Japanese Landscape Painting and Taiwan: Modernity, colonialism and national identity

This volume, edited by Dr Kikuchi, is an outcome of a body of research by members of the research group which formed the TrAIN Research Centre at UAL. It is the first book which deals critically with Taiwanese art and design examining its modernity and the role of Japanese colonial intervention.

This article examines the attitudes of the Japanese painters towards the landscape of Taiwan for the first time. It argues the importance of the Japanese Watercolour Movement for the establishment of a new modern view of landscape and how this impacted on Taiwan particularly through the artist and teacher Ishikawa Kinichiro who vigorously promoted Taiwanese landscape. This is contrasted with the more colonial attitude of the prominent painter Fujishima Takeji and it is argued here that he actually had established a genre of imperial landscape painting within the discipline of Western-style painting (yoga) in Japan.

Through detailed examination of the documentation available, this article provides two new propositions, which has implications beyond the study of art history. First, it establishes the importance of the notion of 'the South' for Japan during 1890s to 1940s, as an alternative to 'the East' and 'the West'. Second, it points out the fundamental contradiction between colonialism and nationalism through the examination of Japanese attitudes to Taiwanese landscape. By incorporating Taiwan as part of Japan, the Taiwanese landscape had to conform to the already identified national characteristics of the Japanese landscape. This created problems and compromises had to be reached by Taiwan assuming a highly ambivalent identity of a tame and internal exotic Other.

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