Presentation 1

Orientalism, Occidentalism, andGlobalism: Japanese Artat the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
国際シンポジウム

William and Helen Pounds Senior Curator of Japanese Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA

ProfileAnne Nishimura Morse is a graduate of Radcliffe College. She received herMasters and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. During her thirty-five
year tenure at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Dr. Morse has organizedmany critically acclaimed exhibitions both in the United States and Japan,
including the recent In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3-11 andTakashi Murakami: Lineage of Eccentrics, A Collaboration with Nobuo Tsuji andthe Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She currently serves as the co-chair of theArts Dialogue Committee for the Conference on Cultural and Educational
Interchange (CULCON).

Since its founding in 1870 the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has assumed the missionof an encyclopedic museum—collecting, preserving, and exhibiting art of all areas of theworld from all time periods. Due to the breadth and importance of its holdings, fromits first years the collections of Japanese art have been one of the Museum’s cornerstonesand the evolving interpretative presentations of these holdings have had a profound
impact upon art historical discourse, both in the West and Japan.
Many of the interpretative models that the Museum of Fine Arts has promoted may
now be critiqued historically as a succession of Orientalist and Occidentalist schemes.
Although this forum has challenged institutions to move beyond these constructs ofOrientalism and Occidentalism, such approaches remain deeply embedded in museum
presentations of Japanese art across the globe, and even in Japan. When the Museum’s
doors officially opened in 1876 the exhibits, like those of many museums around theworld, including the Tokyo National Museum, were arranged following the model of theSouth Kensington Museum (later renamed the Victorian and Albert Museum). Primacy
was given to displays organized by materials and techniques so that the public could beinstructed in design and thereby develop local industries. This decorative Orientalist
framework constructed by Europeans and Americans looking for an idealized, pre-industrial organization of production, was equally promoted by Japanese governmentaland commercial interests. As Japan had embarked upon its unprecedented campaign ofmodernization and westernization in the name of the newly enthroned Emperor Meiji,Japanese society as a whole was obliged to rethink its identity as mediated by their interpretations of the West. Thus, disentangling Western and on occasion Japanese presentations of Japanese art today from this Orientalist past is not an easy task.
By the 1880s MFA pioneers Edward Sylvester Morse, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, andWilliam Sturgis Bigelow were vigorous in their support of Japan as a modern industrialized country in the international arena and yet insistent that Westernization and modernization should not obliterate all that they found positive about traditional Japaneseculture. Okakura Kakuzō, who came to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1904, positioned
himself as the chief spokesman for an Occidentalist narrative. Okakura asserted that “theOrientalism, Occidentalism, and Globalism: Japanese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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International Symposium

Dr. Anne Nishimura Morsepoint of view of the scholar in charge of Eastern works ought to be the right one, andthat would be the point of view of the East. It would mean a familiarity and sympathy
with Eastern philosophy, life, and aims.” Okakura emphasized his credentials by always
donning kimono. He had his assistants practice kyūdō in the courtyard and offered
instruction in ikebana. In this manner he stressed the “authenticity” of his point of view,
yet at the same time reinforced the “exotic.”
The 2015 exhibition Double Impact: The Art of Meiji Japan at the Tokyo National
University of Arts Museum, which was co-organized by a team of MFA and Japanesecurators, provided a survey of the production of the Meiji era for both domestic andinternational audiences and examined the ways in which Japan and the West influencedeach other. By casting a wide net and not eliminating categories of works created during
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that heretofore had not been part of theestablished canon of Meiji-era art, the MFA and Japanese team was able to provide a
better comprehension about the context for Orientalism and Occidentalism during thatperiod—ideas that are fundamental to understanding it and developing ways to transcend the previous narratives.
A global approach to presentation of works of art is necessarily a collaborative one
as we try to negotiate the inter-connections of the modern world and elucidate patterns of inspiration; no individual curator has perspective on the wide range of objects
and cultural contexts necessary. The presentation of Japanese contemporary art often
devolves into two different types of exhibitions—the local or traditional and the global.
In European and American museums works in time-honored formats or techniques,
such as ceramics and woodblock prints, are generally the domain of curators of Japaneseart; those which have been produced for international galleries are often the domain ofcurators of contemporary art and photography. This type of bifurcated responsibility
risks Orientalizing departments of Japanese art whereby they represent a pre-modern,romantic view of Japan reminiscent of what we have seen in the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. At the same time the presentation of works in the international
contemporary mode is often undertaken by curators with little knowledge of Japanese
art or ability to read Japanese. Working with colleagues in other departments and disciplines has been helpful in ensuring a multivalent point of view. The 2015 exhibitionat the MFA In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3-11 centered on powerfulthemes of time and memory and place and dislocation grounding in Japanese social andpolitical issues—the purview of the Japanologists. However, the input of our photography curator ensured that the individual works in the exhibition were seen in the context
of contemporary photographic discourse. Furthermore, presenting exhibitions of all different types ensures that the complexity of Japan is more apparent to museum visitors.
For those of us who are curators of Japanese art working in a global environment,
we are always trying to educate our visitors about Japanese culture. Although none of us
want to engage in presentations about samurai, geisha, cherry blossoms, and Mount Fuji
that essentialize Japan, we do seek characterizations that can inform. The philosopher
and cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah has written often about the deleterious
effects of essentialism: “Identities are associated with bad things, not just intellectual
errors but moral disasters.” However, he has also stated: “We should remember theyalso can be the basis of useful things. . . And national identities, though they involve allkinds of misunderstandings, are also the basis of strands of solidarity that bring countries together to do difficult things.” However, although binary relationships, such as
Orientalism and Occidentalism, are often convenient for polemic discussions, they do
not encompass the complexities of cultural interactions, complexities that we as curators
should constantly be negotiating and renegotiating.
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International Symposium: The Arts of Japan in a Global Context: Beyond Orientalism and Occidentalism