Editor’s Introduction
2023; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/729113
ISSN1545-6927
Autores Tópico(s)Anthropological Studies and Insights
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeEditor's Introduction Asian Aesthetics and America: Problems and PromisesGuest Coeditor: Vimalin RujivacharakulGuest Coeditor: Vimalin RujivacharakulPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreIf, again, for our average man we seek on similar lines for the average head, and for this the average nose, and so on, then we get the figure that underlines the normal idea of a beautiful man in the country where the comparison is instituted. For this reason, a black man must necessarily (under these empirical conditions) have a different normal idea of the beauty of forms from what a white man has, and the Chinese person one different from the European. And the process would be just the same with the model of a beautiful horse or dog (of a particular breed).—This normal idea is not derived from proportions taken from experience as determinate rules; rather it is according to this idea that rules for judging first become possible. (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment [1790]).2Maybe it is just my luck. Whenever I encounter visitors at Winterthur, I often overhear them discussing things from Asia—ceramics and silks, paintings and lacquered screens, orchids and peonies, or wallpapers and teacups. They share their stories and experiences while connecting the lush green landscape on Kennett Pike to places half a world away. They nod and laugh, as strangers and friends share experiences. But if they notice me, they tend to cut their conversations short. A few might give me polite smiles while the others turn silent. Those are awkward moments. The late Edward Said once connected the process of cultural essentialization of people's identity and things to the configurations of power between East and West.3 However, as an Asian who is observing white Americans discussing export objects from Asia, I can no longer tell who essentializes whom, or what exactly is being culturally essentialized. In those moments, as I stand alone amidst the museum's beautiful objects, my mind usually turns to Kant.In one of the most polemic sections in Critique of Judgment, "Of the Ideal of Beauty," Kant connected three concepts rarely discussed together—intuition, rationality, and physical appearance—as he discussed how human judgment inadvertently connected a form to a cultural context.4 Arguing that the derivation of the ideal of beauty began not with reasoning but with intuition, Kant identified the initial step of formation in familiarity. Experiences with familiar forms of figures instigate thoughts, and thoughts form what he called ästhetische normalidee (aesthetic normal ideas). This aesthetic normal idea allows humans to connect certain physical appearances common with a group with a certain identity, namely, a skin color with an ethnicity, a tattooing practice with a cultural group. But the aesthetic normal idea only operates at the level of intuition, forming the bedrock of our collective familiarity with what we sense. The crux lies in the next stage, when the rational ideas emerge through reasoning and convert the intuition-associated aesthetic normal ideas into principles for judging outward appearances. In this way, members of the same group will also form the same ideas about their group's ideal beauty because they develop a collective familiarity with appearances common within their group.For Kant, this process of identifying the ideal beauty takes an unfortunate turn toward a racialized perception.5 He contended that different groups would hold the ideal of beauty differently because each race develops its own sets of collective familiarity. It is in this way that, as he stated, "a black man must necessarily (under these empirical conditions) have a different normal idea of the beauty of forms from what a white man has, and the Chinese person one different from the European."6Today we cannot support Kant's proposition of differentiation in aesthetic perceptions according to ethnic or racial appearances, not only because of the unspoken racialized tone but also because of the ongoing global transmission of ideas—from colonization to Hollywood movies and Tiktok—all of which have transformed our perception of beauty and our judgment of aesthetics. Still, looking beyond human forms and turning our focus to nonhuman things, Kant's integration of the aesthetic normal idea, rationality, and physical appearance explains how our mind works and how we sense and judge things in relation to cultural perception. In the study of things, this explains why the appearance of blue-and-white ceramics can prompt many of us to presume that they were made in China, or why views of cherry blossoms can take one's thoughts to Japan.For an Asian person standing next to a china cabinet at Winterthur, Kant's theorization offers some peripheral justification as to why those visitors would connect my physical appearance to the things next to me. Fortunately, Winterthur's collections are unique and therefore the awkward moments I experience never last too long. Either a tour leader or one of my Winterthur colleagues always reliably interrupts the silent exchange. Their explanation to the visitors—that Henry Francis DuPont mainly collected export objects adorned with symbols of the United States or those with decorative patterns that fit his collections of American decorative arts—has steadily rescued me from many odd moments while assuring the visitors of the collections' cohesiveness and American values.The stability of Winterthur's rationale for Chinese things in American collections has been for many years a perfect explanation for me. The assurance that these objects belong to American decorative art collections has also helped suppress my fears of being objectified and connected to certain objects due to my skin color, appearance, or presumed ancestral roots. And yet, as I have grown older and encountered more things permanently exiled from their origins, I have become skeptical of this theoretical presupposition. Material objects are defined by their birthplaces; designs, by their producers; and appearances, by their observers. How could lines and colors on the surface of a Chinese-born thing make it American? If a skin-deep pattern can outweigh an object's material origin, should we not change the way we interpret material things by first prioritizing their surface appearance?In his critique of Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche distinguishes between the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich) and its appearance.7 But as Alois Riegl argued, in the persistence of the thing-in-itself, the thing still needs the reader's attention to interpret contents in relation to appearance.8 Then, a skeptic like me can also intervene further: between the object's surface appearance and its material content, which should take priority in our interpretation?To wit, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would have been baffled had he been asked to discuss the national American spirit of a dinner plate made in China; yet visitors to Winterthur regularly encounter George Washington's collection of the Society of the Cincinnati Chinese export porcelains (see Leja-Mitter, fig. 2). A question whose answer would have eluded a nineteenth-century German philosopher is our everyday research challenge at Winterthur.Finding Asian Aesthetics at WinterthurAs this introduction started with interactions with objects and people in the Winterthur galleries, the museum was also the most appropriate ground for myself and J. Ritchie Garrison to begin a shared investigation into Asian aesthetics in American material culture. Garrison was at the time director of the Winterthur Program in Early American Material Culture. He was committed to probing the interconnections of objects, designs, and contents in relation to their reported cultural values. We adopted the term "Asian aesthetics" for our project, not because we planned to essentialize a cultural identity of things, but because we would like to explore the institutionalized concept of "Asian" in relation to appearances and designs of things, so that we can acquire a better understanding of how certain forms, patterns, and designs typically marked as "Asian" have become part of American material life.In the early stages of our project, the Terra Foundation for American Art generously awarded us a grant to put together a team of researchers. The following paragraphs and pages are some of the results of our collaborative research with scholars in American and Asian art and material culture, presented at a 2018 conference held at Winterthur.9 At that conference, our speakers—museum curators and academics who had been paired up in advance—gathered to exchange perspectives and give papers through team collaboration. It was unusual that researchers from two different fields, American art and material culture and Asian art and material culture, worked together to present papers addressing questions formed through unfamiliar perspectives. As a result, this method generated robust and dynamic interexchange among our participants.We, of course, also benefited from existing momentum in the study of Asian art and American art, especially ideas generated at the 2009 conference "A Long and Tumultuous Relationship: East-West Interchanges in American Art," held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.10 Yet, even with prior knowledge and preexisting scholarship, the participants and speakers at our 2018 conference were eager for further dialogue. It was decided that select papers presented at the conference would be published in two themed issues of Winterthur Portfolio. (The journal you hold in your hand is the first of those themed issues.) In the months and years that followed, as the authors invited to contribute to Portfolio began to research and write collaboratively, the COVID pandemic started. Most of the authors carried on through Zoom and email communication, and a few had to change their directions and research topics. Lapses of research time during those two years were inevitable, although the challenging environment also fostered more robust intellectual arguments and stronger critical cross-disciplinary investigations.The excitement about new ideas and conversations across fields in this project did not occur without careful assessment of intellectual risks and tautology. Through years of collaboration, Garrison and I had adopted "Asian aesthetics" as a term for the subject of our inquiry, yet this phrase brought many challenges. We do not attach "Asian" to "aesthetics" because we believe that a cultural identity preexists, nor do we believe that it could serve as a category of appearance. Still, there had been kind warnings from colleagues in the field that Asian aesthetics did not exist, for Asia could never be summed up in a unified mode given the expansive and diverse pool of cultures on the continent of Asia. Those warnings are valid, but they should also be expanded and reframed.To begin, the concept of "aesthetics" concerned in this study refers primarily to the modern aesthetics.11 It is within the discourse of modern aesthetics that the concept of "Asian aesthetics" developed. As Michael Marra demonstrates through his research in modern Japanese aesthetics, that global circulation of knowledge occurred as Western perspectives became the global modern standards.12 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories by Western philosophers such as Kant, Hume, Hagel, and Nietzsche spread from Europe into Asia through the introduction of colonial knowledge and practice. By the late nineteenth century, their writings had been abundantly translated into local Asian languages.13 Between derivations and translations, their discourses of "aesthetics" became universally accepted, not because human judgments across the globe turned homogenous but because the early understanding of modern aesthetics in Asia was largely influenced by the Western models.In his study of Kant, national identity, and aesthetics in Asia, Karatani Kojin aptly shows how aesthetics played roles in shaping a nation's collective identity.14 But one can also argue that it was also through the same process of modernization-cum-nation-building that the attribution of "Asian" emerged as a subject of inquiry in relation to aesthetics. The process involved the construction of "Asian" as a cultural discourse as much as the association of form that could be uniquely fit to that discourse itself. With these, as readers surely determined, examples of the beautiful things in Asia often require certain physical appearances that either confirm their unique existence in the Asian region or their presumed representation of values held in Asian societies. The problem with such arguments is that Asia itself is a geological and cultural predetermination—a historical condition that has been examined by Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen in The Myth of Continents.15 Its cultural identity as a single continent is forged and has long been called into question, from Qing scholars to Meiji nationalists and modern-day authors around the globe. For researchers of Asian studies, to study Asia is not a result of intellectual absentmindedness but an act of activism, calling into question one's own field of research operation, a quest to find its roots and governing sphere.16As such, our take on the compound noun "Asian aesthetics" is not to perpetuate a construct or to establish a cultural construct (Asian) in a branch of philosophy (aesthetics). Rather, we purposely pair two constructs—"Asian" and "aesthetics"—to challenge the position of cultural relevancy in the interpretation of things and their appearances. For that reason, the double construct of "Asian aesthetics" as investigated in our project exists beyond the realm of the arts of Asia and does not define either the specific appearances of the Asian ideal of beauty or the essence of Asian-ness. Instead, the main objective we have for this volume is to present a collective investigation about things allegedly inhabiting the ideal of beauty characterized as Asian but also presumed to possess values in American material culture.It is in this spirit of investigation that we present this special issue on "Asian aesthetics" in American material culture for the Winterthur Portfolio. This volume's essays focus on the theoretical foundation of the subject, especially in relation to modern interpretations and translations of form. Essays by Partha Mitter and Michael Leja, Lee Glazer and Stacey Pierson, and Ned Cooke address American interpretations of appearances, historical reassemblages of meanings, and efforts to locate cultural influences that are beyond the established cultural categories.Leja and Mitter coauthor an essay debating whether objects or ideas should take precedence in the global interlacing of art; their debate includes an innovative photographic series in which each author extrapolates their arguments through visual evidence that extends from traditionally told stories about the China Trade to Ai Wei Wei (Leja-Mitter, fig. 6) and the formation of the Grand Canyon's peaks and Indian names (Leja-Mitter, fig. 10). Their shared interest in the circulation of objects and the circulation of ideas is taken further by the other authors. Glazer and Pierson explore the making and remaking of the Peacock Room at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, formerly the Freer-Sackler Galleries (Glazer-Pierson, fig. 1). Edward Cooke, who had partnered with Dorothy Ko during the 2018 conference to study the possibility of writing about eco-aesthetics, takes a new approach to global material culture by minimizing the impact of culturally imposed meaning while allowing the author to engage directly with the global use and design of green woods (Cooke, fig. 2).Together, the essays in this issue outline our examinations of the interpretations of Asian aesthetics in American material culture through cases and stories that have long challenged the authors and the public about connections between objects, designs, and cultural roots. Through object-based cases, we bring forward accounts of the making of things and the way the appearances of things perpetuate a category of taste. Concurrently, the cases examined in this volume also raise questions about the presence and absence of Asian things and Asian voices in American history and American material life.The Asian Presence in American History: Two ChronologiesSome framework is necessary to foreground the history and basic components of "Asian" as referenced in the following essays. American history has long hosted two distinct chronologies of Asian presences. The first chronology is dominated by the presence of objects, and the other by that of people. The object-oriented chronology starts as early as the seventeenth century when settlers from Europe brought with them objects from China, India, and Japan. Some of the objects were heirlooms introduced to Europe via early modern trade routes, while others were added as new settlers established themselves in the new colonies. By the eighteenth century, many of these imported objects were arriving in North America in high volumes, as lacquered furniture, delicate porcelains, and sheer silks. They all served as status symbols and cultural statements of American wealth. In the study of early American material culture, researchers examine shelves of porcelains, cabinets filled with tea and tea wares, rooms decorated with lacquerware, and curtains decked in fine silks. That our founding fathers would dine upon dishes imported from China and decorate their offices in Japanese lacquered cabinets was to be expected. These export objects embody values of fine taste and elegance that were welcome enhancements to the lifestyle of early American history.17The second chronology of Asian presence in American history reflects an entirely different attitude toward Asians in the United States. It is the people-oriented history, which begins in earnest about a century after its object-oriented counterpart. The earliest groups of immigrants from China and Japan did not enter the United States until the mid-nineteenth century, with the Chinese mostly settling along the West Coast, and the Japanese largely on the islands of Hawai'i. Most were laborers and petty merchants, considered by white Americans as part of the lower social crust. The newcomers faced condescension, suppression, unfair labor treatment, and uncountable acts of discrimination. In the subsequent decades, American history recorded acts of institutional discrimination and accounts of violence committed against individual Asian immigrants. Infamous highlights were the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Japanese Internment.18 Clearly, the first hundred years of the Asian presence in this second chronology are marked by alienation, instead of integration.The stark difference in the two chronologies' historical conditions is telling. Seldom have researchers and the public recognized the coexistence of these two chronological timelines, even though some researchers have separately observed the sharp contrast between Americans' welcoming attitude toward objects from Asia and their alienation of Asian immigrants.19 Existing scholarship is valuable and helpful, but we must also distinguish the object-based chronology from the people-based chronology. Only by doing this can we reach the core of the intrinsic problem of Asian presence in the American collective memory. After all, the object-centered chronology places the Asian presence in relation to wealth, whereas the history that follows the people-centered chronology begins with stories of immigrants, labor, and hardship.Given the preset historical disconnect between the two chronologies of Asian presence in the United States, it is no surprise that interpretive accounts in the history of collecting that connect objects from Asia with Asians in the United States are extremely rare. By contrast, a multitude of stories about collections of Asian objects owned by Anglo-American collectors are abundant. This imbalance feeds arguments that often identify exoticism or Orientalism as the impetus for Asian-inspired designs developed outside of Asia. But while Chinoiserie, Japonism, and other such movements were in fact born of infatuation with "Otherness," they are also historical movements whose impact generated new art forms in their own categories.Recognizing this fact helps us develop new theoretical avenues for our authors who seek to address and interpret the Anglo-American collecting of Asian objects beyond symbols of class or as results of exoticism. In their coauthored essay, Glazer and Pierson choose to discuss the Peacock Room as a process of constant making and reshaping, taking us back to the Leyland mansion in London and forward to the latest conservation of the Peacock Room in Washington, DC. The room is in effect the result of layers of interpretative works—from the architect Thomas Jeckyll to the artist James McNeill Whistler and the collector Charles Lang Freer—that seek to define and interpret beauty according to the latest trends of their time. What they adopted and adapted identified more than a sequence of straightforward forms of Orientalist undertaking in art and craft, because their commitment to those design trends suggested the rapidly growing acceptance of an aesthetic category among wealthy class members who associated materials connoted with the constructed essence of Asia as a particular form of experience. Glazer and Pierson identified that experience as the result of cosmopolitanism, developed and curated exclusively in Europe and North America. In this way, the Peacock Room demonstrates the birth and change of Asian aesthetics as a category that related rather minimally to cultural components in Asia, and more to late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo taste for the modern and beautiful (Glazer-Pierson, fig. 2).That the Peacock Room holds a dear place in the object-focused chronology of Asian presence in America is obvious. It is also clear that the room's only inclusion of the purportedly human representation—James McNeill Whistler's painting of the Princess from the Land of Porcelain—is concurrently limited to a representation of the Other; not only does the painting objectify a human figure but it also epitomized it as a humanized representation of porcelain. While this process may seem outright culturally essentializing, its roots lie in the American practice of art-making and collecting things from Asia. Placing the room's manifestation of the object-centered chronology, we can appreciate how it was created with the presence of Asian objects, in the absence of Asian people.Could there be a way to turn away from the two parallel chronologies of object-based history and people-based history? Ned Cooke's essay argues that it is possible and that the path forward is to move away from the human realm and turn instead to nature. Eco-aesthetics, a concept he proposed through his collaboration with Dorothy Ko, eliminates the tension between human agency and objects by exploring a near-global occurrence of craft-making that grew out of the knowledge of and passion for materials. For Cooke, a strong case study lies in green woodworking, an approach that transforms unseasoned, unprocessed wood into objects. In Japan, green woodworking was born as a form of ancient-turned-modern craft-making that has been nurtured over decades through craftsmens' deep commitment to nature and local traditions. In the United States, it was a product of a philosophical argument among American studio craftsmen. In Scandinavia, it is a practice of a tradition of hand skills. In connecting the three domains of craft and craft-making, Cooke's investigation offers a multiregional, near global account of the unexpected simultaneous existences of a craft-making approach. As early as the 1970s and 1980s, members of green woodworking schools in the three domains (Asia, Europe, and North America) also came to know of one another and share their methods and practices. Their connections illustrate a development of global aesthetics, not through a cultural pattern of design or a national expression of artistic heritage, but rather through their shared commitment to working with the materiality of unprocessed wood and finding ways to make it beautiful (Cooke, figs. 3 and 10).The turn toward nature helps us escape the entangled web of the two chronologies, but it also directs us back to Kant, who held nature in an esteemed place for aesthetics as stated in his famous quote: "Nature is beautiful because it looks like art, and art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as art while yet it looks like nature."20 The English critic John Ruskin would have no trouble adopting this argument even though his declaration of the representational beauty of nature came rather from his belief in the divine power of God the creator and his commitment to picturesque practice and theory.21 Still, art may be judged beautiful, but not all beautiful things are art; this is an age-old algorithm of culture vis-à-vis nature, the knotty presupposition at the crux of the debate about the difference between art and aesthetics that has consistently reminded art historians why they can never travel the full length of the philosopher's path.22"Asia": A Political History of AestheticsThe main obstacle in the study of art and material culture in relation to the discourse of aesthetics is the conflation between aesthetics and beauty. While that perception is not incorrect, it puts a narrow limit on the boundaries of aesthetics as an inquiry. Kant might suggest that aesthetics is the condition from which we judge beauty, but the twentieth-century German philosopher Theodor Adorno saw aesthetics as the manifested form of illusion, which his contemporary Hannah Arendt connected with the political nature of humanity (and the humanities), an argument that subsequently led to the political turn of aesthetics.23That is where the study of "Asia" can be part of the political history of aesthetics, for its emergence, as I discuss earlier, took place along with the process of nation-building against imperialist forces. With that, I would like to introduce one unique feature of this themed issue of Winterthur Portfolio: the photo essays by Michael Leja and Partha Mitter—the former a historian of American art and the latter a historian of Asian art—two brilliant minds in the field of art history. Their essays, unlike the contributions of other authors in this issue, adopt text to delineate visual narratives to engage modern political history and allow readers to observe the birth and change of "Asian aesthetics."Central to Leja and Mitter's argument is one major debate: In the study of the transcultural circulation of knowledge, are ideas or material objects the first to cross the alleged cultural borders? Finding a definite answer to this question is not easy. On one level, Leja and Mitter appear to agree that transmitting things and ideas involves capitalism, valuing in historical materiality, and translingual interpretation. However, deeper down, their responses—in which Leja elucidates the importance of historical materialism while Mitter champions the traveling of ideas and translation—are embedded in layers of historiographical debate and conviction in the role aesthetics plays in relation to history.To appreciate some fine grains of the Leja and Mitter's wit as much as their splendid insights, it might be helpful to discuss what has occurred over the past 250 years and how the exchange and global circulation of ideas brought about their debate on material form vis-à-vis concept. A short excursion to examine the history of Asia in relation to the formation of "Asian aesthetics" as a concept can serve as an account of a transcultural history.Let us begin by returning to Michael Marra's argument that modern aesthetics is a construct formed out of a branch of philosophy in eighteenth-century Europe. We should not interpret Marra's argument as blind confirmation that eighteenth-century Europeans were the first to understand how to appreciate beauty. By contrast, he contended that the discourse of modern aesthetics—as distinguished from arguments about content and forms proposed by philosophers from classical periods—had emerged in German-speaking debates in the eighteenth century from thinkers who did not treat their arguments as culturally specific to the Germanic cultures or Western Europe, but rather as pertaining to all of humanity.24In the ensuing two centuries, as their audience expanded beyond Europe, the writings of those Western philosophers were translated into other languages and widely read in Asia. The audience base swelled, making the discourse itself both omnipresent and seemingly universally applicable. As readers debated the imported discourse and related concepts, they raised a critical question: Do we appreciate beauty similarly because all humans process thoughts in the same way, or have we come to judge beauty similarly because our modern perception has been conformed to a purported aesthetic standard initiated by those Europeans? Efforts to answer these questions have prompted two centuries of research on regional aesthetics. Methods and approaches vary but the fundamental of their research evolved around comparing native views with the imported discourse. But such a comparison is often problematic because Kant and Hegel involved an element that has preestablished cultural hierarchy within the discourse of aesthetics: morality.To explain how morality presets a cultural hierarchy in the discourse of aesthetics, I return readers to Kant's argument on the ideal of beauty. The aesthetic normal ideas,
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