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So go and get some books. Welcome to the new books network. Hello, and welcome back to new books in Japanese studies, a podcast channel for the new books network. I am Jean-Ely.
Today, we welcome Drs. Alison Miller and Leon Park to talk about their new edited volume, Transmost Memory, Visual Sites of National Recollection in 20th and 21st century East Asia. It was published last year through braille, and it's a beautifully printed hardcover with lots of beautiful images and photos. Welcome, Alison and Leon.
Thank you so much for joining us today. Hi, I'm Alison Miller. I'm associate professor of Artistry and Director of Asian Studies at the University of the South in 20th Tennessee. Hi, I'm Leon Park, associate professor in the Department of Art History at Ivo Women's University in Seoul.
Thank you both. Before we start talking about this amazing book, can you tell us a bit more about your research and your teaching? And I know Alison, we've previously chatted on this channel before. So can you kind of tell us how your work has evolved since then?
So the previous time that I was on this channel was for Meiji at a Sid Volume, and that was on visual culture of Meiji Japan. Since then, I've continued to work on prints, and I've continued to work on Meiji and Taishou visual culture. I just had a book on the Japanese Unperses that was released a few months ago, which is really exciting. And in the aftermath of that, I continued to work on woodblock prints and a lot of vernacular visual culture and images of women in the 19th and 20th century in Japan.
Thank you. And Leon, how about you? OK, so my primary research interest is contemporary Korean art and Korean-American art with a focus on issues of culture identity and contemporary Native Korean art. So right now, I'm expanding my research on contemporary Korean art of the 1990s, especially focusing on the exhibition culture, questioning how exhibition not only diversified artistic production, art criticism, but also fossilated cross-culture communication within Korea.
Thank you so much. I personally know very little about our history. So I'll try to best to dissect this book from my cultural history perspective. The topic of this book, a visual recollection, a visual culture of national recollection in the 20th and 21st century of East Asia.
That's a very broad topic. So what inspired you and your co-authors to begin this book project? So, I'm going to be a graduate school at the University of Kansas. And one of our advisors, Dr.
Mati Faneko, studies were images and were the visual culture of work from Japan in the mid part of the 20th century. So we had a strong foundation and met in that way. And as a result, we did a panel at the College Art Association conference between the pandemic years. It was 2020 and 2021 that we were working on that panel.
And as a result of that, we decided we wanted to go into this area. We felt like we really wanted to go beyond the often studied corners of this field. So it's really common to talk about comfort in the Yasuko-Nishine and war imagery. And these are incredibly important, of course.
We don't want to discount that. But we also recognize the contentious of these issues. And because they're so charged and understandably so, we felt like it was sometimes hard to progress on the theoretical side of memory and visual culture. And we really wanted to be able to focus on some of those more theoretical ideas.
So that was part of what inspired us. And I'll let you continue with that. Yeah, sure. Another inspiration is many of studies are still very oriented to war kind memories.
And the word dominant narrative constructed by national history. So our volume wanted to broaden this field by focusing on studies of forgotten or almost the lesser known topics or outsiders perspective, such as Japanese American or people of Okinawa. And also individual artists who visualize memories outside the national history. That's fascinating.
A few of our previous episodes also explored kind of a similar topic. We had a professor Sven Seller talking about statues and national memory or cultural memory. And David Vai is talking about how cultural memory, again, cultural memory was reflected in the reinterpretation of Japanese traditional classical tales. So I was really fascinated by the width of this volume and all the chapters in here.
And from these, it seems that you're coming from the angle that cultural memory and identity or identities are often intertwined with national identity. So in this sense, what kinds of visual culture does the volume focus on? And what are some of the themes that connect them? We were really interested in focusing on site specifically.
So we did take site as very broadly defined. So we thought it was really important to think about specific places and to have really specific stories within there. Because we felt that that really allowed us to take the topic beyond some of the kind of often repeated ideas that have been around in the field. So we did really have this historical and geographical specificity.
And we really were interested in how the legacy of colonialism, imperialism, war, and memory were all expressed through different forms of visual culture that were located in these specific places. So we really felt like a place-based approach was what tied a lot of the themes and the chapters together. And as in Young Side, I think I can echo the fact that we really did want to try to diversify the field as best as we could to think a little bit more about some of these not-so-well-told stories. Yeah.
So we have some chapters about very traditional memories, monuments, or museums, parks. But at the same time, we have chapters about temporary exhibitions or deconstructed memorials or contour monuments. At the same time, we have some contemporary art projects such as paintings, video, and installations. So you will encounter very diverse forms of visual culture in our editable game.
Can you give us an overview of the structure? How are the chapters organized? And what are the intersections of these arguments that are made in different chapters? Sure, yes.
So our volume comprises 10 chapters, organized into four sections based on chronological and thematic criteria. So for example, the first section traces the emergence of national identity and collective memory through visual culture and art institutions from the late 19th century. So starting from the late 19th century, the second section moved on to the war period and post-war period addressing the war, aggression, and trauma as major issues. And the third section centers on the forms and materiality of the memorials, discussing how these physical elements participate in process of remembering, forgetting, and the last section, the final section, investigate the public engagement and tourism at the size of memory.
So would you like to add? Yeah, so a little bit of the intersections of the arguments, I think, really do talk a lot about this process of remembering and forgetting. And I know we're going to return to that issue a little bit later. But I think the layering of history at all of these sites is something that was really important to us and how different places are reinterpreted through time.
So thinking specifically about the 21st century Beijing and remembering and forgetting of the Ming, this kind of disbursement of a specific place. And then the reconstruction of it is something that I think is a really good example of how there's this, what we call palimestin, this layering of history and a kind of reinterpretation through time. As different political groups come into play, as different people's memories come in, as different generations pass, and we think about some of the trauma as passed down through generation to generation. That's another issue that was really strong in Hong Kong's chapter on painting memories of the Korean War, is thinking about the generational legacies of these different events that happened and how that trauma is understood and interpreted through time and through visual culture specifically.
I encountered this question that a student asked me really recently about why when we talk about this cultural memory, especially in the case of Japan, because this came up during a Japanese history class, why when we talk about cultural memory, the discussion always starts with the late 19th century instead of going further. So then I was rereading you a volume, and I became curious about this point too, your book also begins with the 19th century. So what do you think from our history perspective? What do you think about the time before that, and why we do not really talk about cultural memory before the 19th century?
That's a great question. I think I could answer that best in the context of Japan myself, to say that I think there is some cultural memory that is brought up in the Edo period. If you think about different narratives, like samurai tales or kubuki plays that are represented in woodblock prints, I've been thinking a lot about the Chuchingda, the story of the 47th Ronin this year, and that's in some ways a representation of the past that was done in the mid 19th century, where they're looking to the historic era before. I think also if you're thinking about woodblock prints of the 1830s, they're certainly representing modern themes, but there's also some reference to historical memory, I think, in many of the temples or shrines or locations that are referenced there.
So in some ways I do think that it's a reference back. I think it's just a different visual signifier, maybe, that we're less familiar with, and that maybe we're thinking of, I was in my survey classes when I'm teaching Intro to Asian Art, we talk about Sean Dynasty bronzes, these very, very ancient things that are themselves referencing what they thought were ancient, and it's hard, I think, for us sometimes to see how the people of the past were looking at their own past, and so maybe we have a cultural blindness around that issue. I don't know any other things to add from that. I'm more contemporary art person, so I was thinking of the better, but in the case of Korea, I believe the Japan is modern period, more covering from the late 19th century, but in the case of Korea, we begin from the only 20th century, because that's the beginning of Japanese colonial period, and especially for the teacher culture and memory studies, is how we look back, the history of the colonial period is very significant to construct and narrate the Korean, modern history or Korean modern teacher culture, so I'm not sure that can be answered to your question, we're not jingyi, but yeah.
That's a really fascinating point, I guess to tie this into the volume, my next question is, so moving from the early modern to the modern period, how has the remembrance of history transformed under this kind of influence of the geopolitics of the areas discussed, such as you mentioned, colonialism in Korea, can you get us a couple examples from the volume? Yeah, so the topics and themes really do evolve through time, and I think that's also why this volume, why we did focus on really the 20th and 21st century, because we were really interested in the interactions of these different countries, and so much of that really does happen in the 20th and 21st century for obvious reasons. So when we were looking through here, thinking about kind of how the remembrance of history transformed, we did really start to think a lot in the early part of the volume around kind of this establishment of national narratives. So what does it mean to have a nation state?
And that's where we kind of come into those themes in the 19th century with the first chapters. And then as we built upon that, we thought a lot about the wartime, but especially as understood by contemporary artists in the present day. And I think that Jessica Nakamura's chapter really does a good job of layering that history across time and place, but also in one specific location. And maybe we can return to that in a minute, but we did also feel like the very ways of representing the experience of war were really important to talk about.
So thinking about the records of the Japanese exhibition from 1959, something that was almost forgotten, but really does address the atomic bombs and the commemoration of the atomic bombs, something that's been studied so much. So that chapter by Rika is a really interesting way of thinking about a very commonly understood topic from a perspective that is almost completely new, as she was reconstructing that from different newspapers and different other sources that she was able to find about that particular exhibition. Then we really did feel like it moves and that the contemporary artists and way of contemporary understanding does really change how people are looking back as we kind of progressed through the volume. And a lot of that relates to tourism and these specific sites.
So thinking a little bit about Okinawa and Bauchu and Arts and how the Okinawan peoples in Travis Siefman's chapter, he's thinking about how Okinawan is attempting in many ways to gain their own history back from this larger Japanese narrative, right? We're all fairly familiar with the story of Japan's involvement in the war and Japanese memory, but the Okinawan peoples suffered immensely in their own specific way that was very different than kind of the mainland story of the Metro Pole of Japan. So really trying to recapture that with this one specific site and how it has been built and rebuilt over time through different tragedy and through fire and what that really means to the Okinawan peoples themselves. Not just as a tourist site where you can go and you take your Okinawan beach trip, but what does that mean to the Okinawan peoples who are actually constructing it and using that site for themselves?
I mean, did you wanna add anything there or? No, about, yeah, because the diversity of the perspective in our volume, so we collected the kind of studies of this history from only modern to modern to contemporary period by scholars from not only the culture, art history, but also history, architectures. So we have a really diverse city perspective from the discipline, but at the same time we collected essays by scholars working in North America, East Asia, and we're at Western Europe together, right? So I think that can also produce some kind of trans-national conversation through our research together.
We also did have a diversity of age groups and you really thought that having a lot of different perspectives on these issues was important to bring to the table. So absolutely agree with that. Yes, the diversity of the contents and the authors, it's very, it was a very fascinating point about the book. I wanna dive into the chapters of you both since we only have you two here, but taking Allison's chapter as an example.
So you just give the role of a particular gallery in commemorating the Imperial Legacy of the 20th century. I found that example to be fascinating. Can you tell us more about this? How was the gallery founded and what does its selection entail?
Yeah, so really fascinating sites that my chapter focused on is the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery. This is a site in Tokyo that you can still visit today. It's open to the public, very affordable to go to. And in its day, it was a major tourist location in Tokyo.
So if you look back at guidebooks from the 1930s, for example, it was listed as one of the major Tokyo sites to go see. And today it's definitely not up there on the Instagram tourist list, but maybe it should be. So this gallery was founded just after Emperor Meiji's death. There was a push to commemorate his life in some sort of museum structure.
And the museum itself is built on the site of where his funeral was held. So out back, for example, there's a large tree that was planted that was part of the funeral procession at the time. So I was founded with the idea of commemorating his life in rain. And half of the paintings are in yoga or oil painting, European salt oil painting.
I mean, other half are in Nihonga or this neo-traditional style of Japanese painting. And if you go through, there's 80 paintings. You walk through in a chronological order from the first painting is about his birth. And the last painting is about his death.
And so you can see basically what a government committee that was formed at the time felt with the most important events within his life and his rain. So that to me tells us a lot about how the Japanese powers that be in the 1920s and 30s, because they started it right after his death that it took awhile to organize. And it was all about committee. What those people and also what the artists who were working together on this project felt were the important things.
So I don't feel like it tells us as much about Emperor Meiji himself as it does about how the Japanese imperial state felt about Emperor Meiji and how they wanted to really structure his life in visual culture. And some of these paintings were used in textbooks at the time, especially until the 1930s, when more of the paintings were completed. So I chose from the gallery four specific paintings that commemorate empire. So thinking about Metruya, Taiwan, Korea, and also Okinawa, and how those four specific colonial locations were incorporated into this story.
What does the visual culture look like? Where exactly are these placed? And how did this committee kind of interpret the idea of what was Metruya, Taiwan, Korea, and Okinawa? And my chapter, I argue that Okinawa and Korea are envisioned in this really much more friendly, airy way.
They're envisioned as a much more positive place. Interestingly, in the painting of Korea, it's in Seoul. And it shows one specific gate, but it also shows the hill behind it where the Meiji shrine was located during the colonial era. And that shrine is no longer there.
It was in a Maltharassu shrine. So there's some references that you would have known at the time. Whereas Metruya and Taiwan are really represented in this much more dark, menacing way. And I think that reflects a lot about how people in the 1920s and 1930s really envisioned these different locations within the Japanese empire.
So that was the argument in my chapter. And it's a really interesting place. If you visit there today, you can still see Emperor Meiji's course, which is embalmed and still on display. And it's a really, really fascinating time capsule into what the 1930s ideals really were.
And then I went together, actually, and visited it as part of it. So when you check the image for the cover of our edited volume, that's our photo together. We visited there while finalizing our editing. So we took the photo together for the cover.
Yes. Well, that's a very fascinating argument. And it's the Meiji Emperor's course. I have this follow up question that's more out of personal interest, because I've been recently reading a lot on art administration in the late Meiji period.
And my question is to commemorate in Bremeiji, why did this committee choose a gallery instead of other forms of, I guess, visual or, I don't know, a statue or money money, anything like that? So there was supposed to be statues inside of the main hall. And those never came to fruition. So that was part of the original plan, is that they were going to have these paintings on either side and a really large scale paintings.
And then in the center, there was going to be these bronze statues. And then the horse itself is in the back. So you get all of this kind of visual culture. But then this is in contrast to the Meiji shrine, which is not nearby, but not very far away.
And the Meiji shrine itself is its own form of visual culture that is on today's tourist circuit. Many people do go visit there. And the Meiji shrine is a constructed forest. It looks like it's a natural environment, but it's not actually.
The trees are all deciduous trees. So they're a lot like it never changes. You never get Meiji. You never get any sort of fall color, anything like that.
And that individual forest kind of stands there in the center of Tokyo with the shrine, which feels like a very conventional form of memorializing. So you have that. And this was kind of in contrast to that, to really be much more didactic, whereas the Meiji shrine is the more religious side of things. This is run by the Meiji memorial picture galleries owned and operated by the Meiji shrine operation.
So they are the people who still today are involved with the day to day operations. But instead of having this more conventional worship site, the idea was that it was a much more modern up-to-date idea of a didactic educational museum site. Yeah. That's very interesting.
Thank you. Yeah. We're going to take a huge time jump and talk about contemporary Korea, because Annya's chapter discusses how the representation of the UN in South Korea was mediated during different times under political ideologies. I thought it was absolutely fascinating.
I never thought anything about any representation of UN being politicized like this. So what was the historical context? And how do you see the UN perceived today in South Korean society? Yes.
So the main reason we have many kind of visual representation of the UN is because of the Korean War. So the following, the Korean War, the United Nations emerged as a kind of prominent symbol in South Korean society and culture due to the involvement of UN forces, especially from the 1960s to the 1980s, I believe the numerous war memorials dedicated to the UN troops were erected under South Korean military regimes. So these monuments often served kind of ideological functions, reinforcing anti-communist narratives and consolidating the state culture over the public's memory. But the issue is that since the Korea's democratization in the late 1980s, the symbolic function of the UN in the public discourse has diminished.
So many UN-related memories still exist, but they are largely overlooked by younger generation in these days. So the goal of my chapter is to recover this fragmented and forgotten layers of memory. So in my chapter, I examine the demolition of UN tower that no longer exists and also contemporary art project based on the fiction of UN tower. So through these two cases studies, my chapter highlights the absence and discontinuities in memory and also reinterpret the UN as kind of historically constructed and symbolically mediated system.
For listeners who might not be so familiar with Korean history but who generally myself, could you give us more background information on how the UN became associated with things like anti-communism or even modernity or ideas like that? Yeah, that's mainly, so you have to understand that during the war period and post the period, many of Koreans doesn't understand the English word. So UN is as kind of simply as a kind of Western power to Korean people at the moment. And especially during the 1960s, from the 1960s to the 1980s, Korea was under the dictatorship or military governments.
And to kind of, how can it justify their powers over the public, the these military leaders emphasized the enemies outside South Korea and namely those are North Korean troops and North Korean people. So anti-communism was widely used as ideological tool to control the current South Korean people under one military power but at the same time kind of emphasizing national identity against the North Koreans. So under this political kind of political and social circumstances, UN has been used as kind of ideological and political tool because of the Korean kind of spatial political situation under military power. I hope that this can be answered to your question.
It does, it does. And it really, it's really amazing how so much historical background is packed into just one tower, the destruction of which can change kinship so many dynamics. So from these examples, this is a question from the both of you. How do you see the interaction between remembering and as you mentioned, and through emphasized forgetting?
And how do they shape the ways that history can be interpreted? So not only my chapter, but also many chapters in our volume highlight the dynamics interplay between remembering and forgetting at the size of memory and also their visual representation. And that's the reason why we use the word recollection in our volume subtitle because we wanted to emphasize that memory is not static but continuously reconstructed. And I believe that as evidence in our chapters, the visual mediation of memory allows for multiple, sometimes even conflicting interpretation of history.
So rather than reinforcing singular or institutionalized narratives, the study of this size, open up possibility for alternative perspectives and critical engagements with the past and history. Alison, would you like to add anything to that? I think that really succinctly answered the question. I think that that idea of memory as really continuously being reconstructed goes back to the idea of palance, that layering that is so really integrated throughout every chapter in the book.
And the idea of just how memory really does shift, not just on a personal basis as most people are very aware of, but also on a national basis, an ethnic basis, a gender basis. I mean, there's so many ways in which our memory and experience as people is really continually being reformed. And I think that being able to see this through the visual culture and in young chapter, really does a fantastic job of showing that with everything from the matchbox through these sketches, through this amazing bridge that is no longer extant, thinking about how generation and people and different citizens of a massive city like Seoul can really continually be reimagining and re-remembering their own history and experience is absolutely where that process of remembering and forgetting is integrated throughout our entire volume. Yeah.
Thank you both for joining us today for this chat. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you.
It was wonderful discussing these chapters, but I think for listeners, it will be a more intuitive experience if you get to actually read the book and see the beautiful illustrations and photos in this book. So please make sure to check out this edited volume, Transposed Memory, Visual Sites of National Recollection in 20th and 21st Century East Asia. It's not available as hardback in ebook. This is Ding Lee.
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