Imagined Neighbors: Visions of China in Japanese Art, Ca. 1680-1980 - Hardcover

by Frank Feltens (Editor), Paul Berry (Contribution by), Michiyo Morioka (Contribution by)

Intriguing paintings that explore Japanese artists' relationship with China.

Imagined Neighbors: Visions of China in Japanese Art examines Japanese artistic understanding of China from the late 1600s, Japan's period of seclusion, to its age of modernization after the mid-nineteenth century. It focuses on ways Japanese painters from the late 1600s to the twentieth century pictured China, both as a real place and as an imagined promised land. It features three essays by renowned Japanese art historians in addition to more than fifty catalog entries highlighting unusual artworks revealing Japanese artists' complex responses to Chinese art, history, and culture. In recent years, a handful of scholarly studies have tried to push against the established narrative of an exclusively Western-inspired modern Japan. Imagined Neighbors challenges the established narrative of an exclusively Western-inspired modern Japan by offering a more nuanced approach to understanding the country's struggle with reconciling the old with the new as it reinvented itself into a modern nationstate.

Author Biography

Frank Feltens is curator of Japanese art at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art. Michiyo Morioka is an independent scholar of Japanese art based in Seattle, Washington. Paul Berry, based in Kyoto, Japan, is an independent scholar of Japanese art and cinema.