholarship in various fields of study? My response is simply if not now, then when? I am writing from North America where Southeast Asian studies has gained only a precarious beach-head in the academy and nowhere is this more evident than in the very limited undergraduate investment in our field. Despite the fact that any expansion of academic appointments for specialists on the region will be spurred by evidence of general student interest, a concern with that issue, on our occasions of collective self scrutiny, has been subordinated to questions of research direction, funding strategies, and the prevailing degree of accord between the various disciplines and area studies. But, however ancillary the general education mission of the undergraduate college may seem to professional scholars eager to get on both with their research and the training of graduate students, it is nevertheless a principal responsibility of those deans who control academic appointments. We differ from our colleagues within Southeast Asia where an interest in the region can be either assumed, or expected eventually to develop. While American universities place globalization high on their agendas today, it is not at all evident that their students will wish to study about Southeast Asia rather than, say, Africa or Latin America. So we do need to focus on how we may demonstrate the centrality of what we do to the process of self-discovery and the integration of learning that is at the heart of general education.

Southeast Asian modern art has thus far been historicized largely within national historical frameworks. The region's contemporary art has been pulled, sometimes unwillingly, into those national frameworks, even as it enters a global market and takes part in a more transnational dialogue. What is the geography proper to contemporary art? And what insights might a regional perspective afford about art that speaks to a world beyond the nation, but resists outright assimilation under the rubric of ‘the global’? This essay proposes a calibration of three art historical frames – national, regional and international. I argue that far from meaning transcendence of national frames, even where artists intend it, contemporaneity compounds and complicates them. I examine two specific manifestations of contemporaneity, one that emerged at the height of the Cold War in the work of a Sino-Thai modernist, Chang Sae-tang; the other in the broaching of Cold War trauma in art and film of the ‘post-historical’ twenty-first century. Neither ‘contemporary’ can be understood without its respective national framing, but that framing alone proves inadequate for describing the complex histories, subjectivities, and formal choices with which Southeast Asian artists have grappled. If studies of modern art demanded recourse to specific national histories, the study of contemporary art will require no less specific histories of the international.

When an object is introduced to a new culture for the first time, how does it transition from the status of a foreign import to a fully integrated object of that culture? Does it ever truly reach this status, or are its foreign origins a part of its identity that are impossible to overlook? What role could the arts of that culture play in adapting a foreign object into part of the culture? I propose to address these questions in specific regard to early modern Japan (1550–1850) through a black lacquered ōtsuzumi drum decorated with a gold powder motif of intersecting arquebuses and powder horns. While it may seem unlikely that a single piece of lacquerware can comment on the larger issues of cultural accommodation and appropriation, careful analysis reveals the way in which adopted firearms, introduced by Portuguese sailors in 1543, shed light on this issue.

While the arquebus’s militaristic and economic influence on Japan has been firmly established, this thesis investigates how the Kobe Museum’s ōtsuzumi is a manifestation of the change that firearms underwent from European imports of pure military value to Japanese items of not just military, but also artistic worth. It resulted from an intermingling of Japanese-Portuguese trade, aesthetics of the noble military class, and cultural accommodation between Europeans and Japanese that complicates our understandings of influence and appropriation. To analyze this process of appropriation and accommodation, the first section begins with a historical overview of lacquer in Japan, focusing on the Momoyama period, and the introduction of firearms. The second section will go into the aesthetics of lacquerware, including the importance of narrative symbolism and use in the performing arts with a particular emphasis on the aural and visual aesthetics of the drum. Finally, I will discuss this drum in the global contexts of the early modern era, which takes into account the tension between the decline in popularity of firearms as well as the survival of the drum. Pieced together, these various aspects will help to construct a better understanding of this unique piece’s place in the Japanese Christian material culture of early modern Japan.

The work of Japanese contemporary artist Aida Makoto (1965-) has been shown internationally in major art institutions, yet there is little English-language art historical scholarship on him. While a contemporary of internationally-acclaimed Japanese artists Murakami Takashi and Nara Yoshitomo, Aida has neither gained their level of international recognition or respect. To date, Aida?s work has been consistently labeled as otaku or subcultural art, and this label fosters exotic and juvenile notions about the artist?s heavy engagement with Japanese animation, film and manga (Japanese comic book) culture. In addition to this critical devaluation, Aida?s explicit and deliberately shocking compositions seemingly serve to further disqualify him from scholarly consideration. This thesis will argue that Aida Makoto is instead a serious and socially responsible artist. Aida graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts from Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music in 1991 and came of age as an artist in the late 1980s during the start of Japan?s economic recession. Since then Aida has tirelessly created artwork embodying an ever-changing contemporary Japanese identity. Much of his twenty-three-year oeuvre explores the culturally significant social sign of the shojo or pre-pubescent Japanese schoolgirl. This thesis will discuss these compositions as Aida?s deliberate and exacting social critiques of Japan?s first and second ?lost decades,? which began in 1991 and continue into the present.

The dominant narrative mode in Ainu studies today stresses an activist agenda that, although worthwhile, limits the potential for new research in the field. In this thesis, I analyze historical accounts of the development of Ainu bear carvings as a case study of the characteristics of the dominant activist mode and present an alternate narrative in order to demonstrate the need for a variety of approaches to Ainu research.

The activist narrative mode is structured to engender sympathy for Ainu people and respect for their cultural heritage. Activist accounts of Ainu bear carvings often claim that the carvers were pressured by the Japanese tourist industry to violate religious taboos against producing realistic depictions of bears. In this way, the carvings serve as a symbol of oppression of Ainu people under Japanese imperialism. At the same time, activist scholars state that the Ainu bear carvings followed a linear progression from tourist souvenirs to respected works of “fine art.” Thus, the carvings also reinforce optimistic projections regarding the future status of Ainu culture and socioeconomic condition.

My alternate narrative focuses on the complexities and ambiguities in the field and avoids judging events in moral or sympathetic terms. I explore a broad range of contextual issues, tracing the regional production of wooden bears from the paleolithic ancestors of Ainu people, examining the role of bears and woodcarving in Ainu culture, analyzing Ainu interactions with Japan, Russia, and other neighboring empires, and investigating the commodification of bear carvings as tourist souvenirs.

Activist narratives have contributed a wealth of valuable research to the field of Ainu studies and remain a useful tool for promoting social and cultural equality for Ainu people. However, automatic conformity to the dominant activist mode perpetuates the obfuscation of certain details in Ainu history, including the diversity within Ainu and Japanese cultures and institutions, instances of political cooperation between Ainu and Japanese communities, and unanswered questions regarding the complex development of Ainu cultural practices and beliefs. Although any historical account (including this thesis) inherently simplifies its subjects, varying our narrative approach helps us to identify and fill some of the gaps.

In this thesis, I explore two works from Mail Order Brides/M.O.B., A Public Message for Your Private Life (1998) and Mail Order Bride of Frankenstein (2003), that take into account the histories and identities produced within Filipino/a American Communities. I use Sarita Echavez See and Emily Noelle Ignacio's theories on parody to analyze the performative aspects of M.O.B's artworks. According to See and Ignacio, parody can be utilized as a tool to simultaneously form solidarity within Filipino American communities. By examining these ideas, I argue that M.O.B. performs appropriated representations of their ethnic and assimilated cultures by using parody to critique and problematize often-misrepresented individual and cultural identities.

This dissertation examines the transformation of the South Indian city of Kanchipuram into a major cosmopolitan sacred center during the course of the eighth through twelfth centuries. In this pivotal five hundred-year period, Kanchipuram served as the royal capital for two major dynasties, the Pallavas and then the Cholas. Both dynasties sponsored the production of prominent sacred monuments built from locally sourced stone. These temples were crowned with pyramidal towers, adorned with sculpted and painted figures of deities amid groves and palatial landscapes, and elegantly ornamented with courtly Sanskrit and Tamil inscriptions. Over time, the temples functioned as monumental statements of power, sites of devotion, and municipal establishments where diverse social groups negotiated their claims to political authority and economic prosperity. In Kanchipuram, temples also played a crucial role in defining urban space by demarcating the city's center and borders, marking crucial junctions, and orienting the gods towards avenues, hydraulic features, and royal establishments. As religious monuments, they also fostered vibrant circuits of pilgrimage and travel that were integrated with a broader Indian Ocean network.

The dissertation argues that the construction of temples fundamentally shaped and reordered landscape. The four chapters, organized chronologically, address the expanding geography of Kanchipuram and its widening sphere of influence. The first two chapters trace the city's shifting contours and the emergence of a major pilgrimage route that led precisely through the urban core. The city was radically reconfigured around this new central road, which functioned as a processional pathway that created relationships between monuments both inside the city and beyond its borders. The third chapter reveals patterns of movement linking the city with its rural and coastal hinterland, and considers connections with Southeast Asia. Temples in more remote areas disclose links to Kanchipuram through their use of shared architectural forms, a standardized iconographic program, and inscriptions that detail economic and political ties to the urban hub. The fourth chapter focuses on colonial-era encounters with Kanchipuram and the city's role in the broader production of colonial knowledge. As a site of antiquarian interest and military history, Kanchipuram was subject to competing narratives about India. Whereas European officials and surveyors such as James Fergusson saw in the city's monuments India's past glory and inevitable decline, other travelers found no evidence of rupture or disrepair. I read these conflicting representations against the grain to expose Kanchipuram's continuity as a flourishing cosmopolitan center. The dissertation's goal is twofold. First, it documents Kanchipuram and maps its monuments spatially and chronologically in relation to each other, the city, and features of the natural environment. Second, it situates the temples within their ritual and civic functions as agentive establishments that both served and fostered a growing urban landscape.

This thesis investigates the intersection of art, feminism and postwar memory in Japan through lens of artist Yoshiko Shimada. Coinciding with unprecedented geopolitical shifts occurring in the final thaw of the Cold War, the year 1989 marks a fraught moment in Japan when spectres of the nation's imperialist past and its historical entanglements acquired renewed potency in the wake of Emperor Hirohito's death. Born in 159, Shimada gained international prominence in the 1990s for her critique of the national body, in particular, the relationship between women and the imperial wartime state. Her work, which unapologetically confronts Japan's WWII aggressions in Asia, its wider histories of occupation, and issues such as the fiercely contested legacies of former 'comfort women' vitally reflects on the social role and agency of art and artist in a climate of political unease emergent at Showa's close. Based on extensive interviews with the artist and research into her primary archive, this is the first comprehensive survey chronicling Shimad;s twenty-five year oeuvre. It situates her practice between two vectors: feminism in Japan and its engagement with Western scholarship, and traces the 1990s 'feminist turn' led by art historians such as Chino Kaori, who began to champion the application of gender perspectives in the study of Japanese art. Within the wider Asian region, the concurrent development of transnational women's art' networks, exhibitions and publications dovetailed with the burgeoning of performance art was protest. As one of the most outspoken feminist art activists of her generation, Shimada has borne key witness to the changing cultural conditions informing women artists' organised activities and the writing of their social histories. This interdisciplinary study incorporates a range of perspectives drawn from art history and gender studies, film and performance theory, memory and trauma studies, Japanese studies and cross-cultural scholarship. It highlights the formal and conceptual interactions between printmaking, performance, installation and lens-based media in Shimada's practice, and demonstrates the plural ways in which her reflexive aesthetics and visual strategies express the tensions and complexities characterising processes of remembering, forgetting and representing the past. By interweaving arguments about the crucial role of feminism in challenging dominant narratives of nation, race, sex and ethnicity, with critical perspectives central to discourse on postmodern Japan, questions are raised concerning the implications of gender, tradition and popular culture for art produced in this age of anxiety. The recent proliferation of problem-oriented, politically engaged practices following the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami marks an ostensible 'return to the social' and departure from privileged tropes of 'Japaneseness' in artistic experimentation. Taking this into account, this thesis proposes that revisiting the recent history of feminist art interventions reveals valuable insights into the role of art in understanding and addressing trauma, and engaging marginalised histories and communities. This is exemplified by Shimada's work, which offers a powerful vantage point from which to contemplate art's political inflections, its social potential and the urgency of memory work both in Japan, and in our contemporary societies today.

This research investigates anusmr&dotbelow;ti (Sanskrit), rjes su dran pa (Tibetan), anussati (Pāli), and considers how this term might serve as a link for finding a commonality in practices in Hīnayāna, Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna traditions. The research was inspired by the work of Buddhist scholars Janet Gyatso, Paul Harrison, and Matthew Kapstein. Each of them has noted the importance of the term anusmr&dotbelow;ti in Buddhist texts and Buddhist practice. Harrison sees a connection between Hīnayāna practices of buddhānusmr&dotbelow;ti and a host of Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna practices. He notes that buddhānusmr&dotbelow;ti can be seen as a source of later, more elaborate Vajrayāna visualization practices ("Commemoration" 215). Gyatso investigates contextual meanings of the term anusmr&dotbelow;ti and cites meanings that include an element of commemoration and devotion. She notes that varieties of anusmr&dotbelow;ti are considered beneficial for soteriological development and are deliberately cultivated for that purpose (Mirror of Memory 2-3). Matthew Kapstein refers to a type of anusmr&dotbelow;ti that is the palpable recovery of a state of being or affect. This, he says, is not simply the memory of the experience but the recovery of the sense of being in that state ("Amnesic Monarch" 234). Essential to the research were the teachings of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche and Anam Thubten Rinpoche on Buddha-nature and Pure Vision.

In this study I have coined the terms "Buddha-nature anusmr&dotbelow;ti" and "Pure vision anusmr&dotbelow;ti." Though these terms do not appear in the literature, they may be seen as useful in investigating core remembrances (anusmr&dotbelow;ti) in the Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna traditions respectively. "Buddha-nature anusmr&dotbelow;ti " refers to a key remembrance or commemoration in Mahāyāna Tibetan literature and practice. "Pure Vision anusmr&dotbelow;ti " refers to a key remembrance or commemoration in Vajrayāna Tibetan literature and practice. This dissertation cites passages from key texts and commentaries to make the point that these coined terms meaningfully reflect a major aspect of their respective traditions. They describe that which is worthy and important, that which should be remembered and commemorated.

The subject of this qualifying paper is an Edo Period Nō theater chōken. Upon receipt, this choken was in very poor condition. There were six types of damage that needed treatment.

First, there was extensive warp breakage along the full length of the shoulders and sleeve bottoms and one area of full loss to the base fabric, exposing wefts. Second, a couched metallic thread was used as an outline to five vase motifs and as patterning for four butterflies. All used ‘urushi,’ better known as Japanese lacquer, for an adhesive binding a metal foil its paper substrate. This couched thread had either loss to the metallic surface, to the combined metallic and lacquer surface, or was hanging, and at times twisted back upon itself. Third, there was a cut and finely woven, metallic coated paper used for some of the leaf and insect wing motifs that was tattered, unaligned, had loss to its metallic surface, and was not secure to the base fabric. Fourth, there were areas of weft breakage exposing warps. Fifth, the six exposed selvages that run the full length of the two sleeves and one body panel all needed to be strengthened. Sixth, there was one 3 by 4 inch area in the lower back of the body panel which had complete fabric loss.

Untreated areas were: areas of warp distortion in the front body panel; a few loose embroidery threads throughout the five floral/vase motifs; and a small amount of loss due to insect infestation.

Research was done and methods developed in order to find treatment techniques for the lacquer based metallic thread, the cut and woven paper motifs, and the extensive warp breakage extending along the shoulders and sleeve bottoms.

Due to the difficulty of finding English equivalents to Japanese textile terminology, I included a Comparative Glossary that I hope will be useful to other researchers in this field.

This project proved to be challenging, but in the end, very rewarding with a new body of knowledge concerning materials used in this type of cultural object.

Genetic and geological studies reveal that following the melting of snows 22,000 years ago, the post Ice-age Sundaland peoples’ migrations as well as other peoples’ migrations spread the ancestors of the two distinct ethnic groups Austronesian and Austroasiatic to various East and South–East Asian countries. Some of the Austroasiatic groups must have migrated to Northeast India at a later date, and whose descendants are today’s Munda-speaking people of Northeast, East and Southcentral India. Language is the store-house of one’s ancestral knowledge, the community’s history, its skills, customs, rituals and rites, attire and cuisine, sports and games, pleasantries and sorrows, terrain and geography, climate and seasons, family and neighbourhoods, greetings and address-forms and so on. Language loss leads to loss of social identity and cultural knowledge, loss of ecological knowledge, and much more. Linguistic hegemony marginalizes and subdues the mother-tongues of the peripheral groups of a society, thereby the community’s narratives, histories, skills etc. are erased from their memories, and fabricated narratives are created to replace them. Each social-group has its own norms of extending respect to a hearer, and a stranger. Similarly there are social rules of expressing grief, condoling, consoling, mourning and so on. The emergence of nation-states after the 2nd World War has made it imperative for every social group to build an authentic, indigenous narrative with intellectual rigour to sustain itself politically and ideologically and progress forward peacefully. The present essay will attempt to introduce variants of linguistic-anthropology practiced in the West, and their genesis and importance for the Asian speech communities. An attempt shall be made to outline a Khymer narrative with inputs from Khymer History, Art and Architecture, Agriculture and Language, for the scholars to take into account, for putting Cambodia on the path to peace, progress and development.

Contemporary Russian socio-cultural, cultural and philosophical, socio psychological, artistic and aesthetic practices actualize the Russian tradition of rejection, criticism, undisguised hatred and fear of power. Today, however, power has ceased to be a subject of one-dimensional denial or condemnation, becoming the subject of an interdisciplinary scientific discourse that integrates cultural studies, philosophy, social psychology, semiotics, art criticism and history (history of culture). The article provides theoretical substantiation and empirical support for the two facets of notions of power. The first facet is the unique, not only political, but also mental determinant of the problem of power in Russia, a kind of reflection of modus vivendi. The second facet is the artistic and image-based determinant of problem of power in Russia designated as artis imago. Theoretical grounds for solving these problems are found in F. Nietzsche’s perceptions of the binary “potentate-mass” opposition, G. Le Bon’s of the “leader”, K.-G. Jung’s of mechanisms of human motivation for power. The paper dwells on the “semiosis of power” in the focus of thoughts by A. F. Losev, P. A. Sorokin, R. Barthes. Based on S. Freud’s views of the unconscious and G. V. Plekhanov’s and J. Maritain’s views of the totalitarian power, we substantiate the concept of “the imperial unconscious”. The paper focuses on the importance of the freedom motif in art (D. Diderot and V. G. Belinsky as theorists, S. Y. Yursky as an art practitioner). Power as a subject of influence and object of analysis by Russian creators is studied on the material of perceptions and creative experience of A. S. Pushkin (in the context of works devoted to Russian “impostors” by numerous authors). Special attention is paid to the early twenty-first century television series on Soviet rulers (Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Furtseva). The conclusion is made on the relevance of Pushkin’s remark about “living power” “hated by the rabble” for contemporary Russia.

Abstract To help the selection of suitable sites for development of offshore wind projects in the US on the coasts of California, Oregon and Hawaii, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) funded this study to assess the potential geo-hazards in this region. First, a comprehensive review of potential threats to the sites based on historic events is provided. The geospatial indexing for the call areas are then calculated based on weights associated with inputs, consisting of: sea floor slope, soil type, and seismicity (peak ground acceleration data of 500 year event). Finally, suitability indices are provided for each region. To perform a suitability analysis using geospatial indexing, all input factors are first standardized into a common scale, then a weighted overlay function is applied. Each of the criteria in the analysis is multiplied by the weights defined based on their importance in the region and then added together and suitability maps for each lease block are developed. Comprehensive maps of geohazards and geological data, suitability index maps and suitability rankings for the area of interest are being generated and presented online. This paper focuses on the floating windfarm call areas offshore California, including Humboldt, Morro Bay and Diablo Canyon, and presents the new approach for evaluating, integrating and indexing geospatial geohazard data for offshore windfarms, and the state-of-the-art suitability analysis approach. This new method can be also beneficial in the other parts of the world (e.g. East Asia), and similar concept can be implemented to evaluate the suitability of sites, based on the hazards in the area of interest.