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Smithsonian American Art Museum

Smithsonian Institution 

Scholarly Press 

The East–West Interchanges in American Art symposium 

is part of a series of Terra Symposia on American Art in a 

Global Context, which are supported by a generous grant 

from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

The symposium was convened at and organized by the 

Smithsonian American Art Museum in partnership with 

the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and 

the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program.
East–West Interchanges 

in American Art

A Long and Tumultuous Relationship

Cynthia Mills

Lee Glazer

Amelia A. Goerlitz

Editors

Smithsonian Institution

Scholarly Press

A Smithsonian Contribution to Knowledge

Washington, DC

2012
The East–West Interchanges in American Art symposium was convened at the 

Smithsonian American Art Museum on October 1–2, 2009. It is one of a series of Terra 

Symposia on American Art in a Global Context, which are supported by a generous grant 

from the Terra Foundation for American Art. The Smithsonian American Art Museum 

organized the symposium in partnership with the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. 

Sackler Gallery and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program.

Cover Image: Detail of Black Stone and Red Pebble by Seong Moy, ca. 1970s. Color woodcut 

on paper, 293

⁄4 × 197⁄8 in. 1989.77.9. Smithsonian American Art Museum, a gift of 

Ruth and Jacob Kainen.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

East–West Interchanges in American Art Symposium (2009 : Smithsonian 

American Art Museum)

 East–West interchanges in American art : a long and tumultuous relationship / 

Cynthia Mills, Lee Glazer, and Amelia A. Goerlitz, editors.

 p. cm.

 “A Smithsonian contribution to knowledge.”

 Includes index.

 ISBN 978-1-935623-08-3 (alk. paper)

 1. Art, American--Asian influences--Congresses. 2. Art, Asian--American 

influences--Congresses. 3. United States--Relations--Asia--Congresses. 4. Asia--

Relations--United States--Congresses. I. Mills, Cynthia, 1947- II. Glazer, Lee 

(Lee Stephens) III. Goerlitz, Amelia. IV. Title. 

 N6505.E25 2009

 704.03’95--dc23

 2011026013

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the 

American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials 

Z39.48–1992. 

Contents
v

Introduction 2

Cynthia Mills

Colonialism and Cosmopolitanism 19

Frameworks for Considering Cultural Exchange: 

The Case of India and America 20

Partha Mitter

Destructive Creation: 

The U.S.–Philippine Relationship in American Art 38

J. M. Mancini

Before Zen: The Nothing of American Dada 52

Jacquelynn Baas

Knowledge and Hierarchy 67

Global Knowledge in the Early Republic: 

The East India Marine Society’s “Curiosities” Museum 68

Patricia Johnston

Images of American Racial Stereotypes

in Nineteenth-Century Japan 80

Nicole Fabricand-Person

“A Semi-Chinese Picture”: 

Hubert Vos and the Empress Dowager of China 96

Virginia Anderson
Performing Identity 111

Overtly, Covertly, or Not at All: 

Putting “Japan” in Japanese American Painting 112

Bert Winther-Tamaki

Chinese Painting Comes to America: 

Zhang Shuqi and the Diplomacy of Art 126

Gordon H. Chang

New Negro on the Pacific Rim: 

Sargent Johnson’s Afro-Asian Sculptures 142

John P. Bowles

Encounters and Transference 159

“Gold Mine in Southeast Asia”: Russel Wright, 

Vietnamese Handicraft, and Transnational Consumption 160

Jennifer Way

ROCI East: Rauschenberg’s Encounters in China 176

Hiroko Ikegami

Artistic Tropes: Some Cases of Mutual Chinese–American Influence 190

Ding Ning

Cultural Translation and Creative Misunderstanding 

in the Art of Wenda Gu 204

David Cateforis

Curating Asia / America 215

Stories of the Beautiful: Narratives of East–West Interchange

at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery 216

Lee Glazer

From La Farge to Paik: 

Research Resources at the Smithsonian American Art Museum 232

Amelia A. Goerlitz

Reflections on The Third Mind 248

Alexandra Munroe

Teaching American Art in East Asia 260

Eunyoung Cho

About the Authors 272

Index 276

Introduction

Cynthia Mills
3

In his book The Asian American Century, historian Warren Cohen describes 

how the world has witnessed in recent decades not only the Americanization 

of Asian cultures but also the Asianization of Americans’ daily lives—from 

food to film, and from music to cars and medicine. Moreover, Asian Americans are a rapidly growing demographic group; population analysts predict 

that at least one in 10 U.S. residents will be of Asian heritage by the middle 

of the twenty-first century.1 

These new realities continue and complicate the long-interwoven economic and political relationships of the United States and Asian nations. 

They also carry implications for scholars interested in the history of American art, which has in the past focused on such questions as what qualities of 

U.S. art are distinctly “American” and what lines of influence can be traced 

to European forebears across the Atlantic Ocean. Today scholars of the visual arts are constructing an expanded field, one in which they see “American 

art” as an amalgam of many influences and currents, and consider the plural 

nature of an America made up of more diverse populations. In crossing 

both national and disciplinary boundaries to achieve their goals, they are 

contributing to an international turn in American art scholarship. While 

scholars continue to raise many questions about U.S. artists’ interchanges 

with Europe—the subject of most of the work done to date on transnational exchange—they also, partly in response to our real-world concerns, 

are expressing a greater, more multifarious interest in our growing connections with Asia. This was the subject of the Smithsonian’s 2009 conference 

A Long and Tumultuous Relationship: East–West Interchanges in American 

Art, which was organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 
4 East–West Interchanges in American Art

partnership with the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery as well 

as the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program, with the generous support of 

the Terra Foundation for American Art. This book of proceedings, co-edited with 

Lee Glazer and Amelia A. Goerlitz, brings together papers from the symposium 

that offer new avenues for research on Asian–U.S. artistic exchange.

The contributors to this volume—art historians, curators, and historians from 

Britain, China, Ireland, Japan, and Korea as well as the United States—provide an 

array of perspectives. Each essay explores some aspect of the many ways in which 

American and Asian artists have interacted from the eighteenth century to the present day and considers some of the specific locations where these interchanges took 

place. A key point of the conference and of this volume is to demonstrate through 

the presentation of provocative and original research that artistic ideas did not flow 

primarily in one direction (from Asia to the United States—or as Beijing scholar 

Ding Ning notes, from the country with the longer history to the newer culture), 

but rather that they circulated through a variety of dynamic international relationships—sometimes personal, sometimes commercial or governmental, philosophical 

or pedagogical. In addition, the essays included here discuss an expanded geography 

of contact zones (including, for example, not only the Pacific Northwest, China, 

and Japan, but also India, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Salem, Massachusetts) 

in an attempt to enrich and complicate our understandings of these ever-shifting 

global relationships. They engage a wide range of media, including postcards, magazines, handicrafts, and buildings as well as “high art” forms. Cross-racial themes 

emerge at home and abroad, and strategies used by artists and viewers to envision 

and construct identities, both of self and other, are discussed.

The results of the symposium as laid out in this book are exciting and eclectic, 

with participants not offering any one coherent narrative but struggling with the 

vastness and diversity of the many Easts that exist and of America itself. Some of 

the work presented is in a preliminary stage and will be developed further over time. 

The organizers did not in general select papers that give priority to the immigrant 

experience, another broad area where considerable research is under way today, but 

sought instead a range of approaches to transnational interchange in a variety of 

places, with the hope of provoking a productive dialogue for the future.2 Some of 

these come together visually in Theodore Wores’s compelling 1881 painting The 

Chinese Fishmonger (Figure 1), which was chosen to grace the cover of the conference 

program and website. Here an American-born artist who had just completed years 

of training in Munich found a window on multiple global currents in San Francisco’s busy Chinatown, where he painted with careful dignity a fishmonger engaged 

in a picturesque act of daily commerce—an Asian with whom he had made actual 
Introduction 5

contact. Wores focused much of his effort on a still life of the fish of many colors 

that the man was selling, their glistening forms adding to a sense of the exoticism, 

richness, profitability, and riskiness of the Pacific Ocean passage. At the same time 

the unreadable Chinese characters in the picture make clear the utter foreignness, 

the cultural and linguistic gulf, that existed even for someone as earnest in his project and knowledgeable about San Francisco’s Chinatown since childhood as Wores, 

who later traveled to Japan to seek further subjects directly on Asian soil.

While eclecticism and a diversity of ideas and methodologies as well as images 

reigned at the Smithsonian conference (Figure 2), some linking themes did emerge 

in the talks and discussions that may help set the stage for the essays presented in 

this book, and I summarize these here.

Why now? Gordon H. Chang, a historian at Stanford University, challenged 

colleagues to answer the question of why so many threads have come together to 

highlight interest in Asian and American artistic interchange now, at the end of the 

first decade of the twenty-first century, when less interest was evinced by scholars 

even a few years earlier. A number of books, exhibitions, and conferences demonstrate that shift.3

 Respondents described the intensification of interest as being one 

part of a broader effort to reconceive American history in a globalized age, where 

since the 1990s the Internet and other forms of technology allow an ease and 

1. Theodore Wores, The Chinese Fishmonger, 1881. Oil on canvas, 34 3⁄4 × 46 1⁄8 in. Smithsonian American Art 

Museum, Washington, DC, Gift of Drs. Ben and A. Jess Shenson.
6 East–West Interchanges in American Art

instantaneity of communication and a new mobility, and commercial ventures and 

nations’ economies around the world are more tightly intertwined. The contemporary art world, too, is more interrelated. Today it is made up of global fairs with the 

artist as a truly international, nomadic figure who moves easily from Cologne to 

Venice to Beijing and Shanghai and has studios in multiple places.

In general, Asia seems closer and larger, and at the same time more complex and 

varied than many Americans have understood. Events there more frequently and 

directly touch Americans’ lives. It was not by chance that the first foreign leader to 

visit President Obama’s White House in 2009 was Taro Aso, the prime minister 

of Japan, or that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s first official trip was to China 

and other Asian nations, not Europe. The economic ascension of China has made 

its policies about environmental protection, individual rights, and trade regular 

front-page headline content for U.S. newspapers.4

While nineteenth-century Americans could primarily relate to their European 

ancestors, the demography of the nation and “what looks like America” has shifted 

dramatically to include people from many more geographic points of origin. People 

of Asian heritage now make up more than four percent of the U.S. population, and 

2000 census figures indicate a pattern of rapid future growth in this rate that will 

contribute to changing the very definition of what it is to be an American.5 Today 

an increasing number of professors and influence-makers are Americans of Asian 

descent whose personal heritage may inspire added interest in questions of historic 

interchange.

Interest in Asian American cultural encounters is not new. Asian imports in terms 

of merchandise, artistic styles, and ideas have always been one aspect of our study 

of American art, from the colonists’ use of chinaware from the East to the public 

passion for things Japanese in the late nineteenth century, Orientalist paintings of 

the Gilded Age, and the attraction to ideas derived from Zen Buddhism for twentieth-century artists. Much of the historical interest has been in ceramics, textiles, 

and other “decorative” arts from China and Japan (Figure 3) as well as works on 

paper, and late-nineteenth-century Japonisme influenced by these objects and prints 

2. Panelists at East–West Interchanges in American Art symposium, on stage at the Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium, 

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, 2 October 2009.
Introduction 7

has been an especially large area of study. Curator Alexandra Munroe, who organized a large 2009 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum entitled The 

Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, pointed out that scholars’ attention in the past tended, however, to be focused on a limited number of incidents 

of interchange of occasional relevance to American art, and on certain artists—such 

as James McNeill Whistler, Isamu Noguchi, or Franz Kline. “The loosening of 

our bonds of inheritance from Europe has been a cumulative process of liberation 

and analysis,” Munroe noted. The taste of U.S. audiences, collectors, and artists 

for Asian art or Asian-influenced art has risen or ebbed at times amid changing 

national political and military relations, from the opening of Japan by Commodore 

Perry in the 1850s to the American colonization of the Philippine islands in 1898, 

to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Vietnam War, but it has never 

disappeared. Thus some of today’s cultural interest is a matter of degree, evincing 

a new intensity of attention and a widening of that regard. Some of what is new is 

expressed in the kind of terminology we use.

The nature of scholarly interests has shifted. Travel, for example, has long been an 

interest of scholars of American landscape painting, an area of study that was at the 

heart of the field in the 1970s and ’80s. Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth 

centuries made many risky journeys across the Atlantic and traversed regions of their 

own country by horse, stagecoach, and eventually railroad, and in the twentieth century 

they began venturing into outer space. But the frequency, ease, reach, and sometimes the 

function of travel today are unlike anything in the past. Thus scholarly conferences center on such terms as “transnational” or “transcultural,” “unboundedness,” “circumnavigation” and the “circulation of objects” via cargo routes, “decentering,” “center versus 

periphery,” “cultural transfer” or “cultural translation and transmission,” “hybridity,” 

and “cosmopolitanism”—all recognizing the contemporary concerns of a more mobile, 

multidirectional world (often a world of commerce) and blurring the former scholarly 

emphasis on nationhood in favor of a more multicultural, transnational, and dynamic 

history. Anthony W. Lee, a moderator at our symposium, summed up some of today’s 

views and interests in commenting that we now understand that there are many “Easts” 

and “Wests,” and that nation-states come and go, with regions at times independent and 

at other times not, subject to both Eastern and Western imperialisms. These regions 

produce immigrants and migrants at different times and rates in a Pacific Rim diasporic 

world in which they are connected to each other by “different forms of desire—all of 

which demand different modes of attention and interpretation and respect to historical 

conditions of contact,” Lee added.6

Traffic in goods across the seas has been discussed in studies of American colonial art and architecture for many decades, but until recently tended to be considered 
8 East–West Interchanges in American Art

primarily in terms of British influence or resistances 

to that influence. Most early studies of American art 

centered on the East Coast 

and on the art of four cities: 

New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston, 

which looked east across 

the Atlantic. For many reasons, including the shift of 

the U.S. population to the 

West and Southwest, there 

is increasing national interest in art of California and 

the Pacific Rim, with its 

larger Asian population and 

interest in commerce across 

the “other” ocean.

Another shift in interest that is inspiring fresh 

scholarship is in the arena 

of medium. Easel painting 

has long been at the heart 

of the academic study of historical American art, from colonial portraiture to 

landscape painting to modernist and abstract productions, with sculpture another line of consideration, especially after the rise of Minimalism. Asian artworks, 

though attractive and interesting, were sometimes seen as lesser in terms of content because they were associated with decorative or graphic arts. As a look at the 

images reproduced in this book makes clear, our authors needed to consider formats such as handicrafts, magazine illustrations, postcards, maps, and architecture to make many essential connections about U.S.–Asian artistic interchanges. 

These forms are part of our contemporary visual life, rapidly being incorporated 

into the study of American art as the old “canon” of high art is being expanded 

or dismantled.

Scholars familiar with related disciplines such as literary theory, anthropology, 

linguistics, and gender studies also are not interested in seeking single overriding 

narratives or patterns to reveal characteristics about American art or Asian art. They 

3. Ruth Payne Burgess, Green Chinese Jar, 1924. Oil on canvas, 241⁄8 × 

161

⁄8 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, Gift of John Gellatly.
Introduction 9

are instead searching for ways to reveal nuances and tangled networks of interests 

and interaction. They seek, though not always successfully, to set aside national 

or ethnic stereotypes and assumptions of cultural superiority, and are looking for 

ways to understand the complexity of exchange—of give and take, of the circulation 

and mutation of goods, ideas, cultural forms, and identity formations—and of the 

relationship between these and imperialism and power.

Strategies. When American scholars looked eastward in the past, they often 

considered Asian influence on art of the United States as a unidirectional and 

limited development, suggesting that Asian culture was monolithic and unchanging while characterizing American artists as dynamic and original in their ability 

to absorb and meld the best of diverse global outlooks. In fact, American artists 

went to Asia for a variety of reasons, but usually they were seeking something—

be it profit, power, exoticism, ideas, or ways to resist European artistic traditions 

with alternative approaches. And, perhaps unbeknownst to them, they were also 

bringing something new home and not understanding the power and shape of how 

it would be received. Bert Winther-Tamaki, in writing about encounters between 

nation states has thus referred to the “contentious interdependency” born out of a 

long and tumultuous relationship between East and West.7

 Organizers adopted his 

phrase as part of the conference title and used it to suggest a less simple, less dual 

or oppositional relationship—one in which changes in power relations and social 

relations occurred over a long period of time, with many players, and without permanent winners or losers.

Contributors to these proceedings, in seeking ways to avoid privileging one 

group’s capacities or perspectives, follow a general cross-disciplinary shift in recent 

decades of talking about “encounters” between peoples rather than “discoveries” 

by one nation’s people of another’s world, perceived as less highly “civilized,” as 

Nicole Fabricand-Person discusses in her essay here. A well-known museum exhibition that attempted to take these notions into account was Circa 1492, organized at 

the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1991–92 on the anniversary of the 

sailing of the Nina, Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Instead of celebrating the heroism of 

one individual, Christopher Columbus, for his “discovery” of America, that show, 

for example, featured hundreds of artworks, maps and scientific instruments, and 

decorative objects from five continents in a survey of the world’s visual culture 

around 1492, including a section titled Toward Cathay featuring works from Japan, 

Korea, China, and India. Textbooks that once consisted of a series of accounts of 

heroic individual artists or other achievers also have moved away from the “great 

man” model to a chapter structure of geographic locations and time periods or a 

thematic organization.8
10 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Many of the authors in this collection similarly adopt the notion of a “contact 

zone”—a site where artists or ideas meet in one moment in time, or episodically—

to structure their investigations and to avoid privileging unduly the Western perspective. Partha Mitter discusses this idea in his opening essay, which proposes 

some conceptual frameworks and useful terms for considering exchange and its 

consequences. For Mitter, as for many of our contributors, visual and material cultures are not merely byproducts of encounters, but have helped to shape the kinds 

of interaction that can occur in contact zones, both physical and virtual. Indeed, in 

an expansive view of the term outlined by moderator Anthony W. Lee at the conference, a spectrum of contact zones might be considered: ranging from locales where 

actual meetings took place to texts or other cultural artifacts that mediated crosscultural interchange (as in the essays appearing here by Mitter, Jacquelynn Baas, 

and Munroe) and even deeply personal interchanges that occurred in Asia (such 

as the encounters with artists described by Ding Ning and by Hiroko Ikegami). 

In his brief examination of cultural connections and borrowings between the U.S. 

and India, Mitter deploys the notion of virtual contact zones to describe a dialogical relationship that has operated largely outside of, or beyond, the discourse of 

Western imperial ambition. He seeks to demonstrate that power relations are one 

part of the discussion of interchange, but not the only element. Even within a discourse of mutuality, however, historically real imbalances of power remain in many 

instances. As historian J. M. Mancini reminds us, contact zones can also be sites of 

“destructive creation.” This is especially true when, as in her essay on aspects of the 

U.S. presence in the Philippines, visual transformations—from holiday rituals to 

schoolchildren’s production of embroidery—are part and parcel of a colonialist political agenda. In other instances, a contact zone might be more purely intellectual, 

based on the adaptation of an idea. This is the situation described in Baas’s account 

of how Taoism may have enabled American Dadaists to subvert existing aesthetic 

and philosophical hierarchies.

One of the most fundamental aspects of Asian American contact that surfaced 

in our conference is the way in which new knowledge of foreign cultures can reshape 

how we see ourselves in relation to other peoples, in a hierarchy reinforced by visual 

imagery and collections of artifacts. Interest in the circulation of objects in commerce and in the transformative experience of ocean-crossing has encouraged the 

study of eighteenth-century American art in a global context, as Patricia Johnston’s 

essay shows. Johnston discusses how Salem, Massachusetts, ship captains brought 

home items such as ostrich eggs and miniature pagodas from the Orient and proudly displayed them in a museum to showcase knowledge of exotic cultures and the 

captains’ own expanded worldview. Virginia Anderson explains how a cosmopolitan 
Introduction 11

artist in the early twentieth century headed to China to paint the empress dowager and brought back to Boston a portrait that is a hybrid of visual traditions, a 

product of his own crossings of national borders and cultures. Fabricand-Person 

describes how derogatory images of Native Americans and blacks reached a Japan 

newly opened to the West, affecting not only Japanese conceptions of these American “others,” but also the ways in which Japanese people conceptualized themselves 

anthropologically vis-à-vis peoples of the West. 

In the twentieth century, cosmopolitanism seems to have encouraged a refashioning of identity, often by deliberately invoking or repressing visual signifiers associated 

with aspects of ethnicity. In his essay here, Winther-Tamaki analyzes American art 

audiences’ search for qualities of “Asian-ness” in works by four Asian American artists, and how the creation and reception of their artworks was bound up with familial 

and generational demands. Gordon Chang discusses how a Chinese artist (his father) 

came to America in the 1940s and through live demonstrations and even films educated the U.S. public about Chinese art—so that his performances across the country 

became mobile contact zones between cultures. John P. Bowles of the University of 

North Carolina discusses a Bay-area African American artist’s adoption of a multicultural identity and the artist’s related interest in Asian themes.

A number of the papers, including the discussion of craft production in South 

Vietnam by Jennifer Way and the consideration of contemporary art by Wenda Gu 

offered by scholar David Cateforis, consider the transmission of influences and 

ideas and how they can circle back over time in what Way calls a “feedback loop 

of production and consumption.” In the transference of designs for craft objects 

made by Vietnamese refugees as well as the words Wenda Gu uses in his art, meanings don’t stand still and influences go in multiple directions no matter what the 

intention. Hiroko Ikegami’s look at Robert Rauschenberg’s ROCI China project 

also shows how misunderstandings or miscommunications can occur when there is 

a “cultural time lag” in their artistic development. Ding Ning illustrates the often 

surprising transmission of styles, such as the impact of American painter Andrew 

Wyeth’s work on a group of Chinese painters after the Cultural Revolution.

An expanded scholarly field has altered approaches to teaching and museum exhibitions as well, underscored here in Korean scholar Eunyoung Cho’s description of her 

pedagogical approach and Munroe’s account of The Third Mind. Essays by co-editors 

Lee Glazer and Amelia A. Goerlitz offer information on the collections and array of 

resources at the Smithsonian for the burgeoning study of East–West interchanges.

There are still many barriers to East–West scholarship. While today’s scholars 

talk of seeking multiple perspectives in discussions of cross-border dialogues, 

they acknowledge that it does not seem possible to equally access the views of 
12 East–West Interchanges in American Art

all historical audiences 

for these exchanges, especially in studies of reception. Language barriers, 

cultural differences, lack 

of expertise or of access 

to archives stand in the 

way of any genuine, truly 

equal exchange. 

For most scholars 

of American art, Asia has 

always appeared to be a 

more alien place than “Old 

Europe,” and U.S. interest 

in Asian art has been inevitably selective. From my 

own limited experience, 

crossing into Asia can 

present the novice American traveler with a new 

status perhaps not fully 

comprehended before arrival—abrupt classification as a “Westerner.” This sense of 

personal otherness was both prized and denigrated by Gilded Age visitors, who often 

simplified their experiences and converted their observations into something more 

comfortable and familiar. In late-nineteenth-century Japan, American artist John La 

Farge studied a painting by the Zen priest Mu Ch’i of a bodhisattva, or intermediary 

Buddhist deity, and in his mind and description converted the figure into an Asian 

parallel to the “Holy Virgin” in an attempt to understand it and, in his view, to 

honor it.9

 Isabella Stewart Gardner, touring the Orient in search of the picturesque, 

led an “Anglo-Oriental” life of ease on her trip in 1883. “A small Cambodian fans me 

as I write—naked to the waist,” she wrote from Indochina; “our life is a very lazy, deliciously lazy one,” she added from Bombay (Mumbai), describing visits to temples, 

“tiffins” (meals), and siestas as well as other strange and picturesque sights but failing to mention the violence of poverty she surely also had witnessed. In Yokohama, 

she wrote a friend, “We are leading a perfect holiday life . . . [W]e have drunk gallons 

of canary colored tea out of their dear little cups and have eaten pounds of sweets, as 

we three have sprawled about on the soft, clean mats, in the funny little shops, looking 

at curios. If the Japanese were only handsomer they would be perfect.”10 Gardner filled 

4. Page from Isabella Stewart Gardner travel album showing 

surf boats in Madras, India. From Alan Chong and Noriko Murai, with 

Christine Guth, Journeys East: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Asia (Boston: Isabella 

Stewart Gardner Museum, 2009), 319.
Introduction 13

albums with photographs acquired on her excursions of selective scenes that matched 

her preconceived interests (Figure 4). As Eunyoung Cho describes it, something a 

bit similar occurs for East Asian students of American art, as their interests in things 

American are also piqued and circumscribed by certain cultural tendencies and expectations based on prior experience. 

 How can Americanist scholars be less “Western-centric”? Sarah Burns of Indiana 

University commented during a discussion at the conference that, despite real efforts, 

Western scholars still labor under their own “habits of cultural imperialism,” noting 

that even the papers at the East–West conference continued to demonstrate the “uneven rate of cultural exchange” and perceived authority. She said one way for scholars 

to begin to bypass their own ingrained perceptions might be to try to “defamiliarize 

our own culture, to try to become anthropologists of ourselves, to take a more critical 

and distant view.” Winther-Tamaki agreed that Americanist scholars “trying to give 

voice to the other” need to ask “whether or not there is a balance; or if we’re shy of 

that balance and haven’t represented it properly or satisfactorily, how did we fail to 

attain it?” Patricia Johnston suggested that collaborative work in teams of specialists, 

including those more expert in Asian art, may be most effective. Otherwise individual 

scholars cannot be expected to break barriers of language and expertise, and cross the 

gulf in cultural perceptions to better understand “how these [visual] forms change 

as they go between.” International teaching exchanges were also suggested to allow 

faculty members to learn about the culture of a host country.

Can images, the special precinct of this study, transcend barriers such as geographic, linguistic, and cultural boundaries because of their special visual, nonlinguistic attributes? That was one area of exploration of this symposium and of 

these collected essays. One thing we have been learning, however, is that the way in 

which images are received in another culture is often different than the understanding or intention of the transmitting artist. Sometimes the transmission of an image 

is not a deliberate gift, but happens in modes such as magazine circulation, again 

with unexpected results.

 Language remains a huge barrier and, because of the many languages that are 

spoken in Asia, translation is not an easy solution. In addition, Professor Ding noted 

that there does not seem to have been to date as much demand for translations of 

books about American art history in China, for example, as for volumes about American popular culture or about European art and artists (which are sometimes made 

available via translation grants from European governments, such as France).

The utility and impact of descriptive terminology too must be reconsidered. 

The very term “East–West,” adopted for this conference and book, has often been 

critiqued. While it is frequently used (and retained here) as a shortform means 
14 East–West Interchanges in American Art

to communicate a conversation 

or exchange between Asian and 

European/American peoples, its 

terms suggest monocultures. And 

its hyphenated form allows the 

implicit suggestion that there is 

a mere oppositional dichotomy, 

that things can be reduced to a 

simple binary—something considered problematic in today’s 

scholarly discussions—and that 

power relations or exchange occur 

on an equal and symmetrical basis. In fact, the art work discussed 

here and the broader intellectual 

framework of the discussion do 

ultimately question the easy rubrics of “East” and “West,” Asia 

and the United States without 

dismantling them.

Conclusion

Any conference, or book, is constrained by logistical limitations; one can only 

have so many speakers or hours, or essays, and so ours, like others, had many “blind 

spots” or absences. As Winther-Tamaki noted at the conference, “There was [always] 

inevitably a greater market [in the West] for some kinds of Asian art and ideas than 

others.” In concluding remarks, he spoke of an avoidance in most of these papers of 

discussions of “violence,” for example, between nations and peoples. There was also 

an absence of discussions of Orientalism and gender, one of the most established 

areas of past scholarship but one that may need to be reassessed with twenty-firstcentury models. While speakers talked about the “many Asias,” most papers still 

attended primarily to East Asia. Clearly this symposium just skimmed the surface. 

Much work needs to be done on specific artists who immigrated to the United 

States, conferees agreed, and on the experiences of Americans who lived, worked, or 

traveled in Asia. Chang particularly called for a “deeper investigation of individual 

artists, styles, and schools, both here and in Asia” as well as discussions of the roles 

of museums, art history departments, galleries, and dealers, in furthering artistic 

exchange, and the significance of artistic interaction in international relations. 

5. Installation view of The Third Mind, Solomon R. 

Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo by David Heald, 

courtesy The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
Introduction 15

What’s next? What alternatives are there to an older model of seeing Asia as 

something merely superficial, not integral, to America’s interests—as a site and culture of only episodic relevance to the development of American art? The Guggenheim exhibition The Third Mind (Figure 5) demonstrated the vastness and weight 

of Asia’s intellectual and philosophical influence over a long arc of American art, 

offering an alternative model to the more usual story of European influence. In 

recent books and at our conference, we have learned that there are Easts and Wests 

so diverse and unmanageable in scope that we could often only begin to explore a 

few aspects by looking at specific moments frozen in time, at some specific places, 

events, and themes, and hope to investigate some of these further through increased 

collaborative efforts over time. 

To some extent, these papers confirm the power of images to transcend boundaries as well as artistic intentions, and affirm that art historians, curators, and 

historians working with visual materials have something distinctive to offer in the 

study of international cultural exchanges. As we begin the twenty-first century, the 

United States and its culture can no longer “be considered products exclusively of 

Western civilization,” Warren Cohen concluded in his book The Asian American Century, citing the impact of increasing contacts with Asia.11 Despite the constraints of 

time, space, and language, scholarship about the history of art should strive in the 

ideal for the wealth and complexity of real history and engagement with real people 

and events. The papers compiled here, though eclectic, begin to give us some ways 

of complicating the issues and looking at our changing world through a wide spectrum of colors and through many shades of gray.

Acknowledgments

The organizers thank the Terra Foundation for American Art for its generosity 

in funding this conference, which is the second in a series of five Terra Symposia on 

American Art in a Global Context, and for supporting this publication. The Foundation’s work has enabled scholarly exchange across national borders in the form not 

only of symposia but also exhibitions, fellowships, and publications. Elizabeth Broun, 

director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, introduced the conference and gave 

consistent and generous support to its organization. Franklin Odo, former director of 

the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American program, advised and aided, and opened the 

second day’s proceedings. Joann Moser, senior curator of graphic arts at the American 

Art Museum, also helped shape the conference as part of initial discussions. Jacquelynn Baas, Gordon H. Chang, Anthony W. Lee, and Bert Winther-Tamaki served on 

an advisory panel. In addition, the conference included talks and related tours by Jennifer Sorkin, then a doctoral candidate at Yale University; David Hogge and Rachael 
16 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Woody at the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives; Alice 

Stewart in Washington’s Chinatown; and John Hanhardt, senior curator for media 

arts at the American Art Museum, on the art of Korean-born artist Nam June Paik. 

Artist William T. Wiley participated, leading a gallery tour of a retrospective exhibition of his work at the American Art Museum, during which he and Moser talked 

about his enduring interest in Zen Buddhism. Ginger Strader and Deborah Stultz 

of the Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press helped us immeasurably through the 

process of preparing our manuscript. Interns Mary McMahon and Phoebe Hillemann 

ably performed fact-checking and proofreading of manuscripts at an initial stage, and 

Elizabeth Shook assisted with proofreading the index.

Notes

1. Warren I. Cohen, The Asian American Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 

based on a series of Reischauer lectures delivered at Harvard University in 2000.

2. On Asian American art, see such recent examples as Gordon H. Chang, Mark Dean Johnson, 

and Paul J. Karlstrom, eds., Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970 (Stanford, CA: Stanford 

University Press, 2008), and for contemporary art Daniel Cornell and Mark Dean Johnson, Asian/

American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900–1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 

Collaborative projects at Stanford University and at New York University and the University of 

Connecticut have worked to recover the achievements of Asian American artists. According to 

Chang (xxii, note 1), the term “Asian American” was coined in 1968 at the start of academia’s 

burgeoning interest in ethnic studies.

3. See, for example, Alexandra Munroe, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–

1989, the catalogue of the 2009 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, 

and a response, Seth McCormick et al., “Exhibition as Proposition: Responding Critically to The Third 

Mind,” Art Journal (Fall 2009): 31–49. The published proceedings of a symposium entitled Inventing 

Asia, American Perceptions and Influences around 1900, organized by Noriko Murai and Alan Chong 

at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, are forthcoming. U.S. and Asian museums 

have formed partnerships, as in the case of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and its sister museum 

in Nagoya, Japan. There is a growing body of literature on some Asian American artists; see, for 

instance, ShiPu Wang, “Japan against Japan: U.S. Propaganda and Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Identity Crisis,” 

in the journal American Art (doi: 10.1086/587915), and a dissertation in progress at the Graduate 

Center, City University of New York, by Midori Yamamura on Yayoi Kusama. For wide-ranging 

examples of recent scholarship, see John Clark, Japanese Exchanges in Art 1850s–1930s: with Britain, 

Continental Europe, and the USA (Sydney: Power Publications, 2007); Christine Guth, Longfellow’s 

Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); Christopher 

Benfey, The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (New 

York: Random House Paperbacks, 2004); and Julia Meech, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan: 

The Architect’s Other Passion (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001).

4. Clinton delivered her first major speech as secretary of state at the Asia Society in New York on 

13 February 2009, where she discussed China policy on the eve of her trip to China and other Asian 

nations. See Mark Landler, “Clinton Seeks Shift on China and Stresses Engagement,” New York Times, 

14 February 2009.

5. “The Asian Population: 2000. Census 2000 Brief,” www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/c2kbr01-16.

pdf. In his The Asian American Century, 4, Warren Cohen predicts, “In a few years there will be more 

Buddhists than Jews in the United States and one in ten Americans will be of Asian ancestry.”

6. Anthony W. Lee’s complete comments as moderator, as well as those of all speakers, can be seen 

on the symposium webcast, www.americanart.si.edu/research/symposia/2009/webcast/.

7. Bert Winther-Tamaki, Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American Artists in the Early 

Postwar Years (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 4.
Introduction 17

8. In Angela Miller et al., American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (Upper Saddle River, 

NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008), xii, a recent textbook, the authors declare their intent to focus 

on the theme of innovation and encounter, which they define as “[e]ncounter not only among 

traditions, but between fine arts and commercial mass media, as well as among alternative versions 

of American identity.”

9. The incident is described by Ernest Fenollosa in his Epochs of Chinese & Japanese Art (New York: 

Frederick Stokes Co., 1921), 249–50.

10. Alan Chong and Noriko Murai, with Christine Guth, Journeys East: Isabella Stewart Gardner and 

Asia (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2009), 246, 371, 123, 122, 186. While the European 

grand tour has been well studied, much more is to be done, especially in English, on Americans’ 

ventures to Asia.

11. Cohen, The Asian American Century, 126.

Colonialism and 

Cosmopolitanism
Frameworks for Considering 

Cultural Exchange

The Case of India and America

Partha Mitter
21

Debates on the interface between East and West and the problematic nature of cultural exchanges have taken on fresh urgency today because of the 

increasing globalization of culture. From film and popular illustration to 

high-art installations and architecture (Figure 1), American and Asian visual productions are increasingly intertwined. Our period has witnessed an 

unprecedented proliferation in transcultural conversation, made possible by 

the late-twentieth-century revolution in communication technology. One of 

the main anxieties in this era of relentless cultural mixing is this question: 

are we in danger of becoming a homogeneous mass and losing the cultural 

diversity that makes humanity so interesting? Just as in the field of bioscience where diversity of species is essential for ecological balance, so too in 

the cultural arena must we preserve our differences, within our borders and 

beyond them.1

Comparable in many ways to the spread of multinational conglomerates, 

the world market in art has reached enormous proportions, as represented by 

monster art auctions and biennales, which now welcome artists from outside 

Europe and America. While the inclusion of artists from regions that were 

previously considered to be peripheries is commendable, there is a disquieting aspect to it. It is predicated on the uniformity of taste and aims of these 

mega-institutions and events that reach all the way from the extreme east to 

the westernmost corner of the globe, say, from Beijing to Dublin. What may 

appear to be inclusive may actually be the hold of the Western modernist 

canon, which tends to undermine local voices and practices, destroying the 

polyphony of expressions. The social Darwinian survival of the fittest in the 

art canon contains its own inherent predicament.2
22 East–West Interchanges in American Art

These recent developments force us to ask: in what ways can we study cultural 

encounters and exchanges of the past, and can this ever be a neutral exercise? In this 

exploratory study I seek to foreground the theoretical underpinnings of cultural 

interfaces and offer pointers to further conceptual explorations of the American 

relationship with Asian cultures, taking as my case study the history of interchange 

between the United States and India. 

The period of “tumultuous relationship” between Europe and Asia falls roughly 

between the late eighteenth century and the present. It lies at the heart of Western 

colonial expansion, followed by decolonization. This is an era that is characterized 

by an unequal power relationship between Europe and the rest of the world, traces of 

whose legacy remain. When considering the East–West transmission of ideas in this 

period, it is tempting to regard the Westernization of non-Western countries as the 

inevitable unfolding of Hegelian logic, persuading one to focus on the flow of ideas 

from Europe to countries like India as the single source of the modern there.

On the other hand, the West’s discovery and use of Asian philosophies and 

artistic forms is deemed valuable primarily because of their perceived minor role in 

contributing to the evolution of “Western modernity.” “Even in times characterized 

by the globalization of culture there still remains an endemic Eurocentrism,” the 

intellectual historian J. J. Clarke has thoughtfully observed, “a persistent reluctance 

to accept that the West could ever have borrowed anything of significance from 

the East, or to see the place of Eastern thought within the Western tradition as 

1. Louis I. Kahn, National Assembly Building, view from the west, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo by 

Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World.
Frameworks for Considering Cultural Exchange 23

much more than a recent manifestation, evanescent and intellectually lightweight, 

at best only a trivial part of a wider reaction against the modern world.”3 Behind 

this reluctance is the power and authority of the European knowledge system that is 

closely bound up with the prevailing geopolitical configuration. To make the transition from historical determinism to a new way of thinking, I admit, is no easy task. 

To pull out of this Western bias in cultural analysis, we need to revise afresh our 

intellectual assumptions with a view to defining the flow of global culture not as a 

linear process but as multiple criss-crossings of ideas that flow in different directions, including historical and contemporary exchanges between America and Asia, 

in which a genuine reciprocity is evident.

The superstructure of modern historical scholarship, including art history, 

rests essentially on Western epistemic foundations, a scholarship that inevitably fell 

prey to the body of representations created through European expansion from the 

eighteenth century. Take art history for instance: it claims Kantian disinterested objectivity in evaluating the finer qualities of works of art irrespective of their cultural 

origins. Yet since the nineteenth century the established tradition of scholarship on 

Asian art has rested on the implied superiority of the Western artistic canon vis-àvis all other traditions. In 1977, my work Much Maligned Monsters questioned such 

optimistic formulation of the universal principles of art. Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s dictum on the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” of Greek art, I argued, 

had a detrimental effect on art-historical discourse, indirectly contributing to the 

distortion of Indian and other non-Western art in colonial art history.4

The collective, and frequently negative, images of non-Western art were shared 

in other spheres of knowledge. Edward Said used the term “Orientalism” to describe the “corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by 

making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, 

settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”5 The analysis of colonial 

discourse as a discipline produced a rich crop of committed scholarship that made 

a lasting impact on the academic scene. The relationship between representation, 

power, and authority studied by post-colonial scholars helped set up the ground 

rules for the new cultural studies. Though by no means the sole approach to the 

subject, the importance of post-structuralist deconstruction in these developments 

cannot be gainsaid.

While one must now acknowledge the racist ideological component of colonial 

representations, I would nonetheless argue that American encounters with India 

amounted to something more than an assortment of collective European myths and 

stereotypes. As I hope to show, encounters between India and the United States 
24 East–West Interchanges in American Art

were a product of reciprocity that marked the passage of ideas in both directions. 

For example, an engaging intellectual tradition in the United States—Transcendentalism—emerged in the nineteenth century owing in part to the American discovery 

of ancient Indian thought—a striking case study of how cultures flow across national boundaries. Even if the relationship between the United States and colonized 

India in the nineteenth century was of necessity an asymmetrical one, we cannot 

dismiss this intellectual discovery on the part of American thinkers simply as a 

manifestation of the colonial discourse of difference. 

I must voice a note of caution, however, in viewing such cultural flows as a form 

of global interconnectedness, because there is the danger of viewing such relationships in anodyne, celebratory terms as a precursor to present-day multiculturalism. 

I am acutely aware that such encounters are uneven, and often take place between 

unequal partners. In addition, just as we have learned that the East is not a monolithic entity, much post-colonial theory has failed to recognize the shifting distinctions that characterize the variety of Western cultures (even in the diverse interior 

regions of the United States) that interact with Asia. Bearing this in mind, I will 

seek to highlight the essentially dialectical nature of cultural border crossings, with 

each culture seeking out those precise elements that resonate with its own preoccupations, in other words, with its own cultural imaginary. 

If we are to produce more inflected readings of global encounters in the colonial 

era, what possible approaches can we adopt? Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of contact 

zones offers us some particularly useful lessons. She defines a contact zone as “as a 

space of colonial encounters, the space in which people geographically and historically 

separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually 

involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.” Pratt 

does not discount the role of power in such transactions. In this she is at one with 

other post-colonial scholars. But what interests me in her approach is that it allows 

for the possibility of a more productive relationship between cultures as a species of 

encounter, exchange, and negotiation. This becomes clear in her next passage: “I aim 

to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so 

easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination . . . 

[and their] copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often 

within radically asymmetrical relations of power.”6

Power naturally has a certain purchase in our study of cross-cultural intellectual exchanges. Yet it does not quite explain the true nature of this cosmopolitan 

imaginary, namely how ideas cross borders and what happens to them when they 

begin their afterlives in other cultures. The second idea I wish to introduce in this 

context is the notion of cosmopolitanism itself, a notion used in multiple ways, 
Frameworks for Considering Cultural Exchange 25

which furnishes us with another related working tool. I introduce cosmopolitanism 

in the full knowledge of the dangers of using this controversial term. The classic 

meaning of the cosmopolitan is someone who is able to transcend his parochial 

locus to become a world citizen. Within the transcultural framework of present 

globalization, the term offers some useful means of understanding modern population movements and cultural intersections. 

The term cosmopolitanism is meant to counter pessimism about the possibility 

of fruitful cultural exchanges amid the morass of power politics. Its most eloquent 

champion is the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who injects a much-needed 

ethical dimension to the globalization debate. Appiah views cosmopolitan values 

as the thread that ties human beings together, rejecting identity politics and the 

“majoritarian” nationalist claims to an exclusivist cultural patrimony. He makes a 

persuasive case for everyone’s right to share the common human heritage, regardless of race, gender, and orientation, placing his faith in the individual’s ability to 

overcome narrow parochialism and aspire for world citizenship.7 While Appiah’s 

Aristotelian universalism offers a welcome corrective to the politics of difference, it 

does not address power and authority that confer visibility and inclusion in the uneven relationship between center and periphery. Craig Calhoun mounts a powerful 

critique of what he terms the extreme and abstract view of cosmopolitanism as an 

autonomous entity. Not only does such cosmopolitanism camouflage privilege, he 

says, it fails to appreciate the importance of solidarity, especially for those who are 

bereft of power. A more limited and political cosmopolitanism that accommodates 

difference and hybridity may make a more effective engine of global change.8

Taking cosmopolitanism as a working hypothesis, I would like to extend its 

scope in the global circulation of information. In this context we may take Mary 

Louise Pratt’s concept of social space a little further and in a somewhat different 

direction. A novel “social space” that opened up in the wake of the worldwide spread 

of print capitalism during the colonial era helped to introduce ideas of the Enlightenment to regions outside Europe. Benedict Anderson has argued in connection 

with the rise of nationalism that print culture created imagined communities whose 

members had no direct contact with one another but shared a social or intellectual 

space.9 In my 2007 book, The Triumph of Modernism, I sought to extend Anderson’s 

concept of the imagined community to the global level. In the era of European 

expansion, the transmission of knowledge between center and periphery took place 

through an imagined community that might be described as a “virtual cosmopolis.” 

The virtual cosmopolitan in the colonies was able to engage with the printed text 

emanating from the center and generate new forms of knowledge. These global 

cultural exchanges were not necessarily dependent upon direct power relations, even 
26 East–West Interchanges in American Art

though one cannot deny the uneven relationship of center and periphery.10 Cosmopolitanism often implies privilege plus freedom of mobility whereas all that the 

virtual cosmopolitan requires is access to printed material. The concept also gives 

due recognition to the coexistence and mutual influence of multiple cultures within 

this informal global network.11

I propose “virtual cosmopolitanism” here to argue that the reception of Western ideas in the peripheries, and in colonized countries in particular, was an active 

process that centered on the agency of the colonized. What struck me most forcefully while working on this paper is that such global exchanges were by no means 

unidirectional. Westernization of nineteenth- and twentieth-century India is too 

well ploughed a field for me to rehearse at any length here. Less systematically explored, however, is the impact of ancient Indian thought on American intellectuals. 

In fact, the dynamics of the circulation of ideas from outside one’s own culture and 

its creative uses were no different among American intellectuals than the Indian intelligentsia. Translations of Asian classics and philosophy, particularly into English 

and French, and their dissemination resulting from advances in print technology, 

gave Western intellectuals an entry point into the thoughts of the complex cultures 

of Asia. Raymond Schwab, who celebrated it as an enriching experience, named it 

the Oriental Renaissance.12

To put it in a nutshell, both Indian and American intellectuals were operating 

in a virtual space that generated a mode of conversation across cultures, leading to 

the production of new ideas. What theoretical underpinning can we deploy to make 

sense of these cultural exchanges that are not prejudged by a dependency syndrome? 

The Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin coins the term “dialogic” to describe a 

continuous dialogue with other works of literature. The process appropriates the 

words of others and transforms them according to one’s creative intentions. This 

intertextual process is dynamic, relational, and engaged in endless redescriptions 

of one’s own world vision. The concept that Bakhtin applies to literary texts could 

be a useful tool for our cross-cultural analysis of visual art. The particular merit 

of the dialogic method is that it allows for the coexistence of different approaches 

in a relativist way; it does not set up an essentialist hierarchy of ideas and values 

as in the case of colonial discourse, for instance.13 This accords well with the form 

of hybrid and multifaceted cosmopolitanism discussed above in the sense that the 

received foreign text, interpreted in the light of one’s own text, sets up a dialogic relationship between the global and the vernacular within a cosmopolitan framework. 

We automatically imagine the paradigmatic cosmopolitan to be a world tourist or 

someone who enjoys cosmopolitan values vicariously as a reader of heterogeneous 

literatures: what they share is an openness to other cultures that they manifest in 
Frameworks for Considering Cultural Exchange 27

their response to plural contexts. Information and communication revolutions enabled intellectuals in the East and the West to discover each other’s cultural products, such as art, philosophy, and literature, giving rise to a new global community 

that was engaged in creating the hybrid multipolar universe of modernity.14 

With these long introductory remarks, whose objective was to open up the 

discussion of cultural border crossings on a global level, let me now apply some 

of these ideas to the mutual reactions of Americans and Indians within the intellectual realm that I have characterized as a virtual cosmopolis. My own work since 

the 1970s has centered on colonial representations, with particular emphasis on the 

complex relationship between the British Raj and its Indian subjects. Over the years 

I have probed the role of British colonial administrator-writers in the construction 

of the discipline of Indian art history, which shaped Western responses to Indian 

art even as it provided the wherewithal for the transformation of Indian art in the 

image of colonial modernity. American and Indian cultural exchanges were in many 

aspects both similar to and different from the Indo-British colonial relationship. 

In support of this contention, I will retrace here some well-trodden grounds such 

as American Transcendentalism and discuss the introduction of the International 

Style in post-independence India. My aim is not to present a detailed survey of 

Indian and American encounters but to propose some possible avenues that merit 

more extensive investigations than are possible in this short essay. 

Of course, today the economic and political relationships between America 

and Asia are growing fast within a new post-colonial world order. In the nineteenth 

century and part of the twentieth, American engagement with India was indirect 

and intermittent, as the geographical and cultural distance between the two countries was considerable. Unsurprisingly, however, during the imperial meridian in the 

nineteenth century, the United States could not be immune to the powerful stereotypes of Indian irrationality created by the authoritative European texts on literature, politics, anthropology, and art. One thus comes across comments by Mark 

Twain and others that owe a great deal to these texts. The Industrial Revolution, 

which brought unprecedented material comforts to westerners, became an index of 

cultural superiority; Europeans and Americans could not help but feel superior to 

the people outside the West, where material comforts were meager and confined to 

a small minority. 

American reactions to India in this period are particularly complex, however, 

and cannot be dismissed simply as an endorsement of Victorian representations of 

Indian society. As a former colony, Americans expressed considerable ambivalence 

toward the British Empire in the nineteenth century. At the same time they were 

actively engaged in creating an identity independent of the European continent. 
28 East–West Interchanges in American Art

As Susan Bean argues, even though Americans shared the British attitude of moral 

and racial superiority, as an emancipated 

colony they saw themselves as different 

from the British in championing liberty 

and equality, occasionally sympathizing 

with the plight of the Indians.15 From the 

late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, certain Boston families maintained 

close trade relations with their Calcutta 

opposite numbers. The traders T. A. Neil 

and Raj Kissen Mitter cultivated a warm 

friendship. They corresponded in English, and Neil stayed as a guest at the 

Calcutta residence of his Bengali partner 

in 1809. The Peabody Essex Museum, in 

Salem, Massachusetts, contains an impressive collection of life-size clay images 

of the Bengali magnates sent as gifts to 

their American trade partners (Figure 2). 

Around the same time, the Philadelphians, 

as a token of appreciation, presented the 

Bengali shipping magnate Ramdulal Dey 

with a portrait of George Washington in the style of Gilbert Stuart, a student of 

Benjamin West who specialized in portraits of the first president of the United States. 

The portrait was exhibited at an early art exhibition held in Calcutta in 1874.16

Americans, I have suggested, were not unaffected by general Victorian representations of Asia and Africa in the nineteenth century. The celebrated explorer 

Henry Morton Stanley, who reputedly went in search of Dr. Livingstone, shared, 

for instance, with the British the prevailing notions of race, hierarchy, and evolution.17 On the other hand, Mark Twain did not profess much sympathy for colonial 

empires and their racial ideology and strongly disagreed with Rudyard Kipling’s 

view of Britain’s civilizing mission in India. Twain’s account of India is sympathetic, 

humorous, and insightful. Even as he admired India’s antiquity, there was a conflict 

in his mind between India’s limitless extravagance and the clarity of Western rationality much in a Hegelian vein: “India has two million gods, and worships them 

all. In religion all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.” He 

further observed that Indians were “the most interesting people in the world—and 

2. Durgaprasad Ghose, attributed to Sri Ram Pal,

 ca. 1837. Clay, straw, pigments, cloth, 46 7

⁄8 in. high. 

Peabody Essex Museum E9937, Salem, MA, possibly 

given by Durgaprasad Ghose. Photo 

© Peabody Essex Museum.
Frameworks for Considering Cultural Exchange 29

the nearest to being incomprehensible. . . . Their character and their history, their 

customs and their religion, confront you with riddles at every turn—riddles which 

are a trifle more perplexing after they are explained than they were before.”18

America’s intense intellectual engagement with India may appear as the revenge 

of the meek and the fallen during the period of European ascendancy. The phenomenon is, however, more complicated, involving various factors, not least the desire 

on the part of American intellectuals to free themselves from the limitations of European positivist thought. Here we may pose once again the question I asked at the 

outset: why does a society or culture become more receptive to ideas from outside, 

and what does it take from another society that is in consonance with its own values 

and cultural imperatives? In studies of Westernization in Asia and Africa, it is now 

common to hold that the acculturation process was not a passive act but a highly 

selective affair. This principle may also enable us to understand the revolutionary 

impact of Eastern philosophy on the West. For this application to work, however, 

we need to view the reception of Indian philosophy among Americans as not totally 

different from the influence of the Enlightenment on nineteenth-century Indians; 

they are two sides to the same coin of reception studies.

The wide intellectual interest in Indian philosophy reflected a powerful paradigm shift in the West that led painters Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian and 

philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Martin Heidegger, for instance, to turn to 

the East and seek an active dialogue with the thinkers of the Asian continent. It is a 

striking fact that if the dark reverse side of colonialism was its racism and ideology 

of difference, its obverse was an active engagement by Europeans with the wealth 

of Eastern, particularly Indian thought. Why was this so? As Paul Carus, scholar 

of religion and friend of the American Transcendentalists, put it, “Mankind does 

not want Buddhism, nor Islam, nor Christianity; mankind wants the truth, and 

truth is best brought out by a impartial comparison.”19 This search for a wider 

spiritual meaning in life intensified in the wake of widespread disillusionment with 

Enlightenment rationality and industrial materialism of the Victorian age, perhaps 

nowhere more intense than in America. The key year was 1893. The charismatic 

Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda won rapturous ovation with his “ecumenical” 

speech addressing his audience as “sisters and brothers of America” at the World’s 

Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.20

Vivekananda’s tumultuous reception was only the culmination of a longer process 

that had begun in the late eighteenth century with European discovery of Sanskrit literature that inspired the “Oriental Renaissance.” The key texts were Charles Wilkins’s 

translation of the Bhagavad Gita, H. T. Colebrooke’s edition of the Rig-Veda, and the 

Bengali savant Rammohun Roy’s translation of the Upanishads. The sublime poetry 
30 East–West Interchanges in American Art

of the Bhagavad Gita continued to inspire as late as 1945. Stunned by the awesome 

power of the atom bomb detonated at Los Alamos, Robert Oppenheimer was moved 

to quote the epiphany of the god Krishna in the Hindu text: “If the radiance of a 

thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of 

the mighty one,” and “I am become death; the destroyer of worlds.”21

To return to Mark Twain, the novelist’s long meditation on India is at one with 

the sentiment of the German Romantics: “India had the start of the whole world in 

the beginning of things. She had the first civilization; she had the first accumulation 

of material wealth; she was populous with deep thinkers and subtle intellects; she had 

mines, and woods, and a fruitful soil. It would seem as if she should have kept the 

lead, and should be to-day not the meek dependent of an alien master, but mistress of 

the world, and delivering law and command to every tribe and nation in it.”22

Transcendentalism, most closely associated in the popular imagination with Ralph 

Waldo Emerson, was one of the most original movements to grow up on the American 

soil. Despite its indebtedness to the venerable history of European thought, it was 

determined to assert its originality. Drawing upon the discoveries of Sanskrit texts 

by Sir William Jones and other Orientalists, the Transcendentalists set in motion 

a remarkable conversation with Indian philosophy, which enabled them to examine 

their own faith more critically, each of the intellectual figures associated with Indian 

thought providing their own interpretations on the subject. One common characteristic of Buddhism, Hinduism, and other ancient Indian religions is their questioning 

of articles of faith—an approach that dovetailed perfectly with the Transcendentalist search for wider spiritual values and a more critical stance toward to mainstream 

Christianity. As early as 1818, Emerson had turned to Hindu thought after his aunt 

introduced him to Rammohun Roy’s editions of the ancient Indian metaphysical 

texts, the Upanishads. This great nineteenth-century intellectual was an inspiration 

to the Spanish liberals who dedicated the 1812 Constitution to him. Emerson’s interest was to flower into what Walt Whitman called New World Metaphysics, which 

liberated the Transcendentalists from Christianity. As R. C. Gordon shows, reunion 

of the soul with Brahman or the Spirit became preferable to the Christian notion 

of salvation. Yet Emerson did initially approach Hinduism in an uncritical frame of 

mind, as suggested by his prize poem at Harvard entitled, “Indian Superstition.”23 

 Henry David Thoreau’s classic text Walden speaks of “the pure Walden water . . . 

mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”24 Thoreau’s interest was more in 

terms of a temperamental affinity with Indian thought, especially its stress on meditation and asceticism. He admired the mystical poem Bhagavad Gita, and he bequeathed 40 volumes of Indian texts to Emerson. Walt Whitman too had amassed 

ancient Indian material throughout his life, which informed the spirit of his poetry 
Frameworks for Considering Cultural Exchange 31

and explained his engagement with Indian 

philosophy. The striking line in “Song of 

Myself” (Canto 51), namely, “I am large, 

I contain multitudes,” directly paraphrases the Gita. In his masterpiece, Leaves of 

Grass, the great poet undertakes his own 

“Passage to India.” His ultimate journey 

on his deathbed sings praises of modern progress while reminding us of the 

importance of ancient wisdom, expressing the hope that technology will help 

bring East and West together. Hence his 

“Passage” becomes more a metaphor for 

a spiritual journey than a literal trip to 

India itself.25 The novelist Herman Melville and the psychologist William James 

belonged to the same intellectual circle. 

May I remind you of Melville’s comparison of Moby Dick with Vishnu’s Matsya 

Incarnation?26 Less sympathetic though 

no less knowledgeable, James’s empiricist 

bent of mind displayed some ambivalence toward Buddhism and Hinduism. 

He nonetheless felt the need to recognize 

other great world systems. On a lower intellectual plane, one may mention Henry 

Olcott, the co-founder with Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky of the Theosophical Society, which drew inspiration from ancient Indian wisdom.27 One may describe 

the response to the Bhagavad Gita and other ancient Indian metaphysical works as 

an informed but critical one that enabled Emerson, Whitman, and Oppenheimer 

to engage with the texts of other cultures in a dialogic way, not simply reproducing the tenets of the Bhagavad Gita, for instance, but generating new thoughts in 

consonance with Western modernity. 

On a popular level, the lure of India left its mark on American consciousness 

in a number of different ways that one is only able to touch upon here. One of the 

offshoots of the growing awareness of ancient Indian texts was the dedication of a 

mesa in the Grand Canyon to the Hindu god Shiva. India’s alien exoticism offered Hollywood visually enthralling material (Figure 3); the studios in their turn exported this 

fascination worldwide, not excluding India. The Hollywood Moguls, whose extravagant 

3. Poster for Gunga Din (RKO Pictures, 1939). 

From Stephen Rebello and Richard Allen, Reel Art: Great 

Posters from the Golden Age of the Silver Screen

(New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 155.
32 East–West Interchanges in American Art

lifestyle was compared to 

that of the Grand Mughals 

of medieval India, created an enduring image 

of the romantic Orient 

with their elaborate sets 

of lush oriental interiors, 

florid temples, lurid customs, and thronging multitudes of humanity. 

Cinema that uses 

Indian locale to evoke a 

frisson of otherness continues to be a staple of 

Hollywood cinema. It exploits an escapist genre that is perennially popular, to judge 

by Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The myth of empire, white 

superiority, and British civilizing mission—all these resonated with Hollywood, as 

a spate of films dealing with the British Raj in India bears witness. The Green Goddess

by the English playwright William Archer was turned into a silent adventure film 

in 1923, to be remade as a talkie in 1930. Typical ingredients of these adventure 

films were the stiff upper lip, gallantry, and rationality of the English gentlemen 

heroes, in contrast to the sadism and vindictiveness of oriental potentates who 

worshipped bloodthirsty deities like the eponymous goddess in the film. Other 

movies romancing the British Empire—the Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Gunga 

Din (1939), and Sundown (1941)—were inspired by Kipling or, in the case of Clive 

of India (1935), by the imperial adventurer Robert Clive, founder of the British 

Empire.28 At the same time, the cinema has the power to instruct and transmit 

knowledge in the form of documentary films. The foremost American industrial 

architect Albert Kahn’s mammoth photographic project on global diversity includes 

the earliest color photographs of the holy city of Benares, and Indianstyle villages 

as a key example of rural civilization (Figure 4). The foremost quality of Kahn’s 

faithful documentation is that he does not fall for cheap exoticism even as he treats 

picturesque subjects, such as Benares or the Hindu yogis.

On the heels of this brief consideration of the American discovery of India in the 

nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I would like to conclude with an examination of the 

slow encroachment of America in Indian consciousness in a period before more complex 

Indian responses were set against the background of Cold War politics on the one hand 

and the global desire to obtain a slice of the American Dream. As Hollywood drew upon 

4. Albert Kahn, Kapurthala, India, 1927. From David Okuefuna, 

The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn: Colour Photographs from a Lost Age

(London: BBC, 2008), 223.
Frameworks for Considering Cultural Exchange 33

the Indian imaginary, the universal language of American films, epitomized by Charlie 

Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford provided the material for collective 

fantasy in India. From the early twentieth century, Americans writers began to feature 

more prominently in Indian thought as well. Mahatma Gandhi’s non-cooperation 

movement clearly acknowledged its debt to Thoreau’s doctrine of civil disobedience. 

In the 1950s, Martin Luther King’s civil disobedience movement returned the compliment by seeking inspiration in the Mahatma.

Following decolonization, relations between India and America entered a new 

chapter as the Third World, especially non-aligned India under its first Prime Minster, Jawaharlal Nehru, began playing a more active role in international politics. Indian music, interpreted for the Western audience by the sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, 

revealed an entirely new world to the Americans, offering fresh creative possibilities 

to Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and other Minimalists. 

With Nehru assuming the mantle of leadership after independence, India embarked on the systematic creation of a modern secular state, symbolized by his 

vision of town planning that drew upon the experience of continental and American avant-garde masters of design and architecture. Nehru’s appreciation of the 

pioneers of modernist design brought to an end the long colonial chapter in Indian 

history dominated by British art and architecture. Charles and Ray Eames, celebrated for their radical industrial designs and contribution to the intelligence and 

communication revolution, were invited in 1958 to advise on the future of small 

industries faced with rapid industrialization. Their report, produced after investigating rural handicrafts and modern design centers throughout the subcontinent, 

led to the establishment of the influential National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. The Eames report is infused with ideas of Indian spirituality. The long quotation from the Bhagavad Gita in its preface makes a gesture that takes us back once 

again to the American discovery of Indian scriptures in the nineteenth century. The 

Eames husband-and-wife team pay a heartfelt compliment to Indian society. In the 

face of change, they write, India enjoys a great advantage: she has a tradition and a 

philosophy familiar with the meaning of creative destruction, which is an advantage 

in restructuring society. The report’s main tenor was to reiterate the values and 

qualities that Indians held important for a good life.29

Perhaps in no other sphere does one detect a more intense and dialogic IndoU.S. relationship than in the evolution of modernist architecture in post-colonial 

India (Figure 5). One witnesses there a complex and symbiotic relationship growing 

up between Indian architects and the American masters of the International Style, 

which may be described as one of mutual creative exchanges. The United States 

was one of the key centers of architectural modernism in the twentieth century, but 
34 East–West Interchanges in American Art

apart from that American 

architecture proved to be 

an especially attractive 

counterweight to British 

colonial buildings in a 

newly independent India. 

The American architects 

and designers also readily 

expressed deep affinities 

with Indian spirituality. 

This was part of a larger 

phenomenon that drew 

intellectually adventurous architects to India because of unlimited possibilities, 

compared by Joseph Allen Stein to the United States of the Jeffersonian era. 

Even though Frank Lloyd Wright was never personally involved in building in 

the subcontinent, and the Swiss-French master Le Corbusier was invited by Nehru 

to design the new capital of the Punjab and Haryana at Chandigarh, the spirit of 

Wright’s architecture permeated post-colonial India. The earliest traces of Louis 

Sullivan, Wright, and the Prairie School are to be found in India long before independence in the buildings of Walter Burley Griffin and Antonin Raymond, both 

of whom had been pupils of Wright. Griffin, who was in India in 1935–37, built 

extensively in the Muslim city of Lucknow and its environs, drawing inspiration 

from Indian architecture. Raymond was briefly in India in 1937 in connection with 

building projects at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry, which was then a 

French colony. It was during that time that Raymond engaged George Nakashima 

to design organic furniture, named by him Golconde design after the medieval 

Indian kingdom. These were indeed pioneering figures who introduced modernist 

design and architecture to India.

Following the departure of the British in 1947, the pace quickened. Gautam 

Sarabhai, a member of a leading industrialist family, introduced many of Wright’s 

ideas in Gujarat. Among post-independence architects, Charles Correa trained at 

MIT, A. P. Kanvinde received his degree at Harvard, and Balkrishna Doshi won a fellowship at the University of Chicago. In that city, Doshi met Louis Kahn, a major 

figure who was sympathetic to eastern spirituality, using the concept of light as a 

metaphysical substance in his building designs. At Doshi’s behest, he spent over 

a decade in Ahmedabad, conducting influential seminars and designing the Indian 

Institute of Management building in the city. His most important work, however, was 

the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan, considered 

5. Joseph Allen Stein, India International Centre, New Delhi, India. 

Photo by Partha Mitter.
Frameworks for Considering Cultural Exchange 35

a masterpiece of International Modernism (Figure 1). Finally, the man who disseminated Wright’s ideas most successfully in India was Joseph Allen Stein, who 

founded the partnership of Stein, Doshi, and Bhalla in order to disseminate organic architecture. Arguably, Stein’s finest achievement was the elegant International 

Centre in New Delhi (Figure 5), set in a Mughal garden, which sensitively blended 

his environmental ideals, spirituality, and ethnocentric regionalism. Stein was both 

perceptive and fortunate in being able to situate the Centre in close proximity to 

the old Mughal Lodi gardens in a playful juxtaposition of the old and the new.

As these important exponents of modernism were emulated by the rising generation of Indian architects, the American architects themselves aimed at combining 

formalism with an informed sympathy for ancient Indian thought. It has been said 

that India profoundly transformed these practitioners of the International Style. 

There is no more eloquent testimony to this than this passage from an interview 

given by Stein: “Why do I continue to live and work in India? I think India offers 

the great possibility of beauty with simplicity. This is a rare and little understood 

thing in the world today; yet one sees it here in so many different ways.”30

There are clearly many more avenues of cultural interchange between India and 

the United States to explore. What I have tried to do here is to raise questions 

about a set of fruitful exchanges between these two nations over the last 200 years 

within the context of some possible conceptual frameworks for studying the West’s 

interaction with Asian cultures. When there is an intellectual engagement with the 

thoughts of other societies, as was the case with India and America, that encounter 

becomes an instrument for scrutinizing one’s own culture more critically. The diverse personalities studied here express the catholicity of minds capable of embracing the new and seeing the interlinks of global culture, as epitomized by Joseph 

Allen Stein’s “expanding vision of interconnected global relations.”31

Notes

1. Intercultural exchange is a fast growing but as yet nebulous area. My thanks to the Smithsonian 

Institution for inviting me to take part in what turned out to be an unusually rewarding symposium. 

Strikingly I have been invited to several recent conferences dealing with the problem of cultural 

transfers or migration of ideas and technologies, as for instance, meetings in Berlin on the global 

Bauhaus, in Heidelberg on Punch magazine as a transcultural phenomenon, and in St. Petersburg in 

Russia on “the global Cézanne effect.” I have also been having fruitful conversations with a group of 

younger scholars, notably Kris Manjapra, who is developing the idea of “crossing borders.” 

2. Partha Mitter, “Interventions: Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the 

Periphery,” Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (December 2008): 531–74.

3. John James Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1997), 5.

4. See Partha Mitter, “The Hottentot Venus and Western Man: Reflections on the Construction of 

Beauty in the West” (London: Routledge, 2000), 40–41, and Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A 

History of European Reactions to Indian Art (1977; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) for a 

discussion of art history and western representations of ancient Indian art.

5. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978), 3.
36 East–West Interchanges in American Art

6. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6, 7. 

doi:10.4324/9780203163672.

7. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism (New York: Norton, 2006), xv.

8. Craig Calhoun, “‘Belonging’ in the Cosmopolitan Imaginary,” Ethnicities (Debate) 3, no. 4 

(New Delhi: Sage, 2003): 531–68, doi:10.1177/1468796803003004005. James Clifford speaks 

of “discrepant cosmopolitanism” to explain globalization from below of the powerless and the 

disadvantaged; see “Mixed Feelings,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. 

Pheang Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998): 362–65. On 

hybridity, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) excerpted in C. 

Harrison and P. Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 1,112.

9. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins of Nationalism (London: 

Verso, 1983).

10. See Partha Mitter, Triumph of Modernism: Indian Artists and the Avant-Garde (London: Reaktion 

Books, 2007). On center and periphery as a political concept rather than a geographical one, see 

Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginsberg, “Centro e periferia,” in Storia dell’ arte italiana, I/1 Materiali 

e problemi. Questioni e metodi, a cura di G. Prevital (Turin: Einaudi, 1979): 285–354.

11. See Sheldon Pollock, Homi Bhabha, Carol Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabharty, 

“Cosmopolitanisms,” Public Culture, 12, no. 3 (2000), 577–90. doi:10.1215/08992363-12-3-577.

12. Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance orientale (Paris: Payot, 1950).

13. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. 

Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) and Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His 

World (London: Routledge, 2002).

14. I have used Calhoun’s ideas of the global community as not inimical to cosmopolitanism. While 

it is true that ethnic conflicts have emanated from narrow communal allegiances, the notion of 

community itself need not be confined to single ethnic allegiances. Calhoun writes that “public 

communication is itself a form of solidarity.” Those who are inspired by Eastern ideas are not antimodern but critical of modernity as in the case of Kandinsky; see Mitter, Triumph of Modernism, 34, 

35, 117–18.

15. Susan Bean, Yankee India: American Commercial and Cultural Encounters with India in the Age of 

Sail 1784–1860 (Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 2001), 22.

16. Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press,1994), 75. The portrait of Washington has since been attributed to William 

Winstanley, who copied a number of Stuart paintings; it is in the collection of Washington and Lee 

University, Lexington, VA; see Bean, Yankee India, 72, no. 30, 75. 

17. Brian V. Street, The Savage in Literature: Representations of ‘Primitive’ Society in English Fiction 

1858–1920 (London: Routledge, 1975); and Victor G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind (London: The 

Cresset Library, 1969), 226.

18. Mark Twain, Following the Equator, and Anti-Imperialist Essays: Mark Twain, preface Shelley Fisher 

Fishkin (New York, 1996), 397, 451–52. On Hegel’s description of Indian religion, see Mitter, Much 

Maligned Monsters, 208–20.

19. Quoted in Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment, 84.

20. M. L. Burke, Swami Vivekananda in the West: New Discoveries, Part 1 (Delhi, 1983) 81.

21. Robert Oppenheimer quotes from the Bhagavad Gita in the television documentary The 

Decision to Drop the Bomb, produced by Fred Freed and broadcast on NBC in 1965; see James A 

Hijiya, “The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 144, 

no. 2 (June 2000): 123.

22. Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 398. On German Romanticism and Indian thought, see 

Schwab, Renaissance orientale.

23. See Partha Mitter, “Rammohun Roy et le nouveau langage du monothéisme,” in L’Impensable 

polythéisme, ed. Francis Schmidt (Montreux: Éditions des archives contemporaines, Gordon & 

Breach Science Publishers, 1988), 258. See Robert C. Gordon, “Emerson’s Earliest Interest in India,” 

www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/i_es/i_es_gordo_emerson.htm.
Frameworks for Considering Cultural Exchange 37

24. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings (New York: Bantam, 1962), 339. 

25. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, eds. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York 

University Press, 1965) 88, 420. The complete version of Leaves of Grass was published in 1881.

26. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, eds. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: Norton, 

1967), 225. Mention of Vishnu occurs in chapter 55, where Melville discusses the description of the 

whale in different religions and cultures.

27. On the apparent correspondence between James’s psychology and Buddhist psychology in 

his proposal for a scientific study of religion, see Miranda Shaw, “William James and Yogacara 

Philosophy: A Comparative Enquiry,” Philosophy East and West 37, no. 3 (July 1987): 223–44, 

doi:10.2307/1398517. On the Theosophists, see Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived, a 

History of the Theosophical Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

28. Jeffrey Richards, “Films and the Empire: Britain in the 1930s,” in Literature and Imperialism, ed. 

Bart Moore-Gilbert (London: Roehampton Institute of Higher Education, 1983), 160–61.

29. Charles Eames and Ray Eames, The Eames Report (Ahmedabad:, National Institute of Design, 

1958).

30. Stephen White, Building in the Garden: the Architecture of Joseph Allen Stein (Oxford University 

Press, New Delhi, 1993), 35.

31. Ibid.
Destructive Creation

The U.S.–Philippine Relationship in American Art

J. M. Mancini
39

Forged in war and framed by empire, the relationship between the United 

States and the Philippines has been as tumultuous as any of America’s encounters with other Asian nations. And yet, as recent analysts have emphasized, one of the most marked aspects of that long-running connection is the 

extent to which it has become hidden from the U.S. historical imagination 

through neglect, willful forgetting, and “miseducation.” The result has been 

the shrouding of the U.S.–Philippine relationship—and its violent foundation in the Philippine-American War—in what the poet and critic Luis H. 

Francia has called a “mantle of invisibility.” “Here is a war that lasted for a 

decade, cost so much more money and lives than the 1898 Spanish-American 

War,” Francia writes, “reduced in scale and intensity to a nonevent.”1

Francia’s critique also carries profound weight for the American arthistorical imagination. To be fair, a small number of scholars have noted 

that the creation of works of art and architecture played a part in the U.S. 

imperial administration of the Philippines. Most recently, David Brody explored how the colonization of the Philippines “permitted the acting out of 

American Orientalist fantasies” that had permeated U.S. visual and material culture in the late nineteenth century. And, as early as 1972 Thomas 

S. Hines noted that “[Daniel] Burnham’s mission to the Philippines as 

an architectural consultant in 1904 and 1905 and his subsequent planning proposals for the cities of Manila and Baguio constituted indeed an 

architectural corollary to the earlier more salient programs of the United 

States for the islands’ political and economic development.” But in American art scholarship at large there has been little exploration of the extent to 

which the turn-of-the-century Americans who forged empire shared the era’s 
40 East–West Interchanges in American Art

particularly intense attraction to art-making as a vehicle and venue for political, 

social, cultural, and economic transformation. This is surprising, for two reasons. 

The first is that architecture was only one of the wide range of aesthetic media in 

which Americans worked in this context, from photographs, picture postcards, and 

illustrated books, to buildings and landscapes. The second is that evidence for this 

ferment is not only to be found in the Philippines; a significant quantity of relevant 

material is also available in the United States, hidden in plain sight in repositories 

including the Smithsonian Institution.2

With this in mind, the first aim of this essay is to remove Hines’s qualification 

that “political and economic” programs pursued by the United States in the Philippines were “more salient” than merely “corollary” art and architectural measures. 

In fact, the U.S. political and economic programs that the historian Glenn May 

has insightfully called an “experiment in self-duplication” nearly always contained 

within them a constitutive element of aesthetic transformation that directly intersected with more familiar practices of “social engineering.” U.S. attempts to create 

and reformulate Philippine civic institutions along American lines entailed not only 

the reconfiguration of abstract principles and relations between people but also the 

physical and aesthetic reconstruction of “the political landscape” in the sense that 

the term is employed by the archaeologist Adam T. Smith—as a built environment 

comprising buildings, monuments, architectural decoration, and other works of 

visual art, which in turn became the physical context for the performance of aesthetically charged civic rituals and the subject of further representation.3

The American reconstruction of the Philippine political landscape was, as this 

suggests, a complex and multifaceted process. On the most basic level, it involved the 

deployment—in the design and construction of U.S.-controlled institutions in the 

Philippines such as schools, hospitals, and prisons—of forms and styles that directly 

referenced the American metropole. This is perhaps most obvious in the case of large 

new neoclassical buildings such as the Manila building that was recently refurbished 

as the National Art Gallery. The structure was designed originally as the city’s public 

library by the American architect Ralph Harrington Doane and built, according to revised plans designed by the Filipino architect Juan Arellano, as the Legislative Building 

in 1926. Beyond “self-duplication,” however, the U.S. employment of neoclassicism 

also referenced the more general process of architectural reiteration that attended the 

imperial building projects of Britain and other European empires—including Spain, 

which in the Philippines employed neoclassicism in both civil and ecclesiastical buildings such as the monumental Taal church in Batangas Province.4

In other instances, American structures referred to regional, vernacular, and 

domestic forms that were adapted to use in the Philippines. This is not to say 
Destructive Creation 41

that such quotidian forms did not also have imperial associations. For instance, an 

American hospital built in the form of a bungalow referred both to U.S. domestic 

architecture (and perhaps especially to the domestic architecture of California, the 

home state of many Americans in the Philippines and the point of embarkation for 

the vast majority of U.S. soldiers and civilians alike) and to colonial Anglo-Indian 

architecture. What is striking in this case of an institution built in a vernacular, 

regional mode is that it was (like grander structures in more imposing styles) also 

understood by some American observers as a “monument” whose success as a work 

of institutional architecture correlated specifically to the success of American geopolitical aims. This is made clear by a typed annotation affixed to a photograph of 

the building found in an album made by the American teachers Maud and Luther 

Parker. It describes the hospital as “entirely free from the usual odors of such institutions” and the “main operating room” as “made of crystal,” and declares, “All of 

this is the great Monument of the American flag in the Philippine Islands.”5

Another quotidian form derived from an Asian original that Americans built 

into the Philippine landscape—and then represented in other media—was the gazebo. As is suggested by the thirteenth-century Southern Song dynasty painting 

collected by Charles Lang Freer, Strolling to a Lakeside Gazebo, gazebos historically were 

associated with elite social rituals. Wealthy Americans constructed them for private 

use in the nineteenth century, as may be seen in Thomas Hill’s painting Irrigating 

at Strawberry Farm (ca. 1865), depicting a California landowner with Chinese laborers before a gazebo and a distant Mission-revival mansion. But generally speaking 

it may be said that in the context of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century 

United States the gazebo acquired quite a different set of associations. Particularly 

when configured as a bandstand, the American gazebo came to be situated precisely 

at the confluence of landscape architecture and civic ritual and thus was perhaps 

quintessentially associated with the performance of Americanness. As such, gazebos 

were built not only on public greens but in institutions with an avowedly assimilationist purpose, such as Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian School.6

In the Philippines, Americans created, preserved, and reiterated gazebo landscapes, both in symbolically important locations such as the large Manila park 

known as the Luneta and within new landscapes, including those specifically associated with American institutions. Both the Luneta and an open-air pavilion there 

preceded U.S. occupation. Nonetheless, from the beginning Americans worked to 

claim the site through use, alteration, and representation. During the PhilippineAmerican War, the U.S. military used the park as an encampment ground for troops 

and for the procession of fallen officers, as well as the grounds for Fourth of July 

rituals and the performance of celebrations for other newly introduced holidays. 
42 East–West Interchanges in American Art

These and other uses were then photographed and sent back to the United States as 

commercial images. U.S. alterations included the extension of the park and creation 

of a “New Luneta,” on a large site reclaimed from the sea, on which a large flagpole 

was raised and two gazebos symmetrically placed on either side of the flagpole. This 

transformed landscape was the subject of American images intended for circulation 

to the United States and/or among Americans in the Philippines. One example, a 

postcard published by the Philippine Curio Agency, cast the gazebo-laden bayside 

stretch of the Luneta as a place where Americans could indulge in nostalgic yearning. As the poem printed below the image lugubriously intoned, “The slow undulating blue waters/Bejeweled with sparkling white foam/Lazily waver in front of my 

vision,—Lazily whisper a message of home!”7

Americans also produced and reproduced gazebo landscapes mirroring the United States in explicitly institutional contexts. One striking example of this is a postcard by the prolific Manila-based American publishers Leon J. Lambert and Milton 

Springer, depicting a white-clad band in and around a gazebo (Figure 1). Nearly every 

detail of this landscape—the waving American flag, the manicured grass, the immaculate pathways, the slatted benches—evokes the United States. In some cases, these 

details evoke the landscape of California, notably the lush, yet controlled plantings 

of palms, the imposing mountains, and the pink-to-blue sky. Indeed, while there is 

no direct evidence that the landscape in the postcard was designed after a particular 

U.S. original, it is striking that the somewhat idiosyncratic palm-thatch roof of the 

gazebo, the Pacific vegetation, and the mountains do have counterparts in a specific 

1. Lambert-Springer Co., Park and Colonist Band, Iwahig Penal Colony, Island of Palawan, Philippines, ca. 1909–20.

National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
Destructive Creation 43

U.S. landscape that was reproduced tens of thousands of times in the same period. 

This was the gazebo’d park on Redlands, California’s Smiley Drive, drawn by Louise 

M. Keeler and printed in Southern California, a guidebook published by the Santa Fe 

railroad that was in its eightieth edition in 1901.8

While Lambert and Springer’s image might be taken at first glance for a picture of 

preparations for a Fourth of July celebration in California, the caption indicates that 

this was not at all what the postcard represented. In fact, the figures in the bandstand 

were colonists in the Iwahig Penal Colony on Palawan Island—a U.S. facility built in 

1904 in the face of overcrowding and rioting in Manila’s Bilibid Prison. As such, the 

image might be taken at second glance as merely an example—admittedly, a somewhat 

bizarre example—of U.S. social engineering through the apparently benevolent use 

of pleasing landscape architecture and uplifting civic ritual. But, as Michael Salman 

argues, the colony did not just hold criminals in need of reform. Rather by 1908 as 

many as a third of Iwahig’s inmates were political prisoners, incarcerated for crimes 

such as sedition, insurrection, or “brigandage.” This latter offense, as Jim Zwick 

argues, was introduced by the Philippine Commission in 1902 precisely to criminalize armed resistance to U.S. rule—just as the United States had earlier defined the 

conflict itself as an “insurrection” rather than a war. In other words, the “Brigandage 

Act” or “Bandolerismo Statute” that brought many Filipinos to Iwahig represented 

the continuation of a deliberate U.S. effort to limit its obligations towards Filipino 

revolutionaries, who would have enjoyed specific rights and privileges under U.S. and 

international law if they had been defined as legitimate combatants and as prisoners 

of war. As such, the image is something of a sorcerer’s mirror, reflecting the U.S. 

promulgation of the “soft power” of social engineering through aesthetic reform, 

while occluding its exercise of harder forms of coercion rooted in war.9

 Lambert and Springer’s Park and Colonist Band, Iwahig Penal Colony, Island of Palawan, 

Philippines thus brings us back to Francia’s assertion that the Philippine-American War 

lurks in the blindest spot of the U.S.–Philippine relationship—and to some of the 

ways in which the American art-historical imagination has been blinded to coercion 

and violence as contexts for aesthetic practice within that relationship. For, if it may 

be argued that American art scholarship generally ignores images, objects, buildings, 

and landscapes produced within the context of the U.S.–Philippine encounter, then 

it may also be argued that even the limited body of scholarship that does address the 

role of American art and architecture in that context tends to bracket this aspect of 

the subject. Hines’s account, for example, focuses entirely on Burnham’s plan and the 

“architecture of quality and of startlingly prophetic import” of William E. Parsons, 

the consulting architect appointed to carry out the plan, essentially skipping over 

the war and its legacies. And, while Brody does interleave an analysis of Burnham and 
44 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Parsons with material from the Spanish-American War—notably in an interesting 

account of how a “naval [and] land parade, fireworks, street decorations, swarms of 

visitors, the construction of the monumental Dewey Arch, and a range of other cultural 

productions” contributed to the “canonization” of Admiral George Dewey in the 

United States—his account is less attentive to the specific ways in which aesthetic, 

military, and political practices intersected in the (deadlier, costlier, larger-scale, and 

more intense) Philippine-American War. Moreover, in their accounts both authors 

emphasize positive aesthetic practices such as creation, reproduction, circulation, and 

the preservation by Burnham and Parsons of “pre-existing Spanish design.”10

While once again acknowledging its debts to these earlier authors, this essay 

proposes, as a second line of argument, that a greater emphasis should be placed 

upon aesthetic practices that had dislocating, disfiguring, or destructive results. 

Such a reorientation, I argue elsewhere, must include an analysis of how the American spoliation and destruction of art and architecture directly intersected with 

military practice during the officially recognized period of conflict between 1899 

and 1902. But it also ought to entail a recognition of the subtler ways in which 

a dynamic interplay between creation and destruction persisted much later—

throughout the decade of simultaneous conflict and reconstruction that followed 

Theodore Roosevelt’s official declaration of the end of the war in 1902, and even 

into the somewhat less tumultuous decades that followed.11

One place to begin such a reorientation is with the Burnham plan itself, and 

Parsons’s work to implement it through the design and construction of certain 

structures. Here the emphasis placed by scholars on the preservation of the Spanish imperial past is appropriate. But so too are contrary aspects, beginning with the 

American reconfiguration of Manila. Since the sixteenth century, the walled city of 

Intramuros had been the center of political, economic, military, and religious authority. It was Manila’s and the Philippines’ central “political landscape,” embodied 

by structures such as the Ayuntamiento, the seat of the city government; the Aduana, or customs house; Fort Santiago; and the churches and houses of the Catholic 

religious orders—and by spaces such as the Plaza Aduana (renamed the Plaza de 

los Martires de la Integridad de la Patria in 1897 to honor loyalist troops in the 

Philippine Revolution). The Burnham plan did “preserve” this landscape’s “picturesque” structures and spaces. It did so, however, by converting the walled city into 

“a recreation park possessing expansive promenades where the people gather during 

open air band concerts” (indeed, “one corner of the bastille has been made over into 

an underground aquarium”) while relocating the new core of buildings, spaces, and 

avenues in extramural districts.12 Thus, while not destroying the individual buildings 

of Intramuros (as would happen on an almost incalculable scale during the Second 
Destructive Creation 45

World War), Burnham’s plan effected a symbolic reduction of the landscape as a 

whole, akin to desacralization or deconsecration.

Individual buildings also embodied the dynamic interplay between creative and 

destructive practices. Hines convincingly presents Parsons’s method as a distillation from “the corpus of Spanish-Philippine building,” analogous and parallel to 

“Irving Gill and his California contemporaries[’] increasingly purified abstractions 

of the earlier Spanish Colonial styles.” In both cases ecclesiastical architecture was 

a primary referent, seen for example in the overlapping employment by Gill, in the 

1913 Women’s Club of La Jolla, and by Parsons, in the 1910 Philippine General 

Hospital, of arcades of round arches, a staple feature of both the California missions and Spanish churches in the Philippines. Such arches can be seen in Adam 

Clark Vroman’s late-nineteenth-century postcard of Mission San Luis Rey de Francia (Figure 2) in California. Indeed, while Parsons himself was not apparently directly influenced by the California missions, other Americans engaged in the reconstruction of Philippine institutions certainly imagined a link between them and the 

Philippine landscape. Maud and Luther Parker (who became industrial inspector in 

the Bureau of Education), for example, affixed 18 postcards of the California missions into their album, along with the many architectural and ethnographic views 

of the Philippines that constituted the bulk of its images.13

Gill’s distillation of architectural elements from California’s picturesquely ruined missions into modernist clubs and laboratories did parallel aesthetic processes 

that took place in the Philippines to some degree. There was a key difference, however. 

In California, by the time of Gill, Vroman, and even the U.S.-Mexican War, the missions 

2. Adam Clark Vroman, No. 3. Mission San Luis Rey de Francia. Founded 1798. General View from S-E.

National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
46 East–West Interchanges in American Art

were already secularized, in poor repair, and anachronistic. When the United States 

went to war with the Philippines, in contrast, the church landscape there was still very 

much in use. Thus it could not just be reimagined by the makers of nostalgic postcards 

or the cool renderers of architectural parts, but had to be wrested from the control of 

the Catholic church and the religious orders through legal wrangling, negotiated or 

coerced occupation, or force. These processes were inscribed upon the buildings themselves and upon American representations of them—and, it is arguable that they were 

embedded within the new structures Americans built. Consider, for example, the inclusion in the Parker album of a commercial photograph of the Jesuit Observatory. This 

was no mere recording of a tourist visit, for the 1901 annotations to the image mark out 

the “Exposition Building where we are stationed,” the “Baggage room, Assembly Hall, 

Observatory, Ladies’ Quarters, and Carriage Rooms”—in other words, the appropriation of the complex for U.S. civilian occupation. Or consider the Augustinian church 

and convent at Guadalupe (Figure 3), outside Manila, whose iconic tiered arcades and 

popularity as an American tourist site—one 1906 guide called it “Guadalupe Queen 

of the Ruins”—made it a likely model for Parsons’s cloister-like arrangement of tiered 

arches in the Philippine General Hospital (Figure 4). Along with several other church 

buildings in the province of Manila, Guadalupe was a ruin, not because of the ravages of 

time or earthquakes, but because it had been burned by U.S. forces in 1899.14

An undercurrent of destruction also informed U.S. revisions to another, final institution: schools. Here it is necessary to comment briefly on the importance of schools 

as a site for U.S. social engineering in the Philippines, and on the intersection between so-called social engineering and aesthetic transformation in that context. Like 

the revolutionary Filipino government, whose 1899 constitution called for a separation 

3. Strohmeyer & Wyman, Publishers/Underwood & Underwood, Ruins of the old Church at Guadalupe—

burned during Filipino retreat—Philippines, 1899. Stereograph. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 

Prints and Photographs Division.
Destructive Creation 47

of church and state and the establishment of “free and obligatory” 

public education, the American 

administration originally set out 

to secularize the schools and to extend their reach to wider segments 

of the population—although the 

goal of universal primary education 

was quickly abandoned. Within this 

framework, U.S. administrators and 

educators pursued a range of other 

political, social, economic, and cultural goals, through instruments as 

varied as the use of English as the 

medium of instruction, the introduction of physical education and 

other curricular changes, and the 

institutionalization in the school 

calendar of new holidays including 

not only Independence Day (which 

fell during the Philippine school 

year) but also Thanksgiving Day, 

Washington’s Birthday, and even 

Occupation Day.15

Even more than in other institutions, social engineering in the U.S.-administered 

Philippine schools intersected with reformist aesthetic practices. Perhaps the most obvious of these was the Bureau of Education’s wholesale redesign and reconstruction of the 

educational infrastructure—including in some cases the construction of dormitories as 

well as schools. This was a highly centralized project, exemplified by the adoption under 

Parsons in 1912 of a Philippine-wide “unit system of construction” for the building 

of schools of all sizes. Thus even before Filipino school children experienced a single 

day of the American curriculum, or heard an American teacher speak a word of English, 

schools built in this architectural mode themselves imparted some first modernist lessons in modular design, scale efficiency, and centralized administration.16

The institutionalization of new holidays in Philippine school calendars also employed aesthetic practices in the service of ideological change. American holidays provided obvious occasions for “Our young Filipinos” to perform American civil religion, 

to exhibit the U.S. flag, and to become the subject of images to be circulated in the 

4. History and Description of the Philippine General Hospital, 

compiled by John E. Snodgrass (Manila: Bureau of 

Printing, 1912), pl. XIX. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
48 East–West Interchanges in American Art

United States (Figure 5). Holidays also provided the opportunity for additional ways 

of enlisting Filipino youth in the reiteration of American iconography. School drawing 

manuals developed by Americans for use in the Philippines recommended holidays including Flag Day, Independence Day, and Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays as suitable occasions for the assignment of “special projects” to be undertaken by students.17

And then there is art and craft education itself. As they developed new schools, 

U.S. educators developed a complex system of art and craft education that turned 

Philippine schoolchildren into producers of highly specific kinds of works such as 

hats, mats, and works of embroidery. In turn, art and craft education became the subject of further representations in such images as the colorful Lambert-Springer Co. 

postcard Embroidery Class, Manila, Philippines (ca. 1909–20)—also reproduced in black 

and white in the Bureau of Education’s Bulletin No. 34, Lace Making and Embroidery.

18

Such instruction bore some similarity to industrial design education in the United 

States, which matched economic to human development. But in this case, as in others, 

it may be seen that reforms in the Philippines were not just examples of a generalized 

reform program “appropriate for cities everywhere,” but that they entailed degrees of 

control and coercion that distinguished them from many domestic counterparts. The 

U.S. Department of Public Instruction micromanaged aesthetic details as minute as 

the color schemes employed in the making of mats, whose brilliant colors American 

educators worked to “tone down.” This aversion to brilliant color undoubtedly owed 

its origin in part to prevailing American models of color theory, notably A. H. Munsell’s A Color Notation, which American teacher Clara Carter recommended for use in 

the Philippine schools in her manual. But this inculcation of a particular aesthetic 

preference was also tied directly to a concern that did not inform art pedagogy in the 

metropole: the creation of saleable works by schoolchildren for domestic and export 

5. B. W. Kilburn, Our young Filipinos in holiday attire at the Fourth of July celebration, Manila, P. I., 1900. Stereograph. 

Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division.
Destructive Creation 49

markets. Indeed, the Bureau of Education instituted its own in-house General Sales 

Department explicitly for this purpose.19

Sometimes, coercion shaded into force, as may be seen in the approach U.S. 

administrators took to the aesthetic side of school secularization, particularly during the initial period when the schools run by the United States were not newly 

constructed but appropriated from the old Catholic regime. The approach taken 

by the superintendent of schools in Manila, David Prescott Barrows, an anthropologist and later president of the University of California, was quite severe. He 

“ordered the removal of all crucifixes, statues, pictures, and religious symbols from 

walls, doorways, and roof tops of all classroom buildings.”20

Although Barrows’s purge is an extreme instance of U.S. officials’ attempts 

at aesthetic (and hence, ideological) control through the schools, it is indicative 

of the more pervasive way in which the creation of an imperial American aesthetic 

and ideological order depended upon the suppression of alternatives. Consider the 

reconfiguration of the school calendar, which as has been noted affected the production and reproduction of American iconography and ritual. This process had 

another, negative aspect: the supplanting of the old calendar—including not only 

the excision of old political holidays but the radical diminution of Catholic holy 

days—and the intensely visual and material celebrations that accompanied them. 

This ritual and iconographic displacement of the old regime took place alongside 

corollary policies also aimed at suppressing revolutionary icons and practices, notably the notorious Flag Law of 1907 forbidding “Filipinos to use or display the 

Philippine flag anywhere, even inside Filipino homes.”21

In light of the many works and practices associated with the U.S.-Philippine 

relationship that have never been analyzed, it would be too soon to make a final 

conclusion regarding the place of that relationship in American art. Future scholars 

might address a number of important subjects that this essay has not been able to 

consider: for example, the responses of ordinary people to the visual and material 

transformations they experienced, and the roles played by Filipino architects and 

artists like Juan Arellano who directly shaped the creation of a new political landscape in the U.S. era. What may be argued safely for the moment is that that relationship, and the tumultuous dynamic within it between creation and destruction, 

ought to be a subject of sustained inquiry in the years to come.

Notes

1. Luis H. Francia, “Introduction: The Rind of Things,” in Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War 

and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, ed. Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia (New York: New 

York University Press, 2002), xxiii.

2. David Brody, “Fantasy Realized: The Philippines, Orientalism, and Imperialism in Turn-of-theCentury American Visual Culture,” Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1997, xviii; Thomas S. Hines, 
50 East–West Interchanges in American Art

“The Imperial Façade: Daniel H. Burnham and American Architectural Planning in the Philippines,” 

Pacific Historical Review 41, no. 1 (February 1972): 33–53, quote at 33.

3. Glenn Anthony May, Social Engineering in the Philippines (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980); 

Adam T. Smith, The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities (Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press, 2003).

4. Little has been published on the Legislative building, but informative text panels outlining its 

history were installed in the building after its renovation. For a comment on Spain’s employment 

of neoclassicism, see A. N. Rebori, “The Work of William E. Parsons in the Philippine Islands,” Part I, 

Architectural Record 41 (April 1917): 305.

5. The album made by Maud and Luther Parker is Album—Filipiana Division, 2 vols., National 

Library of the Philippines, Special Collections, n.d. Many other images in the album are also of 

institutional architecture or the performance of rituals associated with U.S. political culture (often 

within a specific architectural setting). Examples include a photograph of a parade on the Fourth of 

July, 1903, taken outside the old Manila Post Office; a postcard of the Philippine General Hospital; 

a photo of “Maud N. Parker presiding at the First Woman’s Club Convention ever held in the Phil. 

Islands,” dated 1917, and numerous images of schools. The Parkers’ correlation of architectural and 

geopolitical aims paralleled Rebori’s interpretation of Parsons’s work as “a lasting tribute to the 

period of our Government’s constructive interest in the Philippines.” Rebori, “Work of William E. 

Parsons,” I, 309.

6. See, for example, John N. Choate, Carlisle Girls and Boys in School Uniform with Two Women 

School Teachers (?), Under Gazebo, 1879, a black-and-white gelatin glass negative in the National 

Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution (NAA Inv. 06804900).

7. See Underwood & Underwood, Co. L, 12th U.S. Infantry, on the Luneta, Manila, Philippines, 1899, 

and Honoring the soldier who lived and died a hero—Caisson bearing Gen. Lawton’s remains on 

the Luneta, Manila, 1899, both held by the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian 

Institution (RSN 17021 and RSN 26439). For a discussion of alterations to the Luneta, see W. E. 

Parsons, “Manila Old and New,” Western Architect 17, no. 1 (January 1911): 9–11. Philippine Curio 

Agency, No. 104 La Luneta, Manila, n.d. National Anthropological Archives, (NAA INV 05175600). A 

photograph by Squires & Bingham from the same vantage point is reproduced in George A. Miller, 

Interesting Manila (Manila: Central Methodist Episcopal Church, 1906), 42.

8. The logo and dates of activity of the Lambert-Springer Co. (1909–20) are identified in Conrado 

F. Ciriaco, Catalogue of Philippine Picture Postcards: American Period: 1898 to 1941 ([Manila]: 

Conrado F. Ciriaco, 1995), 12. Southern California: Illustrated with Drawings from Nature and from 

Photographs by Louise M. Keeler, 80th ed. (Santa Fe: Santa Fe Railroad, 1901).

9. Michael Salman, “‘The Prison That Makes Men Free’: The Iwahig Penal Colony and the Simulacra 

of the American State in the Philippines,” in ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, Colonial 

Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison: University of Wisconsin 

Press, 2009), 116–26. The passage of the “Brigandage Act” or “Bandolerismo Statute” is discussed 

in Zwick, “Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialist Writings in the ‘American Century,’” in Shaw and Francia, 

Vestiges of War, 38–56, see esp. 39.

10. Besides the works in Francia and Shaw’s volume, important exceptions include Vicente Rafael, 

White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000) and Sharon 

Delmendo, The Star-Entangled Banner: One Hundred Years of America in the Philippines (New Brunswick, 

NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004). “Canonization”: see Brody, “Fantasy Realized,” chapter 3, quote 

at 114. On Burnham’s preservationism see David Brody, “Building Empire: Architecture and American 

Imperialism in the Philippines,” Journal of Asian American Studies 4, no. 2 (2001): 123–45, quote at 127, 

doi:10.1353/jaas.2001.0013; Hines emphasizes that Parsons also took “Burnham’s lead in deferring, 

whenever possible, to older Spanish and Philippine landmarks” in Thomas S. Hines, “American Modernism 

in the Philippines: The Forgotten Architecture of William E. Parsons,” Journal of the Society of Architectural 

Historians 32, no. 4 (December 1973): 316–26, quote at 319, doi:10.2307/988922.

11. See J. M. Mancini, “Sovereignty Trouble: The United States, the Catholic Political Landscape, and 

Regime Change in the Philippines,” forthcoming and presented in versions at the State University 

of New York, Brockport, 2009; Yale University; Institute for Advanced Study; College Art Association, 

Chicago; Princeton University; and European Association for American Studies, Dublin, 2010.
Destructive Creation 51

12. Rebori, “The Work of William E. Parsons,” I, 319. U.S. military governors briefly used the 

Ayuntamiento, often misidentified in photographs as “the Palace,” as a headquarters until 1903; 

see H.C. White Co., The palace, headquarters of Maj. Gen. MacArthur, Manila, P. I., 1901, Library 

of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Stereograph LOT 12605. Under U.S. rule, the Plaza 

of the Martyrs was given the vague name Plaza España. Burnham’s remit did not include military 

structures, and Fort Santiago continued to be used as it had been during the war. For useful notes 

on sites in Intramuros, see www.intramurosadministration.com/home.htm.

13. Hines, “American Modernism in the Philippines,” 319, 316. Parker’s position is noted in Luther Parker, 

“Notes on the Direction and Limits of Industrial Work,” Philippine Craftsman 1, no. 1 (July 1912): 48–53. 

14. The destruction of Guadalupe is discussed in the early guidebook that used the phrase “Queen 

of the Ruins,” Miller’s Interesting Manila, 142, but that book does not mention the more widespread 

destruction of churches. See Archdiocese of Manila, Catálogo de las reclamaciones que por daños 

y perjuicios inferidos a la Iglesia Católica de Filipinas presenta al gobierno de los Estados Unidos de 

América el Arzobispado de Manila y los obispados sufraganeos (Manila : Imp. de ‘El Mercantil,’ 1903), 

11–15, 171–73, and Mancini, “Sovereignty Trouble.” In 1920 the Guadalupe ruins still “featured in 

all the guide books”; Facts and Figures about the Philippines (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1920), 53.

15. “Calendar for 1904–1905,” Bureau of Education, The Philippine School of Arts and Trades, Manila, 

P.I., 1905–1905 (Manila: Bureau of Public Printing, 1904), inside front cover.

16. Images of a dormitory, the Women’s Dormitory of the Normal School in Manila, may be seen 

in Rebori, “Work of William E. Parsons,” 318–19. As Kenton J. Clymer notes, dormitories became an 

important institutional space for American Protestant missionaries in light of the official policy of 

secularization: “if religion could not be taught in the schools . . . then the mission had to reach the 

students through dormitories”; Clymer, “Religion and American Imperialism: Methodist Missionaries in 

the Philippine Islands, 1899–1913,” Pacific Historical Review 49, no. 1 (February 1980): 29–50, see 49. 

Bureau of Education, School Buildings: Plans, Specifications, and Bills of Material for Standard Revised 

School Buildings of the Bureau of Education (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1912); Bureau of Education, 

School Buildings and Grounds (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1912). 

17. [Clara O. Carter], Course of Study in Drawing for Normal Schools (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1929), 14.

18. The postcards are in the collection of the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian 

Institution; Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1911.

19. Glenn May convincingly argues that the emphasis on vocational and manual education 

of American administrators derived from the approach of Booker T. Washington; May, Social 

Engineering in the Philippines, 89–93. Hines, “Imperial Façade,” 44. See the Department of Public 

Instruction of the Bureau of Education’s Philippine Craftsman Reprint Series No. 1, Philippine Mats

(Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1913), 12–13; [Carter], Course of Study in Drawing for Normal Schools, 8. 

Director of Education Luther B. Bewley wrote in his introduction to Catalog of Handwoven Products 

of the Philippine Public Schools (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1920), “The purpose of this catalog is to 

disseminate information on the standard handwoven articles made in Philippine public schools and, 

by so doing, to help the General Sales Department of the Bureau of Education to find buyers, both 

here and abroad, for these articles.” 

20. Frank T. Reuter, “American Catholics and the Establishment of the Philippine Public School 

System,” Catholic Historical Review 49, no. 3 (October 1963): 374.

21. This is not to say that the reconfiguration of the calendar completely eclipsed prior Catholic 

holidays or excluded Filipino heroes. As the 1904–05 calendar of Manila’s School of Arts and 

Trades suggests, the U.S. administration preserved All Saints’ Day and two holidays devoted to the 

Blessed Virgin Mary. Rizal Day, established to commemorate the 1896 martyrdom by Spain of the 

nationalist intellectual José Rizal, explicitly incorporated into the new pantheon a Filipino hero 

whose heroism did not challenge U.S. hegemony. Bureau of Education, The Philippine School of Arts 

and Trades, Manila, P.I., 1905–1905 (Manila: Bureau of Public Printing, 1904). On memorializing 

Rizal see Delmendo, The Star-Entangled Banner. Chris Antonette Piedad-Pugay, ‘The Controversial 

Philippine National Flag’, National Historical Institute, www.nhi.gov.ph/index2.php?option=com_

content&do_pdf=1&id=26.
Before Zen

The Nothing of American Dada

Jacquelynn Baas
53

One of the challenges confronting our modern era has been how to resolve the subject-object dichotomy proposed by Descartes and refined by 

Newton—the belief that reality consists of matter and motion, and that all 

questions can be answered by means of the scientific method of objective 

observation and measurement. This egocentric perspective has been cast 

into doubt by evidence from quantum mechanics that matter and motion 

are interdependent forms of energy and that the observer is always in an 

experiential relationship with the observed.1

 To understand ourselves as interconnected beings who experience time and space rather than being subject to them takes a radical shift of perspective, and artists have been at the 

leading edge of this exploration. From Marcel Duchamp and Dada to John 

Cage and Fluxus, to William T. Wiley and his West Coast colleagues, to the 

recent international explosion of participatory artwork, artists have been 

trying to get us to change how we see. Nor should it be surprising that in 

our global era Asian perspectives regarding the nature of reality have been a 

crucial factor in effecting this shift.2

The 2009 Guggenheim exhibition The Third Mind emphasized the importance of Asian philosophical and spiritual texts in the development of 

American modernism.3

 Zen Buddhism especially was of great interest to 

artists and writers in the United States following World War II. The histories of modernism traced by the exhibition reflected the well-documented 

influence of Zen, but did not include another, earlier link—that of Daoism 

and American Dada.

 For my part, I confess that when I wrote my 2005 book about manifestations of Asian philosophy within Western art, I did not really understand 
54 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Daoism.4 The blending of Daoism and Buddhism over the centuries has made it 

difficult to separate these two philosophical and religious systems when looking 

for their putative influence within Western art. Indeed, the full range of resources 

drawn upon by Marcel Duchamp and his colleagues in the United States is so 

varied that any new understanding of the relevance of particular Asian traditions 

to their work provides only fragmentary evidence of these artists’ interests and 

intentions. The evidence of their attraction to Daoism has been largely overlooked 

until recently and is still regarded in some quarters as insufficiently intellectual or 

theoretical.5 Yet it was precisely the anti-intellectual and anti-theoretical nature of 

American Dada that Daoism helped to nourish. Drawing on the dynamic concept of 

reality contained in the Dao de jing and the anti-authoritarianism and ironic humor 

of Zhuangzi, American Dada developed a framework for deconstructing traditional 

Western understandings of the nature of knowledge—a framework that was at once 

deeply serious and emphatically humorous.

Daoism has assumed many forms in response to changing conditions. The primary text is the Dao de jing, a collection of verses traditionally attributed to Laozi. 

Dao de jing can be translated as “The Classic of This Focus and Its Field,” and one 

of its central assumptions is that “each particular element in our experience is 

holographic in the sense that it has implicated within it the entire field of experience.” Access to this double view of reality is achieved by recognizing the unifying energy—qi (“chi”)—that flows to us from the world and back into it. Once 

realized, this skill is put into service for humanity in an effective yet diffuse and 

inconspicuous manner, in keeping with the elusive principles of the Dao.

6

In contrast with the poetic Dao de jing, the anecdotal accounts of Zhuangzi and 

his followers are laced with emphatic anti-authoritarianism. Zhuangzi’s anecdotes 

came to stand for the opposite of Confucianism’s ethos of self-sacrifice: specifically, escape from societal pressure to an individual path of freedom, often through 

the liberating power of humor. According to Burton Watson, Zhuangzi “appears 

to have known that one good laugh would do more than ten pages of harangue to 

shake the reader’s confidence in the validity of his past assumptions.”7

“dada means nothing,” reads the first heading of Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto 

1918. The following year, Raoul Hausmann similarly characterized Dada as “nothing, 

i.e., everything,” and Francis Picabia, in his own “Dada Manifesto” of 1920 wrote, 

“[I]t’s doing something so that the public can say: ‘We understand nothing, nothing, nothing,’” signing his manifesto, “Francis Picabia / who knows nothing, nothing, 

nothing.” In 1921 Marcel Duchamp told a reporter, “Dada is nothing. For instance 
Before Zen 55

the Dadaists say that everything is nothing; nothing is good, nothing is interesting, 

nothing is important.” And in 1922 Tzara asserted, “Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing. It is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at 

street corners, like dogs.”8

Where did this anti-intellectual ideal of “nothing” come from? According to those 

most directly involved, an important source was Daoism, specifically the Daoist notion 

of “inner-alchemy,” the goal of which, according to Thomas Cleary, is “autonomy, the 

freedom to be or not to be, to do or not do, according to the needs of the situation at 

hand. . . . The adept is said to transcend yin and yang [male and female], reaching an 

undefinable state in which one ‘does nothing yet does anything.’”9 Acknowledging the 

debt to Daoism, Tzara claimed, “Chouang-Dsi [Zhuangzi] was just as Dada as we are. 

You are mistaken if you take Dada for a modern school, or even for a reaction against 

the schools of today.” He went on to characterize Dada in terms usually applied to 

Daoism: “Dada is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to races 

and events.”Hans Arp similarly stressed the Daoist taproot of Dada: “Dada objects 

are made of found or manufactured elements, simple or incongruous. The Chinese 

several millenniums ago, Duchamp and Picabia in the United States, and Schwitters and myself during World War I, were the first to invent and spread these games 

of wisdom and acumen that were meant to cure human beings of the sheer madness 

of genius and to lead them back more modestly to their proper place in nature.”10

 Like Arp, who specified Duchamp and Picabia’s work “in the United States,” 

Richard Huelsenbeck emphasized the American context in his introduction to the 

1920 Dada Almanac: “One cannot understand Dada; one must experience it. . . . 

Dada is the neutral point between content and form, male and female, matter and 

spirit. . . . Dada is the American aspect of Buddhism; it blusters because it knows 

how to be quiet; it agitates because it is at peace.” Huelsenbeck cites Buddhism, 

but his language is Daoist. This may suggest a certain lack of clarity—perhaps not 

surprising from artists interested in Asian philosophies primarily as resources for 

their own work—but should not be confused with a naïve “Orientalism.” As the 

poet Walter Mehring observed in “Unveilings,” also published in the Dada Almanac: 

“The East Asian Society protests at the way Dada is wrecking Asiatic culture.”11

Buddhism absorbed key Daoist concepts when it reached China, where Chan 

(in Japanese: Zen) Buddhism was one result. And Daoism returned the favor, generating hybrid practices that might be labeled “DABU.” Tao is the Wade-Giles system of romanization, Dao the more recent pinyin. TABU—a contraction of the first 

two letters of the words “Tao” and “Buddha”—was, in fact, what Marcel Duchamp’s 

brother-in-law, Jean Crotti, called the version of Dada that he and Suzanne Duchamp 
56 East–West Interchanges in American Art

practiced in Paris during 

the early 1920s.12 Significantly, Crotti dated his 

“second birth” to 1915, 

the year he moved into 

a New York studio with 

Marcel Duchamp.13

What was it about Daoism that might have offered a resource for artists 

around the time of the 

First World War? Several 

things, including Daoism’s sexually charged view 

of the cosmos as a continuously self-balancing 

system; its emphases on 

perception and perspective; and perhaps most 

important, its assumption 

of the self-transforming power of the individual and rejection of social conventions 

and definitions.14 There is yet another aspect of Daoism that would have appealed to 

these artists: the Daoist view of creativity. In their philosophical analysis of the Dao 

de jing, Roger Ames and David Hall point out that in the Judeo-Christian worldview, 

with its omnipotent “maker,” “all subsequent acts of ‘creativity’ are in fact secondary 

and derivative exercises of power.” In contrast, real creativity “can make sense only in 

a [Daoist] processual world that admits of ontological parity among its constitutive 

events and of the spontaneous emergence of novelty. . . . Creativity is always reflexive 

and is exercised over and with respect to ‘self.’ And since self in a processive world 

is always communal, creativity is contextual, transactional, and multidimensional.”15

This analysis reads like a recipe for Dada artworks, which, as Arp wrote, tend to be 

“made of found or manufactured elements, simple or incongruous.” 

It also challenges the art-historical impulse to establish precise authorship for 

Dada objects and events. Consider God (Figure 1), an upside-down plumbing trap affixed to a wooden miter box by the German-born Dada artist and poet Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven and the Philadelphia painter Morton Livingston Schamberg, a piece that 

combines Schamberg’s rigor with von Freytag-Loringhoven’s talent for shock.16 The 

title, God, might be interpreted humorously, or at least ironically. Indeed, attached to 

1. Morton Livingston Schamberg and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, 

God, ca. 1917. Wood miter box and cast iron plumbing trap, height: 

12 3

⁄8 in.; base: 3 × 4 3⁄4 × 11 5⁄8 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 

The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
Before Zen 57

an unglamorous, usually hidden portion of a plumbing fixture, the title has been read 

as both, but this does not fully address the artists’ intent. How might someone versed 

in both Daoism and modern plumbing experience this piece, along with its title? 

A plumbing trap is a low point in the evacuation of waste, creating a water seal 

that prevents sewer gas from passing into occupied space. It thus “traps” the free 

flow of air and, thanks to gravity, it tends to trap other things as well—traps are 

notorious villains in backed-up plumbing scenarios. Daoism emphasizes the importance of open, uncomplicated, free flow. In fact, the earliest appearance of the 

word dao in the ancient Chinese Book of Documents has to do with cutting a channel to 

prevent the overflowing of riverbanks.17 From a Daoist perspective, then, God evokes 

the ironic and—yes—funny concept of a constipated omnipotent supreme being, 

along with the serious thought that there might be other possibilities for conceiving the workings of the universe.

There is another reason God is a quintessential example of Dada’s Daoist perspective—its existence as embodied metaphor. Because the concepts of Daoism are 

so abstract, the language of Daoism is the language of metaphor. Nature is a primary source of metaphorical meaning, but so is technology, which is fundamentally 

the harnessing and channeling of natural forces. The wheel, for example, becomes a 

metaphor for the fecundity of nothingness in chapter 11 of the Dao de jing:

The thirty spokes converge at one hub,

But the utility of the cart is a function of the nothingness inside the hub. . . . 

Thus, it might be something that provides the value,

But it is nothing that provides the utility.18

“Cart” might be any vehicle; substitute “art” and we have, “Thirty spokes converge at 

one hub, but the utility of the art is a function of the nothingness inside”—an image 

that suggests Duchamp’s first readymade, Bicycle Wheel (1913), and his concept of the 

“art coefficient” or “gap.” Duchamp believed that, “What art is in reality is this missing 

link, not the links which exist. It’s not what you see that is art, art is the gap.”19

Machine technology became American Dada’s metaphor, and Daoist inner alchemical descriptions of the rotational circulation of qi-energy throughout the body 

as a hydraulic process, and the intensification of qi through a kind of shifting of gears, 

seems to have provided a model. As early as 1911, Marcel Duchamp integrated the 

mechanical draftsman’s dotted line and directional arrow into his otherwise painterly 

Coffee Mill. Duchamp described this coffee grinder as something “which I made to 

explode; the grounds are tumbling down beside it; the gear wheels are above, and the 

knob is seen simultaneously at several points in its circuit, with an arrow to indicate 
58 East–West Interchanges in American Art

movement. Without knowing it, I had opened a window 

onto something else.” When 

pressed about whether Coffee 

Mill had any “symbolic significance,” Duchamp replied: 

“None at all,” adding: “It was 

a sort of escape hatch. You 

know, I’ve always felt this need 

to escape myself.” As a “window” or “escape hatch,” Coffee 

Mill seems to have served not 

as a symbol of, but a metaphor for escape from habits 

of perceiving and experiencing reality.20

Another catalyst for 

American artists was Duchamp’s close friend, Francis Picabia, who arrived in New 

York at the beginning of June 1915, two weeks before Duchamp. The preceding 

year, in Paris, Picabia had incorporated a Daoist yin-yang symbol into Comic Wedlock

(Figure 2), a painting whose theme was likely influenced by Duchamp’s 1912–13 

plans for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23). At this time, Duchamp’s influence on Picabia’s work was evident more in terms of content than style. 

Still resolutely wrestling with abstraction, Picabia’s use of the yin-yang form was 

anomalous in both its specificity and its symbolic intent. 

Marius de Zayas, in Paris in 1914 on a scouting mission on behalf of Alfred 

Stieglitz’s gallery 291, suggested a show of Picabia’s recent paintings to follow a 

planned Picasso show. “Picasso represents in his work the . . . action of matter on 

the senses,” de Zayas wrote Stieglitz, “while Picabia’s work is the expression of pure 

thought. Picasso could never work without dealing with objectivity while Picabia forgets matter to express only, maybe the memory of something that has happened.”21 The 

“maybe” suggests hesitation on de Zayas’s part. One thing seems clear: “the memory 

of something that has happened” was a mental something that—at least in the case 

of Comic Wedlock—had to do with copulation that was not sensual. Other titles of 

Picabia paintings from this time likewise suggest an experiential mental realm—Udnie, a scrambling and contraction of “Uni-dimensionnel”; and Edtaonisl, derived from 

“Etoile danseuse,” or “Star Dancer” (note the tao in Edtaonisl).22 Picabia was struggling to give sensual form to mental experience in Paris. It is paradoxically perfect 

2. Francis Picabia, Comic Wedlock, 1914. Oil on canvas, 

6 ft. 5 3

⁄8 in. × 6 ft. 6 3⁄4 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 

Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Collection, Given by their family © 2011 Artists 

Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo © The Museum of 

Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.
Before Zen 59

that the door to representation of 

the “uni-dimensional” or immaterial 

would finally open to him in the context of the resolutely material culture 

of the United States. 

 Upon his arrival, Picabia immersed himself in the goings-on 

surrounding Stieglitz’s gallery. The 

July-August 1915 issue of the largeformat journal 291, a successor to 

Stieglitz’s Camera Work edited by de 

Zayas, featured six powerful Picabia 

portrait-drawings of 291 associates 

for which machines and technology 

provided the metaphors and American advertising the model. Picabia’s 

“portrait” of Stieglitz appeared on 

the cover (Figure 3).

That Picabia intended to portray Stieglitz as an apostle of 

American modernism seems clear 

from the inscription: “Here, here 

is Stieglitz, faith, and love”—surely an affectionate riff on the apostle Paul’s 

assurance to the Corinthians, “So abide faith, hope, and love.” Here, Stieglitz 

is the hope. Picabia’s icon for Stieglitz is made up of two mechanical elements: 

a camera with its bellows detached, preventing recording of exterior images on 

the photographic plate; and a similarly disengaged brake and gearshift—controls 

for starting and stopping.23 Only the lens at the top of the camera seems to be 

in active mode, stretched heavenward, as if anticipating Stieglitz’s future cloudportrait “equivalents,” and focused on the word, “ideal.” 

The detached bellows has elicited a wide range of comments about its possible meaning, from implications regarding Stieglitz’s sexual potency to Picabia’s 

supposed opinion of the success of gallery 291.24 From the Daoist perspective, 

however, the bellows may suggest something quite different. A bellows is the expandable part of a camera, but it is also a device for generating a strong current of 

air. In chapter five of the Dao de jing, the bellows becomes a technological metaphor 

for the indeterminate source of spontaneous and inexhaustible phenomena: “What 

is between the heavens and the earth resembles a bellows that is empty yet never 

3. Francis Picabia, Ici, C’est Ici Stieglitz Foi et Amour, 1915. 

Relief print on paper, 14 15⁄16 × 9 in. National Portrait Gallery, 

Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Katharine Graham © 2011 Artists 

Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo © 2011 

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
60 East–West Interchanges in American Art

exhausted; put into motion, it yields more 

and more.”25

In Daoism, the earth is conceived as 

yin—female/receptive/dark—and the heavens as yang—male/aggressive/light. They 

are opposites whose union generates constantly morphing phenomena. What Picabia’s detached bellows implies is that Stieglitz is a catalyst for change, but his “camera 

work” cannot be portrayed only in terms of 

the mechanically recordable visible world. 

Stieglitz called this his “‘anti-photographic’ search—the vision of both the inner and 

the outer eye”26—a double view of reality 

conveyed in the famous first chapter of the 

Dao de jing:

Nameless is the source of heaven and earth; named, it is the mother of all things.

This is why when one is steadily free of the passions, one sees one’s spiritual essence; immersed in the sensual, one sees bounded form.

These two things have a single origin and are called by different names. 

One calls them both profound. They are profound, doubly deep. This is 

the portal to all things.27

Picabia’s brake and gearshift may refer to what is required in order to achieve this 

complete vision of reality. Having both your gearshift and brake disengaged just 

might be the perfect modern metaphor for being “steadily free of the passions.” 

Picabia’s “ideal” is printed in German gothic type—perhaps a reference to 

Stieglitz’s German background and education. Jay Bochner has written insightfully 

about how often the word “ideal” appears in Picabia’s work, “in exactly the same 

position on the page as here”: hovering at the top.28 But it is also helpful to look at 

what Stieglitz had to say about his cloud-portraits (Figure 4):

Are the sky and water not one, if one truly sees them? Are they not, after all, 

to be seen as interchangeable? In fact, I feel that all experiences in life are one, 

if truly seen. . . . How is it possible to conceive of black without white? Why 

reject either the one or the other, since both exist? I feel the duality of world 

forces forever at work. But it is when conflict hovers about a point—a focal 

point—and light is in the ascendancy, that I am moved.29

4. Alfred Stieglitz, Songs of the Sky in Five 

Pictures (No. 3), 1923. Gelatin silver print, 4 5

⁄8 × 3 1⁄2 in. 

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Alfred Stieglitz 

© 2011 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society 

(ARS), New York. Photo © 2011 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Before Zen 61

Stieglitz’s yin-yang “focal point” 

found an earlier manifestation as a 

point of light in Duchamp’s Fountain, surely the exemplar of how 

Dada artworks served as “contextual, transactional, and multidimensional” objects of public art 

practice. A photograph of Fountain

(Figure 5) taken at 291 by Alfred 

Stieglitz (and the only surviving 

visual record of the piece) appeared in the same issue of The 

Blind Man as Louise Norton’s apologia “Buddha of the Bathroom.” 

According to Beatrice Wood, the 

artist who apparently made the 

first contact with Stieglitz about taking the picture, Stieglitz and Duchamp had a 

long discussion about how to photograph the piece. Stieglitz, Wood wrote, “took 

great pains with the lighting.”30

Duchamp had signed the urinal “R. Mutt,” purportedly after Mott ironworks, 

a plumbing supply company. Mutt, pronounced with a French accent, sounds like 

the English word “moot,” which can mean “meeting” (evoking Tzara’s two dogs, 

or mutts, meeting); or “mute”–“silent”; but also perhaps shorthand for “mutable” 

(the same word in both French and English), meaning “changeable.”31 “A female 

friend of mine,” Duchamp wrote his sister Suzanne, “using a male pseudonym, 

. . . submitted a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.”In a letter to Georgia O’Keeffe, 

Stieglitz indicated that he, too, was under the impression that a young woman had 

submitted the urinal.32 It is possible Duchamp was simply acknowledging the participation of one of his many women friends in this caper, but it seems at least as 

likely that the ambisexual authorship of Fountain reflected how Duchamp, shortly to 

become Rrose Sélavy (his female alter-ego), understood himself. 

Daoism emphasizes the vital role of yin, the female aspect of the world. Chapter 

six of the Dao de jing expands upon the portal or gateway metaphor we encountered 

in chapter one, and the generative, self-replenishing bellows-energy of chapter five:

The life-force of the valley never dies; this is called the mysterious female.

The gateway of the mysterious female is called the root of heaven and of earth.

It is endless and only seems to be there.

Using it, one never tires.33

5. Alfred Stieglitz, photograph of Marcel Duchamp’s 

Fountain, as published in Beatrice Wood, The Blind Man, No. 2, 

May 1917. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 

The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
62 East–West Interchanges in American Art

“In this chapter and pervasively in the text,” Ames and Hall write, “the image of the 

dark, moist, and accommodatingly vacant interior of the vagina is used as an analogy for [the fecundity of emptiness].”The Dao de jing presents the female aspect as 

something to be cultivated. In chapter 28, we read: 

Know the male

Yet safeguard the female

And be a river gorge to the world.

As a river gorge to the world,

You will not lose your real potency,

And not losing your real potency,

You return to the state of the newborn babe.34

The return of the mind to its original, pre-conditioned state—the mind of a “newborn babe”—is the goal of Daoist practice in general, and Daoist inner alchemical 

practice in particular. Lydie Fischer Sarazin-Levassor, who was briefly married to 

Duchamp in 1927, quoted his advice to her: “Find yourself, the pure self, like a 

child newborn. . . . An equilibrium is maintained, as in chess. You have to try to 

see everything as if for the first time, all the time.”35 A Daoist metaphor for this 

mental equilibrium is a pearl of light between and behind the eyes—the “center of 

spirit” in Daoist meditation practice. This “focal point,” to use Stieglitz’s term, is 

clearly visible, thanks to his careful lighting, in the “head” of the Buddha into which 

Stieglitz and Duchamp transformed a urinal.36

Another notable feature of this photograph of Fountain is the moist darkness 

of the protruding hole where the genitals would be, a feature that emphasizes its 

womb-like aspect, and which would surface again over 50 years later in Duchamp’s 

Étant donnés. To truly comprehend what strikes the American mind (still!) as Duchamp’s shocking exploitation of sexuality, is to understand why Fountain was not 

a cynical gesture of “pissing on” the establishment, but an affectionate, humorous, 

and tough-minded koan-like Daoist challenge to both the American art community 

and the American public.

“Behind [Duchamp’s] works, another world really exists,” his friend Robert Lebel 

asserted. About the unintelligibility of these works, Lebel wrote: “because of what 

he calls his ‘delay in glass,’ [Duchamp] seems to have had in mind the anonymity of 

future archaeological excavations, after the final collapse of our own civilization.”37

As we approach the hundredth anniversary of the start of the Large Glass and the fiftieth anniversary of the completion of Étant donnés, could we be witnessing the “final 
Before Zen 63

collapse” of the walls that frame our Western civilization and its materialist view of 

reality? Can we be archaeologists enough to recognize the reality contained within 

Duchamp’s “delay in glass”? Dada artworks were not intended to inspire disinterested 

contemplation or intellectual cognition; they are metaphors for reality, nothings intended to open the world’s mind to new somethings. “Dada never preached,” Tristan 

Tzara wrote in 1953, in a statement translated by Duchamp; “having no theory to 

defend, it showed truths in action and it is as action that what is commonly called art 

will henceforth have to be considered.”38

Notes

1. For some implications, see Robert Lanza with Bob Berman, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness 

are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe (Dallas: Benbella Books, 2009).

2. As Edward Carpenter wrote early in the last century, “Forty or fifty years ago the materialistic 

view of the world was much in evidence. . . . Since then, however, partly through a natural reaction 

and partly through the influx of Eastern ideas, there has been a great swing of the pendulum”; 

Carpenter, The Art of Creation: Essays on the Self and Its Powers (1904; London: G. Allen, 1907), 10.

3. Alexandra Munroe, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 (New York: 

Guggenheim Museum, 2009).

4. Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 

5. An important factor has been the post-war intellectual tendency to define Daoist/Buddhist 

perspectives as “spiritual” rather than as theories of mind, to be dismissed along with theosophy 

and other forms of Western occultism and “new age” philosophy. This may change, thanks to the 

investigations of neuroscientists like Jill Bolte Taylor; see, for example, Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight: A 

Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey (New York: Viking Penguin, 2006). 

6. Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall, Daodejing “Making This Life Significant”: A Philosophical 

Translation (New York: Ballantine, 2003), 13, 60, 18. Thomas Cleary, The Taoist Classics, vol. 1 

(Boston: Shambhala, 1999), 3–4.

7. Burton Watson, Zhuangzi: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 5. 

8. For the Tzara quotes, see Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: 

G. K. Hall, [1951] 1981), 77, 251. Raoul Hausmann, “Was ist dada?” [text collage], Der Dada, no. 2, ed. 

Hausmann (Berlin 1919); reprinted Hausmann, Am Anfang war Dada, 1972, 8; trans. and quoted by 

Dorothée Brill, Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 

2010), 72. Francis Picabia, “Dada Manifesto,” trans. Margaret I. Lippard from 391, no. 12 (Paris, March 

1920), published in Lucy R. Lippard, ed., Dadas on Art: Tzara, Arp, Duchamp and Others (Englewood 

Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 166. For the Duchamp quote, see Margery Rex, “‘Dada’ Will Get You if 

You Don’t Watch Out: It Is on the Way Here,” New York Evening Journal, 29 January 1921; quoted by 

Rudolf E. Kuenzli, ed., New York Dada (New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1986), 140. 

9. Early western translations of Dao de jing and Zhuangzi include, Stanislas Julien, Le Livre de la voie 

et de la vertu par le philosophe Lao-Tseu (Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1842) and John Chalmers, The 

Speculations on Metaphysics, Polity, and Morality of “The Old Philosopher,” Lau-Tse (London: Trubner, 

1868). Also important were James Legge’s “The Texts of Taoism,” vols. 39 and 40 of F. Max Müller, 

ed., The Sacred Books of the East (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891); Paul Carus, Lao-Tze’s Tao-The-King

(Chicago: Open Court, 1898), Chinese Philosophy (1902), and Chinese Thought (1907); and Léon 

Wieger, Taoïsme, 2 vols. (Xian Xian: Imp. de Xian Xian, 1911–13). For the quote, see Thomas Cleary, 

Understanding Reality: A Taoist Alchemical Classic by Chang Po-tuan with a Concise Commentary by 

Liu I-ming (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), 5.

10. For the Tzara quote, see Motherwell, Dada Painters and Poets, 250, 251. Jean (Hans) Arp , 

“Dadaland” (1948), in Collected French Writings: Poems, Essays, Memories, ed. Marcel Jean, trans. 

Joachim Neugroschel (London: Calder & Boyars, 1974), 235. 
64 East–West Interchanges in American Art

11. Richard Huelsenbeck, The Dada Almanac (Berlin, 1920), ed. and trans. Malcolm Green (London: 

Atlas, 1993), 9–10, 75.

12. A similar interpretation, minus Daoism, was offered by Jean-Hubert Martin, who pointed out 

that inverting the syllables of TABU yields BUTA, a pun on “Buddha” (“TABU: Artistic Movement or 

Religion?” in TABU DADA: Jean Crotti & Suzanne Duchamp, 1915–1922, ed. William A. Camfield and 

Jean-Hubert Martin [Kunsthalle Bern, 1983], 88). Buddhist as well as Daoist concepts abound in 

Crotti’s art and writings, which warrant further study.

13. See Crotti’s autobiographical statement regarding his “second birth . . . without umbilical cord” 

reproduced in Camfield and Martin, TABU DADA, 82; “Chronology,” 129.

14. For a period discussion of Daoism’s radical anti-authoritarianism, see Charles F. Horne, The 

Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, vol. 12, Medieval China (New York: Parke, Austin, and 

Lipscomb, 1917), 2.

15. Ames and Hall, Daodejing, 17.

16. On the authorship of this work, see Michael R. Taylor, “New York,” in Dada, ed. Leah Dickerson 

(Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2006), 289.

17. Ames and Hall, Daodejing, 57.

18. Ibid., 91. 

19. Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (1969; New York: Abrams, 1970), 197. 

20. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Rod Padgett (New York: Da Capo Press, 

1987), 31. I have modified the translations, substituting “grounds” for “coffee” (poudre in the 

French) and changing “loophole” to “escape hatch” (une sorte d’échappatoire). For more on Coffee 

Mill, see Smile of the Buddha, 83, 85.

21. From a letter of 30 June 1914, in the Alfred Stieglitz Archive, Yale University, quoted in William 

A. Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 

68.

22. On these titles see Roger I. Rothman, “Between Music and the Machine,” Toutfait, vol. 2, issue 

4, 2002, note 14 (www.toutfait.com). On the intersection of Stieglitz, Picabia, and a “machine 

aesthetic” see Camfield, Francis Picabia, 77ff.

23. See Jay Bochner, An American Lens (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 144.

24. Pepe Karmel cogently observes that the bellows appears to have collapsed because it has torn 

loose from the lens, which is unnaturally extended in its pursuit of the ideal; see Karmel, “Francis 

Picabia, 1915: The Sex of a New Machine,” in Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries, ed. Sarah 

Greenough (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2000), 216–17. 

25. Julien, Le Livre de la voie, 18 (texts from Julien are the author’s translation).

26. Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: Introduction to an American Seer (New York: Duell, Sloan and 

Pearce, 1960), 20. 

27. Julien, Le Livre de la voie, 2. 

28. Bochner, American Lens, 145.

29. Norman, Alfred Stieglitz, 36.

30. Beatrice Wood, I Shock Myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood (San Francisco: Chronicle 

Books, 1985), 30. See also William A. Camfield, “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Its History and 

Aesthetics in the Context of 1917,” in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli 

and Francis M. Naumann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 74.

31. Duchamp’s homosexual friend Charles Demuth spelled Mutt “Mutte” in a letter to an art critic 

from mid-April 1917. (Camfield, “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain,” 72 and 90 n. 28, where Camfield 

speculates that “the ‘e’ added to Mutt in this letter may have been intended to suggest a female 

identity.”)

32. Duchamp letter of April 11, 1917, in Francis E. Naumann and Hector Obalk, eds., Affectionately 

Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp (Ghent: Ludion Press, 2000), 47. Stieglitz’s 

letter is summarized by Camfield in Kuenzli and Naumann, Marcel Duchamp, 91 n. 39. Duchamp 
Before Zen 65

may have asked Beatrice Wood to make the first contact with Stieglitz precisely to give him 

this impression; but she recorded that it was Duchamp who worked with Stieglitz on the actual 

photography of the piece.

33. Julien, Le Livre de la voie, 21.

34. Ames and Hall, Daodejing, 86, 120.

35. Lydie Fischer Sarazin-Levassor, A Marriage in Check: The Heart of the Bride Stripped Bare by Her 

Bachelor, Even, trans. Paul Edwards (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2007), 48.

36. Lu K’uan yü (Charles Luk), Taoist Yoga: Alchemy & Immortality (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 

1973), xvi (“prenatal vitality [is] transmuted into a bright pearl that illuminates the brain”). Stieglitz 

himself described the form as that of a Buddha; see Camfield in Kuenzli and Naumann, Marcel 

Duchamp, 75–76.

37. Robert Lebel, “Portrait of Marcel Duchamp as a Dropout,” in Étant donné, no. 7, 2006, 74. Robert 

Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, trans. George Heard Hamilton (New York: Paragraphic Books, 1959), 69.

38. From the broadside “catalogue” to the exhibition, “DADA 1916–1923,” Sidney Janis Gallery, 

April 15 to May 9, 1953.

Knowledge and Hierarchy
Global Knowledge 

in the Early Republic

The East India Marine Society’s “Curiosities” Museum

Patricia Johnston
69

On a cold January day in 1804, the Reverend William Bentley, pastor of 

the East Church, stood and watched a strange and exotic parade weaving 

through the streets of Salem, Massachusetts. A number of sea captains, who 

had just returned from Sumatra, Bombay, Calcutta, Canton, Manila, and 

other Asian ports, put on this public display to commemorate their recent 

business adventures. Bentley recorded in his diary, “This day is the Annual 

Meeting of the East India Marine Society. . . . After business & before dinner they moved in procession, . . . Each of the brethren bore some Indian 

curiosity & the palanquin was borne by the negroes dressed nearly in the 

Indian manner. A person dressed in Chinese habits & mask passed in front. 

The crowd of spectators was great.”1

The objects that the minister described demonstrate the global circulation of material culture in the Early Republic. Waiting in Asian harbors for 

trade opportunities, captains and crews swapped souvenirs that had literally 

circled the world. When they returned to their hometowns, they shared the 

objects they collected, both privately with acquaintances and publicly in museums and parades that were widely covered in the newspapers. These global 

artifacts provide insights into the broad intellectual pursuits of the Early 

Republic, including natural history, ethnography, and aesthetics. The objects 

also illuminate early trade relations and cultural perceptions between Asia and 

the new United States. When displayed back in the United States, artifacts 

helped construct and reinforce social hierarchies in American seaports; they 

also expressed America’s arrival as a full participant in world commerce.

Bentley’s reference to the material culture of India and China, carried 

through the streets of Salem, described a public celebration of the international 
70 East–West Interchanges in American Art

trade that had changed the identity and character of the town over the previous 

20 years. In the colonial period, Salem had been a flourishing fishing and trading 

village, known mostly for its infamous witch trials. The British navigation acts of 

1660 and 1663 allowed the North American colonies access to the lucrative Caribbean trade, and for 150 years Salem vessels voyaged regularly to other British 

colonial ports to exchange cod, corn, and timber for sugar, molasses, and occasionally slaves. After the American Revolution, however, the town’s prosperity reached a 

new order of magnitude with the start of legal trade with China and the East Indies. 

By the turn of the nineteenth century, Salem was the sixth largest city in the new 

United States, boasting the highest per capita income in the country, derived from 

its fleet of more than 200 trading vessels. Though the China trade is best known, 

Salem’s wealth derived more generally from the East Indies trade: Salem dominated 

the cotton trade with India and the pepper trade with Sumatra.2

With global commerce came an increased demand for geographical knowledge, 

and institutions developed in Salem to meet this need. In the colonial period, 

strong kinship and social networks were the primary conduits of global knowledge, 

augmented by fledgling libraries and fraternal groups. These associations became 

stronger in the Early Republic, as more institutional venues—such as libraries, 

retail establishments, and the museum—emerged to circulate ideas and information. In Salem, those who had firsthand global seafaring experience interacted with 

those who learned about the world through study. Exchanges of texts, images, and 

objects became the basis of deep fraternal bonding and played a role in solidifying 

the town’s class hierarchies. An elite class developed, characterized and united by 

knowledge of the wider world, particularly Asia and the rest of the Pacific Basin.

In the colonial period, sea captains in every substantial port organized marine 

societies.3 These charitable organizations provided assistance to disabled seamen 

and to those widowed and orphaned by the dangerous sea life. Founded in 1799, 

Salem’s East India Marine Society was more select. Its membership was limited to 

sea captains and supercargoes (that is, the head traders) who had rounded either 

the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn to engage in Asian trade. Thus right from 

the outset the by-laws of the East India Marine Society defined the elite of Salem’s 

elite. Because of this restriction, there were only 22 members at its founding in 

1799. By 1800, however, the number neared 50, and by 1805 there were 100 members, indicative of the extent and global reach of Salem’s trade.4

Part of the East India Marine Society’s collecting activities were directed toward its goals of furthering navigation and providing its members with safety and 

a competitive edge in trade. The society collected nautical charts, which members 

could borrow as they prepared for voyages. It also collected unique and personal 
Global Knowledge in the Early Republic 71

information. Members of this fraternal organization were required from the beginning to present the logs of their voyages to the library committee upon their 

return. Starting in 1801, the society even provided blank journals for seafarers. 

Nathaniel Bowditch, author of the path-breaking New American Practical Navigator, 

was named the Inspector of Journals after he returned from his last Asian voyage in 

1804. Bowditch arranged, analyzed, and bound the journals (which were sometimes 

illustrated with drawings) to allow members easier access to information on maneuvering harbors and conducting trade. In addition to firsthand information, the 

society’s library offered for circulation among members a selection of published 

sea chronicles, particularly very expensive engraved imported volumes—including 

books illustrating the voyages of Captain Cook, La Pérouse, and Vancouver. In 

these ways the East India Marine Society became an important center for the circulation of global knowledge and visual imagery of distant lands.

The East India Marine Society was unique among marine societies because its 

members were expected to contribute “curiosities” they personally had collected to 

its cabinet.5

 Mariners had always collected mementos of their voyages. Before the 

establishment of museums in America, these objects circulated much as books did—

through family and friendship networks. If marine societies collected artifacts, they 

did so in a haphazard manner. But the mandate of the new society included forming 

“a Museum of natural and artificial curiosities, particularly such as are to be found beyond the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn.”6 Salem’s sea captains recognized both 

the intellectual and practical values of acquiring and displaying these items for members and the townspeople. The assembled objects embodied both the accessibility of 

the world and the diversity of members’ experiences, and reinforced the captains’ and 

traders’ positions as men of status in Salem’s hierarchical society.

The idea for a museum germinated in summer 1799.7

 Captain Jonathan Carnes 

seems to have been the driving force behind the idea of collecting objects for the society’s museum. Carnes came from a seafaring family; his father had been a successful 

privateer during the Revolutionary War. In the late 1790s he pioneered the pepper 

trade with Sumatra, first in a series of secret voyages, then returning with full cargoes 

of over 150,000 pounds of pepper each in 1797, 1799, and 1801. Other merchants 

soon followed suit, trading directly at small ports on the north side of the island 

in order to avoid the mark-up expenses of Dutch middlemen.8

 Returning from his 

second voyage to Sumatra, Carnes donated the museum’s first acquisitions: objects 

from the natural world, including various shells and an elephant’s tooth, and cultural 

artifacts, including elaborate Malaysian gold boxes and a Sumatran pipe.9

Bentley wrote that the new East India Marine Society had decided “to make 

a cabinet” for such items and that he had helped the new society, which elected 
72 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Benjamin Hodges as president, to revise its articles of incorporation. The 

minister was fully supportive of the 

enterprise, calling it a “liberal & important design.”10 Bentley, a naturalist 

as well as a theologian, used the term 

“liberal” in the Enlightenment sense 

of scientific inquiry. He and the Salem 

sea captains saw the value of collecting 

specimens as far more than entertainment; it was firsthand participation in 

the eighteenth-century quest to study and make available natural history.

Knowing the minister’s deep interest in natural history, Reverend Bentley’s 

seagoing parishioners often brought him exotica from their journeys. His diary 

mentions such gifts in 1788, after he had been settled at the East Church for nearly 

five years. Captain Elkins gave him a Chinese razor; Captain West brought him 

Chinese copper coins. Captain Benjamin Hodges, Bentley’s close friend, presented 

him with some of the most intriguing items in his collection. In 1790 Hodges gave 

the minister “a Pike or Spear of Wood, with a Bow and two Arrows brought by the 

American Ship Columbia from Nootka Sound [in present-day British Columbia] 

to Canton, & Specimens of cloth from Sandwich Islands” [that is, present-day 

Hawaii]. Though Hodges had gone to China along the traditional Salem route of 

the eighteenth century—via the Cape of Good Hope and the Isle of France [now 

Mauritius], then across the Indian Ocean and on to China—the first artifacts he 

presented to his friend were items from the American side of the Pacific basin, 

where he had not traveled. From the same China trade season of 1790, Captain 

Henry Elkins also gave the minister Native American hooks and cloth from the 

Northwest coast along with French and Dutch coins and a “specimen of Chinese 

writing.”11 Thus the artifacts the captains brought back were truly global—from all 

around the world—and not simply evidence of where individuals had voyaged.

For Bentley, these objects were guides for learning about the physical world. Bentley 

is the Salem figure who comes closest to the ideal of collecting for the intensive study 

of natural history, pursued in America, for example, by Charles Willson Peale, who based 

much of the collecting and arrangement of his museum on the Linnaean system.12 Salem 

ministers, professional men, and sea captains were well aware of efforts in Philadelphia 

to develop a philosophical society, to publish journals on the model of the Royal Philosophical Transactions, and to display objects to educate viewers about the natural world. 

Some Salem merchants and mariners even donated objects to Peale’s museum and to the 

1. Ostrich Egg from the Cape of Good Hope. 6 3⁄10 in. 

long. Peabody Essex Museum, (East India Marine Society 502), Gift 

of Captain Benjamin Carpenter. Photo © Peabody Essex Museum.
Global Knowledge in the Early Republic 73

American Philosophical Society’s cabinet before 

the founding of their own. Bentley’s worldview 

was challenged and transformed through his encyclopedic reading and intensive study of global 

artifacts. He concluded that knowledge of all 

parts of the globe—his idealistic goal—might 

prove impossible. And, trained in traditional 

Congregational theology, as early as 1788 he 

moved toward what he called a more “rational 

Christianity,” saying he was “ready to receive 

truth upon proper evidence from whatever quarter it may come.” He worried about doubting 

the Trinity and began a slow drift to what would 

eventually become Unitarianism.13

Within two years of the museum’s beginning, Reverend Bentley recorded in his diary 

that more than 185 articles were on display 

at the East India Society’s meeting room. He 

wrote that at the museum he saw “images & 

paintings of Hindostan, China & Japan, with 

complete dresses in the Chinese fashion.” 

These were intermingled with “various specimens of the Oyster shells of Sumatra. . . . The 

Albatross, birds of paradise, parake[e]ts, & several birds. . . . Some antiquities. . . A 

few specimens of stones, ores, &c. not arranged, petrefactions, & curiosities.”14

In the early days, the members seem to have used the terms “cabinet” and “museum” interchangeably. Whatever they called it, it grew rapidly. From the 185 articles 

Bentley saw in 1801, the first catalogue published in 1821 listed 2,269 objects. The 

second catalogue of 1831 listed 4,299 objects. The contents of the collection mirrored the usual patterns of cabinets of curiosities (Figures 1, 2). There were natural 

curiosities such as ostrich eggs, stuffed penguins, and elephant tusks, and even hair 

shaved from an Indian Brahmin. And there were cultural curiosities such as ivory pagodas, Maori door lintels, Polynesian fans, and Native American masks.15

Some of the objects brought back to America may have been perceived as having 

value as fine art as well as curiosities. For instance, after his 1788–90 voyage to China, 

Captain Hodges gave Reverend Bentley one of the most significant Chinese sculptures 

now in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum (Figure 3). Bentley described 

“the Image of a Mandarin exceeding two feet in height, richly ornamented in the habit 

2. Pagoda, ca. 1800. China. Soapstone, 

nephrite, wood, brass, gold, and silk. Peabody Essex 

Museum, E9659 (East India Marine Society 173), 

Gift of Captain Nathaniel Ingersoll. Photo 

© Peabody Essex Museum.
74 East–West Interchanges in American Art

of his order.” This sculpture is unusual in that 

it has moving parts; it is a “nodder,” in which 

a weight on a wire slides into the hollow clay 

body, triggering another wire to move the head 

and an arm as it descends. Bentley noted that 

the motion was not graceful—rather it evoked 

a realism that was, as he described it, “inspiring the idea of life.” He had high praise for the 

craftsmanship of the textiles the figure wears, 

describing the red apron embroidered with a 

dragon and the beautiful blue of the gown. He 

also noted the sculptor’s talent: “The countenance pleasant, the posture inclined,” and the 

ease with which the hand holds a staff.16 In his 

study of Chinese artists who worked for the 

export market, Carl Crossman noted that this 

is one of the earliest sculptures exported to the 

American market. There was, however, a strong 

tradition of clay Chinese portrait sculpture exported to Britain and the continent throughout the eighteenth century.17 Bentley was 

certainly attuned to the contemporary discourses about sculpture as a fine art and may 

have perceived his gift as such.

What did global artifacts mean once they were brought home? For the collector, 

certainly, souvenirs enhanced personal memories. Objects also signaled their owners’ 

success, for life at sea was grueling, and completion of a voyage constituted a recognized achievement for a mariner of any rank. For captains and traders, artifacts held 

another layer of significance as signs of essential scientific, practical, and commercial 

knowledge. Those who possessed and displayed these Asian curiosities were men of 

accomplishment who had led a successful voyage—and returned a good profit to their 

investors. Beyond symbols of successful trading voyages, these objects were signs of 

intellectual aspirations. As Daniel Finamore observed, “[T]he museum closely linked 

commerce with enlightenment philosophy” and “placed mariners not only in the role 

of merchants but, simultaneously, that of intellectuals.”18 Exotic curiosities were also 

signs of American achievement in commerce, and they reinforced an emerging national identity as former British colonials who were becoming significant players in 

the global economy.

Insights into the meanings that the collection held for society members can be discerned from the toasts proposed at each of their annual meetings. Toasts at fraternal 

3. Figure of a Chinese Man, ca. 1790. 

China. Unfired clay, paint, and steel. Peabody Essex 

Museum, E7096 (East India Marine Society 235), 

Presented by Captain Benjamin Hodges to Reverend 

William Bentley in 1790, Anonymous gift. Photo 

© Peabody Essex Museum.
Global Knowledge in the Early Republic 75

organizations during the Early Republic signaled far more than momentary sentiment 

in the midst of a social event. They were prepared and written out in advance by committee and often sent to the local newspaper to publish. They presented the elite perspective on important social, political, and intellectual currents of the day. From the very 

first, some of the toasts at the East India Marine Society dinners were dedicated to the 

collection. One 1804 toast, for example, commemorated: “A Cabinet. That every mariner may possess the history of the world.” This toast clearly defines objects as a source 

of knowledge. And it gives history an expansive resonance, evoking natural history as 

well as political history. Another toast from the same year was to: “Natural history. May 

commerce never forget its obligations.”19 It suggests that beyond economic motives, the 

captains and merchants practiced learned and gentlemanly pursuits, such as geographical and scientific inquiry. At the elaborate dinners, toasts often linked multiple types of 

knowledge that are today considered more distinct, and they suggested this knowledge 

would bring practical mercantile benefits.

Three toasts from 1809 make clear that mariners—at least these New England Federalist mariners—saw free trade as an essential part of American national 

identity. Imagine a room filled with cigar smoke and men downing several glasses 

of brandy, rum, gin, and Madeira. After the standard toasts to George Washington 

and Christopher Columbus, and the American Navy, were the following:

To: “Commerce, it is our birthright; and ought to be as free as the winds which woft 

our ships.”

To: “The cause of Liberty throughout the World.”

To: “American enterprise. May it never be restrained by lawless power, or rival jealousy.”20

Taken together, the toasts reveal this fraternal organization was bound together 

by useful specialized global knowledge. The collection not only reinforced the wonders of nature, it reinforced members’ self-perception as men of knowledge, taste, 

civilization, leadership—and business acumen.

But what did the mariners think about their Asian trading partners? Their 

journals and logs and their letters home leave no doubt that they believed in their 

own cultural superiority. They saw themselves as recently released from the bondage of British colonialism that had controlled their mercantile exchanges, and, as 

we have seen, they believed mightily in the right to free trade. They were continually frustrated by the elaborate Chinese trading system, which confined outsiders 

to a small area of Canton and insisted that all commerce filter through designated 

trading posts called hongs. Language barriers were great, as was suspicion on both 

sides. In general, the American seamen saw the Chinese as dishonest, superstitious, 
76 East–West Interchanges in American Art

cruel, and corrupt, as well as oppressed 

by the authoritarian rule of the emperor.21 But they sailed to the other side of 

the world because they valued Chinese 

inventiveness and craftsmanship, particularly in the production of porcelain and 

silks—technologies that could not yet 

be replicated in Europe or America—and 

because they wanted tea.

The only way to break down such 

wariness and suspicion was to develop relationships among individuals. Mariners 

operated in contact zones between cultures, and global knowledge gave mariners the confidence and ability to operate 

in these zones.22 In her book Yankee India, 

Susan Bean described how gifts between 

American and Asian merchants helped to 

develop friendly, reliable business relationships. Some of the objects they presented to 

their shore agents had deep American cultural resonance. As Partha Mitter has noted 

earlier in this volume, in 1801 a group of American merchants gave the prominent 

Calcutta merchant Ramdulal Dey a life-size copy by William Winstanley of Gilbert 

Stuart’s iconic Lansdowne portrait of George Washington. No doubt this nationalistic gift was meant to reinforce their message to the Indian trader that their country 

had recently become independent from the British empire.23

The gifts exchanged between Salem captain George Nichols and Bombay (now 

Mumbai) merchant Nusserwanjee Maneckjee Wadia around 1800 were more personal 

and may be more typical. When Nusserwanjee learned that Nichols was engaged to 

be married upon his return, he helped him to select the highest quality fabric for 

his fiancée’s wedding dress. The merchant then gave the captain an elegant camel’s 

hair shawl for his future wife, and the captain reciprocated by giving the merchant a 

20-volume illustrated set of William Mavor’s Voyages, a fairly expensive collection of 

tales of historical sea expeditions that was popular in Salem. As Bean observed, “Gift 

exchanges like these built relationships in the contact zone, where expectations were 

imperfectly understood and legal constraints were treated pragmatically.”24

In 1803 Nusserwanjee donated objects directly to the new museum in Salem. As a Parsi, a member of an ethnic and religious group in India descended from ancient migrations 

of Persian Zoroastrians, Nusserwanjee was a minority in a land of Hindus and Muslims. 

4. Nusserwanjee Maneckjee Wadia, 

ca. 1800. China or India. Oil on canvas, 39 × 29 in. Peabody 

Essex Museum, M245, Gift of John R. Dalling. Photo 

© Peabody Essex Museum.
Global Knowledge in the Early Republic 77

Thus the merchant may have been especially sensitive to intercultural contacts. His gifts to the 

museum—shoes, robe, shawl, and turban that 

made up a “complete Parsee dress”—educated 

Americans about the ethnic complexities of India 

and specifics of his own group. The same year, the 

Salem captain John R. Dalling gave the museum 

an oil painting of Nusserwanjee, which became 

the basis for a sculpture of the Indian merchant 

that the East India Marine Society commissioned 

to display the clothing he had donated (Figure 

4).25 The painting suggests Nusserwanjee’s role 

as an agent between two parties. An Indian-style 

carpet lies under his Western-style desk and chair. 

His pen and paper signal his involvement in the 

business of trade. Displayed back in Salem, such 

portraits reminded sea captains about their steadfast and trustworthy agents abroad and illustrated 

for the townspeople the captains’ mastery of the 

complexities of global trade. 

At the museum, Nusserwanjee shared a home with a life-size figure of Yamqua, 

a Chinese merchant, that Captain Benjamin Hodges gave as a gift to the museum in 

1801 (Figure 5). Museum records are sketchy; they say Hodges donated “an original 

dress of Yamqua.” The body was formed of iron and fabric by carpenter Jonathan 

Bright in Salem, and the head and hands carved in wood by Samuel McIntire and 

likely painted by Michele Felice Cornè.26 Carl Crossman has suggested that McIntire 

worked from an original guide, perhaps a clay portrait that had broken, because the 

realism is readily apparent—right down to the small pox scars on the merchant’s 

face.27 Or McIntire may have worked from Hodges’s description of the merchant.28

Visitors never failed to remark on the dramatic and authentic impression made 

by life-size sculptures of Asian merchants. These Asian merchants were the elite 

counterparts to the American traders. As such, they were presented as individuals, 

unlike the more generic representation of cultures in the society’s cabinet. While 

they reminded sea captains of their trustworthy agents abroad, more importantly, 

they illustrated the complexities of global trade and acknowledged the Salem captains’ ownership of privileged contacts and information.

International trade was the basis for the Salem’s wealth in the Early Republic. Institutions such as libraries, fraternal organizations, and the museum arose to meet the deep 

5. Yamqua, 1801. Head and hands carved 

by Samuel McIntire, painting attributed to Michele 

Felice Cornè, body constructed by Jonathan Bright. 

Wood, paint, human hair, moss, iron, and cotton duck, 

72 × 20 × 20 in. Peabody Essex Museum, E7161, Gift 

of Captain Benjamin Hodges. Photo by Dennis Helmar 

© Peabody Essex Museum.
78 East–West Interchanges in American Art

desire for global knowledge. Awareness of the global artifacts was widespread throughout 

the town; even those who did not venture into the East India Marine Society’s museum 

saw the “curiosities” as they were carried throughout the streets of the city on the days of 

the society’s annual meeting or they read descriptions of them in the newspapers. Ownership of objects from the South Seas, India, China, Indonesia, and other places signified 

possession of specialized knowledge, which was associated with elite status. So was the 

wearing of imported silks and cashmere shawls and the use of ivory fans and elaborate 

sets of Chinese porcelains, especially if they were personalized with monograms that reinforced their direct connections. Thus global artifacts contributed to and reinforced social 

hierarchies. And as physical embodiments of the new American international trade, global 

artifacts also symbolized America’s new place in international commerce.

Notes

I am grateful for the assistance of the librarians at the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, 

particularly Barbara Kampus, Kathy Flynn, and Irene Axelrod, who have worked extensively with the 

papers of the East India Marine Society. I also thank colleagues who read drafts of this article: Jessica 

Lanier, Joanne Lukitsh, Kayleigh Merritt, Josilyn DeMarco, and Patricia Hills.

1. William Bentley, The Diary of William Bentley, D.D., Pastor of the East Church, Salem, Massachusetts.

4 vols. (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1962), quotation from entry for January 4,1804, 3:68. A palanquin 

is a seat carried on poles borne on the shoulders of servants; American and European traders in 

India frequently commented on its use by elites in India for transportation.

2. There are few modern histories of Salem; a good summary is National Park Service, Maritime 

Salem in the Age of Sail (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1987). See also Dane 

Anthony Morrison and Nancy Lusignan Schultz, eds., Salem: Place, Myth, Memory (Boston: 

Northeastern University Press, 2004); James Duncan Phillips, Salem in the Eighteenth Century

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1937); Salem and the Indies: The Story of the Great Commercial Era 

of the City (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1947); and Pepper and Pirates. Adventures in the Sumatra 

Pepper Trade of Salem (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1949).

3. Some of these organizations still exist, such as the Boston Marine Society (founded 1742), the Marine 

Society of the City of New York (founded 1770), the Portland Marine Society (founded 1796), and the 

Salem Marine Society (founded 1766, distinct from the East India Marine Society in Salem).

4. The most thorough and synthetic history of the East India Marine Society is Walter Muir Whitehill, 

The East India Marine Society and the Peabody Museum of Salem: A Sesquicentennial History (Salem, MA: 

Peabody Museum, 1949). More recent interpretive articles include Daniel Finamore, “Displaying the Sea 

and Defining America: Early Exhibitions at the Salem East India Marine Society,” in the online Journal for 

Maritime Research (May 2002), www.jmr.nmm.ac.uk; and James M. Lindgren, “‘That Every Mariner May 

Possess a History of the World’: A Cabinet for the East India Marine Society of Salem.” New England 

Quarterly 68 (June 1995): 179–205. doi:10.2307/366255.

5. Finamore, “Displaying the Sea and Defining America,” makes this point.

6. This is the wording from the 1808 by-laws, which were reprinted in the museum’s 1821 and 

1831 catalogues. The 1799 by-laws simply state that the society may collect or accept donations 

of “Books, Papers, Charts, Curiosities, and other such things.” Original documents are in the papers 

of the East India Marine Society (MH-88), Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum. Reprint of 1799 

document in Whitehill, The East India Marine Society, 177–81.

7. The founding captains asked Bentley for his comments on their written articles of incorporation 

in August 1799; Bentley, The Diary of William Bentley, entry for August 26, 1799, 2:316.

8. On the origins of the pepper trade with Sumatra see Phillips, Salem and the Indies, 92–100, and 

Phillips, Pepper and Pirates. Phillips credits Carnes with inspiring the East India Marine Society cabinet, but 

he did not return until October 1799, a few months after the society had been conceptualized.
Global Knowledge in the Early Republic 79

9. Whitehill, The East India Marine Society, 34.

10. Bentley, Diary, entry for October 21, 1799, 2:321.

11. Bentley, Diary, entry for May 31, 1790, 174–75.

12. David R. Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience

(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), esp. 35, 36, 57–58, 113 on Linnaeus. See 

also Charles Coleman Sellers, Mr. Peale’s Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Popular 

Museum of Natural Science and Art (New York: W. W. Norton and Co, 1980), esp. 15, 67, 106, 162 on 

Linnaeus, and 16–17, 36–37, 90, 206 on the influence of Comte de Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle.

13. Whitfield J. Bell Jr., “The Cabinet of the American Philosophical Society” in A Cabinet of Curiosities: 

Five Episodes in the Evolution of American Museums (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1967), 

1–34. The American Philosophical Society (APS) was founded in 1742, suspended, and then revived in 

1769. Bell comments that in the early years of the APS museum, objects were “merely accumulated; 

they were not collected.” On Bentley’s theology see J. Rixey Ruffin, A Paradise of Reason: William Bentley 

and Enlightenment Christianity in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

14. Bentley, Diary, entry for August 13, 1801, 2:382.

15. At first, there seems to have been no attempt at arrangement. After 1837 the museum was 

arranged by function—for example, all cooking utensils, or hats, or weapons, placed together, no 

matter their country of origin. This organization effectively erased, in the public domain, the specific 

geographic specialties that the sea captains had worked so hard to attain. It romanticized exotica 

rather than educated about culture.

16. Bentley, Diary, entry for June 5, 1790, 1:175.

17. Carl L. Crossman, The Decorative Arts of the China Trade (Wappingers’ Falls, NY: Antique Book 

Collectors’ Club, 1991), 307–18.

18. Finamore, “Displaying the Sea and Defining America.”

19. The 1804 toasts are reprinted in Whitehill, The East India Marine Society, 18–19.

20. The 1809 toasts are transcribed from the original document in the East India Marine Society 

papers (MH-88). A recent book that emphasizes the issue of federal-period free trade in the 

development of the American economy is James Fichter, So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade 

Transformed Anglo-America Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

21. Jessica Lanier, “The Post-Revolutionary Ceramics Trade in Salem, Massachusetts, 1783–1812” (M.A. 

thesis, Bard Graduate Center, 2004), 104–105; Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The 

American Image of the Chinese, 1785–1882 (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1969), 18, 22–30.

22. Susan Bean and Mary Louise Pratt use this term. See Bean, Yankee India (Salem MA: Peabody 

Essex Museum, 2001); and Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: 

Routledge, 1992).

23. Bean, Yankee India, 72, 74.

24. Ibid., 71–72. William Mavor, Historical Account of the Most Celebrated Voyages, Travels, and 

Discoveries, from the Time of Columbus to the Present Period, 25 vols. (London: Printed for E. 

Newbery, 1796–1801).

25. The Peabody Essex Museum formerly attributed this work to Spoilum, the most celebrated 

Cantonese portrait painter of the turn of the nineteenth century, perhaps following the discussion 

in Crossman, The Decorative Arts of the China Trade, 52–53. The canvas, treatment of facial features, 

shading of the head, and light penumbra on the right side of the head suggest Spoilum, but certain 

details, such as the Indian pattern on the rug and the fact that Spoilum rarely painted full-length 

studies, raise questions about the Chinese attribution.

26. Dean T. Lahikanen, Samuel McIntire: Carving an American Style (Salem, MA: Peabody Essex 

Museum, 2007), 83–85, 102.

27. Crossman, The Decorative Arts of the China Trade, 320.

28. Lahikanen, Samuel McIntire, 83–85, 102.
Images of American 

Racial Stereotypes in 

Nineteenth-Century Japan

Nicole Fabricand-Person
81

In the mid-nineteenth century, after more than 200 years of isolation from 

the West, residents of Japan were officially introduced to America, a country with a unique set of artistic conventions for race. As the Japanese encountered Americans of European descent and their images of the American 

“Indian” and “Negro” in newspapers, magazines, dime novels, and even in 

scientifically sanctioned history and geography books, they became aware of 

the racial stratification that existed in the white Western world and were, to 

some extent, forced to self-reflexively evaluate their place within it.1

 This 

essay examines the exportation of U.S. racial stereotypes and their adoption 

in Japanese art and culture.

For the Japanese people, the reaction to first contact with Americans 

was predicated on earlier relationships with European nations. Encounters with the West in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had 

proven unsatisfactory, and in 1639 the Japanese government ordered the 

country’s borders closed to guard against perceived threats of foreign aggression and challenges to the Tokugawa Shogun’s rule. Europeans were 

expelled, and Japanese people traveling abroad were not allowed to return. 

The only Western foreigners permitted to stay and trade in Japan were 

the Dutch, who were confined to a small manmade island off the coast of 

Nagasaki, where their activity was strictly controlled. For more than two 

centuries the government severely limited Japan’s exposure to the rest of 

the world.

This situation changed with the arrival of a fleet of American ships commanded by Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry in 1853. Although Japan 

initially resisted a relationship with America and the West, Perry succeeded 
82 East–West Interchanges in American Art

in opening the country 

to trade with the United 

States, and eventually with 

other nations as well, when 

he returned in 1854 with 

the threat of force. Soon 

after treaties with the Western countries were signed, 

a foreign settlement was 

established within the port 

city of Yokohama.

Not surprisingly, the 

presence of exotic-looking 

foreigners in Japan, with 

their strange hairstyles, 

feathered hats, and unusual 

clothing, fueled an interest 

in images of the Westerners. Woodblock print publishers in the nearby capital 

city of Edo (renamed Tokyo in 1868) quickly capitalized on this fascination 

with the newcomers in the 

foreign settlement, issuing a new kind of woodblock print known as the “Yokohama 

picture” (yokohama-e). These prints were mass-produced for a general audience that 

could easily afford them and were sold by the thousands between 1859 and 1862, 

when their popularity began to wane.2 Some artists appear to have traveled to Yokohama from Edo to “accurately” capture the appearances of their subjects. Access 

to the Westerners in these early years of the small Yokohama foreign settlement was 

difficult, however. The foreigners’ residences were segregated from those of Japanese merchants, and their travel outside the boundaries of Yokohama was restricted. 

Most artists, therefore, drew their inspiration from newspapers and magazines that 

trickled into Japan through the foreign settlement.3

The Western inhabitants of Yokohama—Dutch, French, Russian, English, and 

American—were all represented in these prints.4

 To the Japanese artists who designed them, however, these strangers all looked much the same. Other than an occasional costume flourish, the foreigners were distinguishable only by the accompanying 

1. Utagawa Yoshifuji, Americans Strolling About [Americajin yu-kyo-], 

1861. Woodblock print, 14 15⁄16 × 9 11⁄16 in. Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian 

Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of the Daval Foundation, from the Collection of 

Ambassador and Mrs. William Leonhart.
Images of U.S. Racial Stereotypes in Nineteenth-Century Japan 83

text or by a printed inscription within the composition that noted their nationalities. The emphasis was on the exoticism of the subject matter as a whole; specific 

cultural differences were secondary.

Americans—fair-skinned people of European descent—were a popular subject 

among the pictures of foreigners in Yokohama (Figure 1). The definition of “American,” however, was a complicated one. Unlike the homogeneous depictions of the 

peoples of Holland, Russia, France, and England seen in foreign publications, the 

image of the white Euro-American was but one of the representations of Americans 

that was coming into the Japanese consciousness. The books, newspapers, and magazines that were reaching Japan through the foreign settlement depicted two other 

kinds of American people: Indians and Negroes. These “others” came to be known 

to the Japanese primarily through the filter of stories and illustrations conceived by 

the white Western world—accounts and pictures that provided a subtext defining 

nonwhites as less than human. The fact that this message was clearly received is evident in the nineteenth-century Japanese labeling of images of Native Americans and 

other non-white Americans with terms like Amerika no dojin (“American savages”) 

and Amerika no bo (“American ‘boy’”) in reference to adult males.5

Americans: The Early Years

White Americans of European descent were not the first Americans to be introduced to Japan through images. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Dutch traders had brought maps that included quasi-scientific illustrations 

of the “people of different nations” and featured (correctly) images of Indians as 

the representative culture of America.6

 These maps were widely disseminated, and 

it was through them that Dutch cartographers established global conventions for 

portraying the peoples of different nations—people with whom the Japanese had 

no experience and about whom they had no visual knowledge. These models were 

copied and codified by Japanese artists in the early seventeenth century in large 

paintings made for a wealthy military class interested in exotic themes.7

A celebrated example of this type of painting is a pair of eight-panel folding 

screens entitled Bankoku ezu: Sekai zu/Niju-hachi toshi zu (Pictorial Map of All Countries: Map of the World and Twenty-eight Cities) in the Imperial Household Collection 

in Tokyo. Almost six feet high and over 12 feet wide (each), this imposing set 

of screens is painted in ink and color on paper. On the right screen the anonymous artist has depicted 28 Western cities and a large map of Portugal derived 

from maps by the Dutch mapmakers Willem and Joan Blaeu. Above the cities, 

eight rulers of the Christian and Muslim worlds face off in pairs.8

 The left 

screen features a map of the world flanked on either side by 42 pairs of costumed 
84 East–West Interchanges in American Art

figures representing the peoples of the world (Figure 2). These people are organized following Dutch models, what some scholars have called the “conquerors 

on the right and conquered on the left.” While care seems to have been taken to 

distinguish the different nationalities and to present them in an unbiased, almost 

anthropological way, there is no denying that the painting presents an iconography of civilized versus uncivilized—with the grouping of white and light-skinned 

on the right and nonwhite on the left, the richly clothed on the right and the partially clothed on the left, the weapon as accoutrement on the right and weapon 

as useful tool on the left.9

Through these Dutch-inspired paintings of the people of the world we get a 

sense that, for the first time, the Japanese had begun to think self-reflexively about 

their place in the global context. In most of the works the artists have placed the 

pair of Japanese representatives at the bottom of the “light-skinned” side of the 

maps, suggesting that they saw themselves as part of the “civilized world.” In this 

painting the artist has gone a step further to give the Japanese female figure an 

atypical, long and curly hairstyle, making her appear more like a Renaissance woman 

than a Japanese lady.10 In the nineteenth century, after the long break in regular 

contact with the West, the same hierarchy seen in these paintings would once again 

be clearly articulated to the Japanese—this time by Americans.

2. Bankoku ezu: Sekai zu (Map of the World and Twenty-eight Famous Cities), Momoyama to Edo period, 17th century. 

Details from a pair of eight-panel screens, each screen: 70 5

⁄16 × 191 1⁄2 in. The Museum of the Imperial Collections,

Sannomaru Sho-zo-kan, Tokyo.
Images of U.S. Racial Stereotypes in Nineteenth-Century Japan 85

Images of American Indians

Despite the self-imposed isolation begun in 1639, by the early eighteenth century the Shogunate had relaxed some of the laws regarding contact with the Dutch. 

Western books could be purchased and translated. Rangaku or “Dutch learning” 

became an essential source of information on science and technology, and, with the 

extremely high literacy rate in Japan, thousands of copies of translated Dutch volumes were published and sold. Dutch cartography, perpetuating the visual images 

of the “people of the world,” was once again studied as interest in the West grew.11

Generally speaking though, the image of the American Indian—placed among the 

many “uncivilized” peoples on these maps—was rather benign. Native Americans, 

usually with the label Amerika or “people of America” (Amerika no jin) were depicted 

as one group of the many scantily clad, brown-skinned people wearing feathered 

headdresses that inhabited the Americas.12 It was not until the nineteenth century 

and interaction with the United States that the image of the American Indian began 

to change from a rather impersonal anthropological representation of earlier periods into something more savage and threatening.

The relationship between Native Americans and white Americans in the United 

States was constantly changing during the latter half of the nineteenth century, 

and, consequently, images of the American Indian that came to Japan took a variety 

of forms. This was reflected in contemporary newspapers such as Harper’s Weekly 

that featured everything from articles on the so-called noble savage—with culturally edifying engravings of what was perceived to be controlled Indian life on the 

plains—to advertisements and cartoons of savages wielding knives. The Indian as a 

sexually threatening savage was a popular literary theme in the United States, and a 

staple in luridly illustrated publications coming to Japan like Beadle’s Dime Novels.13 

This was the image that ultimately came to represent the American Indian in the 

minds of the Japanese.

The greatest influence on this choice of how the Indian would be both perceived 

and represented in Japan seems to have been the prolific writings of the renowned 

scholar Fukuzawa Yukichi, who not only made two trips to the United States, but 

was a leading figure in a zealous attempt by a new imperial Japanese government 

(which came to power in 1868) to undertake the modernization of Japan. This was 

a complex project that involved the seemingly contradictory embrace of Western 

culture and the self-conscious revival of old court rituals.14

Woodblock prints, a popular and influential form of media in nineteenth-century Japan, capitalized on this imperially mandated modernization effort. Pictures 

showing technological innovations like the steam train, silk-reeling machines, and 

portraits of the emperor and his family wearing modern Western dress ultimately 
86 East–West Interchanges in American Art

became a means of visually educating the public to move toward what was referred 

to at the time as bunmei kaika or “civilization and enlightenment.” Fukuzawa’s writings were another means of educating the Japanese people. His ideas were not based 

as much on his personal experience in the West, however, as they were on information from illustrated American geography books such as Samuel Augustus Mitchell’s A System of Modern Geography, which he translated and interpreted for Japanese 

audiences. It was Mitchell—and therefore Fukuzawa’s—theory that the people of 

the world fell into general categories: the civilized, the semi-civilized, and the uncivilized.15 Not surprisingly, Europeans and Americans of European descent were 

placed in the “civilized” category. Native Americans and dark-skinned Americans of 

African descent were placed in the “uncivilized” category. The Japanese people, and 

other Asians, fell into the “semi-civilized” category. Undaunted by this designation, 

Fukuzawa wrote that, with this knowledge that they fell between “civilized” and 

“uncivilized,” the people of Japan—in order to become modern—should strive to 

become civilized like the (white) peoples of Europe and America, hence providing 

the rationale for Westernization in the guise of modernization.16 In the chapter 

entitled “Western Civilization as Our Goal” in the 1875 text Bunmeiron no gairyaku 

(“Outline for a Theory of Civilization”), for example, he states:

When we are talking about civilization in the world today, the nations of Europe and the United States of America are the most highly 

civilized, while the Asian countries such as Turkey, China, and Japan, 

may be called semi-developed countries, and Africa and Australia are to 

be counted as still primitive lands. . . . [T]he designations “civilized,” 

“semi-developed,” and “primitive” have been universally accepted by 

people all over the globe.

“[T]he attainment of modern civilization is of the greatest importance,” he later adds. 

“ . . .We have only now reached the stage where true progress can be envisioned.”17

Images played a powerful role in this propaganda, in part because Fukuzawa was 

also indirectly involved in another part of the modernization effort: the transformation of the Japanese educational system. In 1872 new textbooks were required, 

and Fukuzawa’s illustrated Sekai kunizukushi (“Nations of the World”), an abridged 

translation and adaptation of several geography and history books published in 

the United States, became an officially mandated textbook for Japanese schools. 

First published in 1869 as a text for both adults and children, it was reprinted 

several times and sold over a million copies. Sekai kunizukushi greatly influenced how 

Japanese people, from childhood, viewed the Western world and the permutations 

of “civilization.”18 Its contents consequently shaped the Japanese conception of 
Images of U.S. Racial Stereotypes in Nineteenth-Century Japan 87

the American Indian. In Sekai kunizukushi Fukuzawa describes the discovery of the 

Indians (injiyan) by Christopher Columbus, their life on the plains, and their dwindling numbers. He also includes an illustration (Figure 3) of Native Americans, 

with the caption, written within the frame, explaining: “Savages of America Beating 

European People to Death.” This was an image drawn from the American geography and history books he used as his source material—one that was sociologically 

and scientifically sanctioned by the Western authors he held in such high regard.19

Variations of images on this theme appear in countless American books in the 

nineteenth century. Despite Fukuzawa’s belief in their authenticity, however, the 

authors of these history and geography texts were not traveling across America to 

sketch true-to-life depictions of native peoples. They too were often drawing from 

an earlier visual source—a powerful image found in the first American history 

painting to be accepted by the Paris Salon: the 1804 painting of The Murder of Jane 

McCrea by the American artist John Vanderlyn (Figure 4). Although the painting 

did not create the initial excitement the artist had hoped for in Paris, it indirectly 

began the codification of the image of the American Indian that would, in a variety of permutations, transcend its time and place. It was a pictorial convention so 

pervasive that it was the model on which many illustrated articles, books, cartoons, 

advertisements, and dime novel covers were derived throughout the nineteenth and 

early twentieth centuries.20

3. “Savages of America Beating European People to Death.” Woodblock print, 3 1⁄4 × 4 3⁄4 in. From Fukuzawa Yukichi,

Sekai kunizukushi [Nations of the World] (ca. 1868–71 reprinting). Collection of the author.
88 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Vanderlyn’s painting depicts a 

young American woman being scalped 

by savage Indians in the employ of the 

British army during the Revolutionary 

War. It related a story based on actual 

events that took place in 1777 but 

continued to capture the imagination 

of the American public for more than 

a hundred years. The subject was engraved, painted, and lithographed by 

artists as popular as Currier & Ives 

well into the early twentieth century, 

with most versions closely adhering to 

the Vanderlyn prototype.21 Fukuzawa 

derived his image of the American Indian from illustrations like these, heavily influenced by the convention established by Vanderlyn.

That Fukuzawa’s representation of the American Indian became 

part of the Japanese consciousness is 

clearly seen in an 1879 woodblock 

print by the artist Adachi Ginko- and 

in the kabuki play on which that 

print was based (Figure 5).22 The 

print is an illustration of the play 

The Strange Tale of the Castaways: A 

Western Kabuki, produced in 1879 by 

the celebrated theatre owner Morita Kan’ya and playwright Kawatake 

Mokuami. Fresh from a highly acclaimed performance of a play in 

honor of and attended by General 

Ulysses S. Grant two months earlier, they hoped to capitalize on the 

publicity and on their celebrity by 

writing and bringing to the stage a 

play about Japanese people traveling 

4. John Vanderlyn, The Murder of Jane McCrea, 1804. 

Oil on canvas, 32 1

⁄2 × 26 1⁄2 in. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum 

of Art, Hartford, CT, Purchased by Subscription. Photo, 

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York.

5. Adachi Ginko-, The Strange Tale of the Castaways: 

A Western Kabuki [Hyo-ryu kidan seiyo- kabuki]: The Desert Plains of 

America, 1879. Woodblock print, 14 3

⁄16 × 9 5⁄8 in. Princeton 

University Art Museum, Museum purchase, Anne van Biema 

Collection Fund. Photo by Bruce White.
Images of U.S. Racial Stereotypes in Nineteenth-Century Japan 89

through America and Europe. In 

this illustration of the beginning of Act II, Adachi Ginko- has 

depicted the dangerous desert 

plains of America. There has 

been a train crash, which has left 

these young Japanese travelers in 

Western dress victim to the sexual and barbarous nature of the 

bright red, barefoot, and featheradorned American savages (as 

they are described in the yellow 

cartouches within the composition) who loom over them. It is 

clear in the positioning of the 

figures—especially the standing 

Indian wielding the club—and 

the landscape with a large tree 

and lush grass in the background 

that the ultimate model for this 

woodblock print was Vanderlyn’s 

painting of The Murder of Jane McCrea. In its own context it recaptures the drama of the earlier work, and we sense the terror that Japanese audiences 

must have felt as they viewed such an image. Copied in the name of authenticity 

from American prototypes, the depiction of the red savage wielding a weapon became the accepted image of the American Indian in nineteenth-century Japan.

Images of the American Negro

Another of Adachi Ginko-’s woodblock prints illustrating The Strange Tale of 

the Castaways hints at the images that were being cultivated in Japan of the third 

type of American coming into the national consciousness: the American Negro 

(Figure 6).

Producer Morita Kan’ya had the revolutionary idea of ending his production 

with a “play within a play” for which he would hire real Western musicians to 

perform for both the characters in the story and the kabuki audience watching the 

performance. He brought in a troupe of English and American performers touring 

Asia at the time who, among other things, sang contemporary operettas, played the 

6. Adachi Ginko-, The Strange Tale of the Castaways: A Western 

Kabuki [Hyo-ryu kidan seiyo- kabuki]: Theatrical Scene with Foreigners, 

1879. Woodblock print, 141

⁄4 × 91⁄2 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

New York, Bequest of William S. Lieberman. Photo © Metropolitan 

Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York.
90 East–West Interchanges in American Art

violin, and performed the Highland fling. As we can see in this print, there was also 

a comic number based on the American minstrel show staple Brudder Bones.

As Vanderlyn’s representation of the Indian as a savage killer became the convention for portraying the American Indian, so too did this minstrel figure portrayed with wooly hair, a dull gray-colored face, and exaggerated, almost ape-like 

features become one of the conventions for portraying the American Negro in 

nineteenth-century Japan. The black-faced minstrel was an image exported from the 

United States in a variety of media, and it is clear from the positioning of the figure 

with his arms and legs spread wide that Adachi Ginko- is working from a standardized image for this character of Brudder Bones.23

The minstrel show had been known to the Japanese as early as 1854 through 

paintings of the one performed following a large banquet given by Perry for Japanese guests after his second arrival in Japan.24 It was performed by some of his 

crew members, who blacked-up their faces with burnt cork to perform a number of 

songs, and is recorded as having delighted the Japanese audience.25

Black people (Africans) and images of black people were not new to Japan in 

the mid-nineteenth century. They too had appeared on Dutch maps and Japanese 

interpretations of these maps in the “uncivilized” category. Yet contemporary records suggest that there was a certain reverence for the Africans who came to Japan 

in the late sixteenth century as both crewmen and slaves of European traders. Many 

Japanese people thought their dark skin indicated that they were from India, the 

land of Buddha’s birth, and they came from miles around to see them. This interest 

is evidenced in early-seventeenth-century paintings of the port of Nagasaki, showing Portuguese traders and clergy members with their Javanese and African slaves. 

In these works there is only a slight difference in appearance between the slaves and 

their masters. The skin and hair color is not the same, and the slaves are barefoot; 

otherwise there is little differentiation in their features and form—they were all 

strange and exotic foreigners. They were—and this was what was important at the 

time—not Japanese. Gradually, however, the subhuman treatment of these African 

slaves by the white Europeans with whom the Japanese identified caused them to 

feel that they also should despise them and see them as inferior.

In the Yokohama prints made in the early 1860s artists adopted different approaches in portraying dark-skinned people. Works by artists like Utagawa Sadahide, who is believed to have traveled to the foreign settlement to study his subjects, 

reveal an interpretation similar to the early-seventeenth-century paintings of the 

Portuguese and their slaves at Nagasaki; beyond skin color, there is little difference 

in their appearance. In a woodblock print of a salesroom of a foreign mercantile 

firm in Yokohama, for example, we see a woman who is described in a cartouche as 
Images of U.S. Racial Stereotypes in Nineteenth-Century Japan 91

a “black laundress.”26 Except for the grayish coloring of her skin, however, 

she looks just like the 

white women in the room. 

It is interesting, though, 

that she is the only woman identified by a cartouche. Perhaps it is because 

she is so similar in appearance to the other women 

that the artist felt she had 

to be labeled as different. 

This sensitive approach to 

the subject contrasts with 

the treatment of black 

American men we see in 

Yokohama prints.

In a Yokohama print 

by the artist Ichiryusai 

Yoshitoyo, for example, we 

see another type of depiction of the American Negro. These men are not 

performers, conforming to the conventions of the minstrel, but sailors who came 

to Japan on merchant ships as both slaves and free men. They are dark-skinned, 

half-naked, and barefoot and, despite being served food and drink by a woman (who 

appears to be white), they are the quintessential image of the definition of “uncivilized” in appearance (Figure 7). The title of the print in the upper right corner 

telling us that these are Amerika kuronbo- (American black “boys”/inferiors) informs 

these images. It does not contain the word jin or “person,” the term used for depictions of white European and American men and women in Yokohama prints, but the 

distinctively different ending bo.

Like the representation of the minstrel, the model for these figures appears to 

be the visual documentation of Perry and his crew. There are two images of Negro 

sailors in the earlier scrolls. Both have naked torsos with the same defined muscles 

of the men seen in the woodblock print made about six years later. They have baggy 

short pants and scarves which are held or hung around their necks. It is interesting to 

7. Ichiryu-sai Yoshitoyo, American Black Men [Amerika kuronbo-], 1860. 

Woodblock print, 14 5

⁄16 × 9 5⁄8 in. Harvard Art Museums, Arthur M. Sackler 

Gallery, Bequest of William S. Lieberman. Photo, Imaging Department 

© President and Fellows of Harvard College.
92 East–West Interchanges in American Art

note that in the two watercolor paintings of Perry’s trip and this Yokohama print, 

the clothing, the scarves, and the definition of their nude muscular bodies all have 

an uncanny resemblance to paintings and sculptures of Buddhist demons turned 

guardians who are threatening in their fierce protection of Buddhist law. The appropriation of this form in both the 1854 paintings and in this 1860 print further 

emphasized the “uncivilized,” possibly hidden demonic nature of the American 

Negro, known to the majority of the nineteenth-century Japanese population only 

through pictures like these. This too was a subtle message to the Japanese audience 

of the racial stratification that existed in the West.

Relatively speaking, there are few images of Native Americans and Americans of 

African descent in Japanese art of the nineteenth century, and this helped to solidify a 

singular impression of these “other Americans.” It is important, however, to acknowledge these works that were derived from exported American models, because they 

created a negative view of the Indian and Negro that existed well into the twentieth 

century. As pictures of the Japanese themselves began to trickle into Japan through 

the foreign settlement at Yokohama—images often less than flattering with exaggerated features and dark skin—the depictions of Indians and Negroes also helped them 

to consider their own place in the global community as defined by white America.

Notes

1. The terms “Indian” and “Negro” are used in this essay to reflect nineteenth-century American parlance.

2. For a detailed examination and illustrations of Yokohama prints, see Ann Yonemura, Yokohama: 

Prints from Nineteenth-Century Japan (Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery/Smithsonian 

Institution Press, 1990).

3. Ibid., 82, and Julia Meech-Pekarik, The World of the Meiji Print: Impressions of a New Civilization 

(New York: John Weatherhill, Inc., 1986), 17–20.

4. See Yonemura, Yokohama, especially fig. 8, and catalogue entries 21–32 and 34–39.

5. The word dojin has, over the course of Japanese history, ranged in meaning from “savage” to 

“indigenous person.” By the beginning of the Meiji period in 1868, however, it was used as a 

derogatory term. See David Howell, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Berkeley: 

University of California Press, 2005).

6. See, for example, Willem Janszoon Blaeu, Nova Orbis Terrarum Geographica (1607) and Joan 

Blaeu, Nova et Accurata Torius Terrarium Orbis Tabula (1646), in Japan Envisions the West: 16th–19th 

Century Japanese Art from Kobe City Museum, ed. Yukiko Shirahara (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 

2007), figs. 4, 9.

7. Examples of these paintings can be found in Yoshiaki Shimizu, Japan: The Shaping of Daimyo 

Culture (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1988), and Money L. Hickman, Japan’s Golden 

Age: Momoyama (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). See also Ann Yonemura, et al., Twelve 

Centuries of Japanese Art from the Imperial Collections (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and 

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1997), 102–05.

8. The illustrations of these cities are mostly derived from Willem Blaeu’s 1607 map, although 

the view of Rome is believed to have been modeled after Vita Beati patris Ignatii Loyolae (1610). 

Shimizu, Japan: The Shaping of Daimyo Culture, 181. The figures are identified as the rulers of Persia, 

Abyssinia, Tartary, Moscow, France, Spain, Turkey, and the Holy Roman Empire.
Images of U.S. Racial Stereotypes in Nineteenth-Century Japan 93

9. For an interesting exploration of this categorization, see Ronald Toby, “The ‘Indianness’ of Iberia 

and Changing Japanese Iconographies of Other,” in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting 

and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. 

Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 323–54.

10. Ibid.

11. By the mid-eighteenth century, versions of earlier maps with their (labeled) depictions of 

peoples of foreign lands were published for the general public in great quantities. See, for example: 

Bankoku sozu (Kyoto: Hayashi Jizaemon, 1671). Dictionaries and family encyclopedias also included 

these same maps with the labeled foreigners following on subsequent pages. See, for instance 

Daifuku setsuyoshu daizo hokan (Kyoto: Umemura Ichibei, 1761). On the influence of the Dutch 

on art of this period, see Calvin French, Through Closed Doors: Western Influence on Japanese Art 

1639–1853 (Rochester, MI.: Meadow Brook Art Gallery, 1977) and Shiba Ko-kan: Artist, Innovator, and 

Pioneer in the Westernization of Japan (New York: Weatherhill, 1974).

12. Mexican and South American Indian cultures were also included as part of this group.

13. On the appearance and influence of dime novels, see Jonathan E. Zwicker, Practices of the 

Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, The Novel, and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century 

Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 210–13. The impact of the dime novel 

on Japanese literature (particularly drama) of the early Meiji period is discussed in J. Scott Miller, 

Adaptations of Western Literature in Meiji Japan (New York: Palgrave, 2001). See also Christopher 

Castiglia, Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary 

Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and June Namias, White 

Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 

Press, 1993). Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and its Dime and Nickel Novels: The 

Story of a Vanished Literature (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950); for an example of a 

cover illustration of a sexually aggressive Indian, see vol. 1, fig. 54.

14. Founder of Keio University and appearing today on Japan’s 10,000-yen banknote, Fukuzawa 

made his trips to America in 1860 and 1867. In accordance with Japanese custom, the surname 

precedes the given name.

15. Samuel Augustus Mitchell, A System of Modern Geography (Philadelphia: E. H. Butler & 

Company), 1870 (editions of this text had been published since 1839). Fukuzawa translated 

Mitchell’s description of stages of enlightenment in his 1872 Sekai Kunizukushi; see Keio Gijuku, ed.,

Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1959), 663–64. Mitchell originally divided 

the world into five stages, with two categories of uncivilized (savage, barbarous) and two categories 

of civilized (civilized, enlightened), and one category that bridged stages (half-civilized); Fukuzawa 

conflated the groups.

16. Fukuzawa describes the Japanese as being half-civilized in Bunmeiron no gairyaku (“Outline of 

a Theory of Civilization”), 1875, in Keio Gijuku, ed., Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami 

Shoten, 1959). Fukuzawa’s original woodblock-printed books have been scanned by Keio University 

and can be accessed at http://project.lib.keio.ac.jp/dg_kul/index.html.

17. David A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst III, trans., Yukichi Fukuzawa: An Outline of a Theory of 

Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 17–18. Bunmeiron no gairyaku (http://

project.lib.keio.ac.jp/dg_kul/index.html), 43–44, 48–49.

18. In his article, “Fukuzawa Yukichi cho Sekai kunizukushi ni kansuru ichikenkyu-: shoshigakuteki cho-sa,” 

Minamoto Sho-kyu- posits that the images in this text had an influence on the way the Japanese people 

viewed the world from the Meiji period onward. See Ku-kan, shakai, chiri shiso-, no. 2 (1997): 2–18.

19. In Sekai kunizukushi, Fukuzawa explains to the reader that the text is a translation derived from 

a compilation of geography and history books; Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshu-, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami 

Shoten, 1959), 585. From the text he translated and the images he copied, we can specifically cite 

Mitchell’s System of Modern Geography and Sarah Sophie Cornell’s Cornell’s High School Geography 

as two of his sources. The many texts featuring a variation of this image include Robert Sears, The 

Pictorial History of the American Revolution. (Boston: Reading and Co.,1846), fig. 113; John Warner 

Barber, Incidents in American History (New York: Geo. F. Cooledge & Brothers, 1847), 145; and 

Samuel Goodrich, Pictorial History of America (Hartford, CT: House & Brown, 1853).
94 East–West Interchanges in American Art

20. On this painting’s influence on nineteenth-century American art, see Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., 

“The Murder of Jane McCrea: The Tragedy of an American Tableau d’Histoire,” Art Bulletin 47, no. 4 

(December 1965). doi:10.2307/3048306.

21. Currier & Ives produced a hand-painted color lithograph entitled Murder of Miss Jane McCrea, 

A.D. 1777 in 1846; see Currier & Ives: A Catalogue Raisonné (Detroit: Gale Research, ca. 1983), no. 

4638.

22. On this play and the woodblock prints associated with it, see Nicole Fabricand-Person, “From 

the Wild West to the Far East: The Imagining of America in a Nineteenth-Century Japanese 

Woodblock Print,” The Record, Journal of the Princeton University Art Museum, 2009.

23. For early minstrel images, see Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in NineteenthCentury America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). On Brudder Bones, see the cover for The 

Celebrated Negro Melodies, as Sung by the Virginia Minstrels (published in Boston in 1843) in Hans 

Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 

1962), fig. 40, 127.

24. At least two similar water color-painted illustrations of this minstrel show exist, likely based 

on sketches done by artists sent to record the event by the Emperor and Shogun. The first version 

is assembled paintings mounted on a folding screen in Tokyo daigaku shiryo- hensan-jo (Tokyo 

University Historiographical Institute); an illustration of this work appears on the cover of American 

Heritage 29, no. 3 (April-May 1978). The second painting, in the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA, is 

pictured in American Heritage 9, no. 3 (April 1958): 21.

25. See Victor Fell Yellin, “Mrs. Belmont, Matthew Perry, and the ‘Japanese Minstrels’” American 

Music 14, no. 3 (Autumn, 1996): 257–75. A contemporary account appears in Frederic Trautmann, 

trans., With Perry to Japan: A Memoir by William Heine (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1990): 

154–55, 182, 212–13, note 5.

26. This 1861 woodblock print appears in Yonemura, Yokohama, cat. entry 14.

“A Semi-Chinese Picture”

Hubert Vos and the Empress Dowager of China

Virginia Anderson
97

In June 1905, the artist Hubert Vos entered the imperial palace in Beijing to 

paint the portrait of the notorious empress dowager of China, Cixi (1835–

1908). In letters to his family, he described her theatrical arrival at their 

first meeting: first came two eunuchs bearing fans, then a dozen attendant 

eunuchs, followed at last by the empress herself, carried in a golden chair 

at shoulder height by eight more eunuchs. An awestruck Vos called her the 

“Goddess of four hundred million people.”1

Vos, an academic realist painter of society portraits and ethnographic 

studies—and something of an entrepreneur—had been summoned by the 

imperial court from his studio in New York City to paint the 70-year-old 

empress dowager. The empress, who ruled China from 1861 until her death 

47 years later, was for both Westerners and the Chinese a mysterious and 

controversial figure. During her lifetime, she was castigated by her critics as 

a manipulative and profligate ruler, but equally defended by her admirers as 

an educated, talented woman who rose above the constraints of her cloistered life to fight for the integrity of her empire. 

From his encounter with the empress dowager, Vos created two remarkably curious paintings. One, the full-length commissioned portrait 

now in the collection of the Summer Palace, Beijing, is an idealized, 

flattened, symmetrical rendering of the empress as she would have appeared at about 30 years old (less than half her actual age), surrounded 

by ceremonial décor (Figure 1). Vos kept for himself a second, threequarter-length portrait, now in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums (Figure 2). This painting is closer in technique to his usual European academic style, but, like the Summer Palace version, depicts the 
98 East–West Interchanges in American Art

seated empress in a boldly frontal 

pose. Both portraits were hybrids 

of Vos’s Western academic realism and the traditionally codified 

forms of Chinese imperial portraiture. Both functioned as forms of 

propaganda, for artist and subject, 

but in very different cultural contexts: the insular imperial Chinese 

court and the turn-of-the-century 

Western art salon. Produced by an 

adaptable artist and his formidable 

subject during a pivotal historical 

moment, the two portraits destabilize conventional dichotomies of 

East versus West, the artist’s gaze 

versus the subject’s passivity, realism versus idealism, and tradition 

versus modernity. 

Born in Maastricht, Holland, 

Vos (1855–1935) studied painting 

at the Royal Academy of Brussels, 

continuing his training in Rome 

and Paris. He began his career as a 

social realist, painting interiors and 

portraits from almshouses, asylums, and hospitals in Brussels and 

London. During the 1880s, he exhibited widely and received numerous medals from international salons. Moving his studio to London 

in 1887, Vos continued some of his 

social realist work, but at this point 

the focus of his painting shifted to 

society portraiture, a more lucrative 

practice that sustained him for the 

remainder of his long career. Portraits such as his 1891 painting of 

1. Hubert Vos, H. I. M. The Empress Dowager of China, 

Cixi, 1905. Oil on canvas, 92 × 54 in. Summer Palace, Beijing. 

Courtesy Arte et Cetera.

2. Hubert Vos, H. I. M. The Empress Dowager of China, 

Cixi, 1905–6. Oil on canvas, 663

⁄4 × 4811⁄16 in. Harvard Art 

Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop. Photo 

by Katya Kallsen © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
“A Semi-Chinese Picture” 99

the 11-year-old Queen Wilhelmina of Holland demonstrate the artist’s sensitivity to 

both the appearance and the psychological 

tenor of his subjects.2

Peripatetic and energetic, Vos was delighted when the Dutch government appointed him 

the deputy commissioner for Holland to the 

Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.3

 Vos’s experience at the fair shaped his life in significant 

ways. First, he fell in love with America and 

decided to make it his home, opening studios 

in New York City and Newport, Rhode Island. In 1897, having divorced his wife and 

left her and their two children in Europe, he 

married Eleanor Kaikilani Graham, a member 

of the Hawaiian royal family and herself a divorcée.4 His full-length portrait depicts her as 

a vivacious, elegant woman in a green gown, 

her hands gathering the folds of a velvet cape 

around her body (Figure 3).

In addition, Vos became fascinated by the 

myriad ethnological displays at the Chicago exposition, and his interest in portraiture burgeoned with this exposure. He decided to capture the “native types” of the 

world with his brush: 

It was during the World’s Fair in Chicago, where the officials had 

brought together the greatest collection of the different people of the Globe 

ever reunited in one spot at a tremendous expense, that I began to study 

the works I could get hold of on Ethnology and was shocked to see what 

poor specimens the principal authors had, to illustrate their very superior 

works. I thought it might be possible to establish a type of beauty of the 

different original aboriginal races before they became too much mixed or 

extinct and soon got to work.5

This ethnographic project, supported by portrait commissions, was the focus of 

Vos’s art, on and off, for the next six years. To begin with, in 1897 he spent eight 

months on a reservation in Fort Totten, North Dakota, painting Native Americans. 

He then traveled westward, often accompanied by his wife, to Hawaii, Indonesia, 

3. Hubert Vos, Eleanor Kaikilani Coney 

Graham Vos, 1900. Oil on canvas, 861

⁄4 × 413⁄4 in. 

Kaua’i Historical Society.
100 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and China. Echoing his earlier professional practices 

of painting asylum residents and society belles, Vos seems to have selected his 

ethnological subjects from two ends of the economic spectrum. On one hand, he 

portrayed the working-class people he encountered, including a Hawaiian musician, 

a Tibetan lama, and several Indian soldiers stationed in Hong Kong. On the other 

hand, he frequently painted the nobility to whom his society connections gave him 

access, as with his portraits of the emperor of Korea and Javanese royalty.6

 He concluded his travels with a trip to China in 1899, a few months before the 

Boxer Rebellion began. Vos noted the anti-foreign tensions he experienced in certain 

regions. As before, he selected a variety of subjects, including an anonymous young 

woman of Fuzhou and a portrait of a young Manchu man, as well as Yuan Shi-Kai 

(1859–1916), a viceroy who would later briefly become the first president of China, 

and Prince Qing (1836–1918), a senior member at court and a relative by marriage 

to the empress dowager. During this visit, Vos sought permission to paint the empress dowager and her nephew, the Guangxu emperor, but he was unsuccessful.7

Vos’s project resulted in about 40 paintings, which were exhibited at the Union 

League Club in New York and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, as 

well as at the Paris International Exposition of 1900.8

 Most of these compositions 

were bust or half-length portraits that feature their subjects in a lively manner, with 

attention to detail in the particularities of the face, clothing, and accessories.

One reviewer concluded, “Mr. Vos has found nothing to prove that racial types 

are disappearing, and that a world type is being ‘crystallized.’” Multiple critics did, 

however, observe resemblances between the “racial types,” with Charles de Kay, for 

example, noting that the Hawaiian musician could pass for a Provençal, the Javanese 

prince for a Basque. Mused de Kay, “We are constantly haunted with a vain imagining 

that Europeans and Americans are possessed of a noble type . . . but are we? . . . Why 

not confess at once that the world is smaller and the mixture of human races is more 

ancient than our race vanities have permitted us to believe?” 9 In part, Vos’s artistic 

style and his approach to his subject matter contributed to this kind of analysis. 

Eschewing impressionism for academic realism, he kept his painting style traditional 

and conservative. A 1901 critic described his portraits as “delicate, smooth, and accomplished.”10 In keeping with his American and European society portraits, Vos rendered his ethnological subjects with dignity, care, and a certain amount of glamour.

The “exotic” was made fashionable and tangible to his Western audience.

Perhaps it was this sensibility that made Vos’s work appealing to the empress dowager. When he arrived in China, the empress had already been on the throne for more than 

40 years, since the untimely death of the Xianfeng emperor, who had selected her as one 

of his concubines. As a woman from a low-ranking Manchu clan, Cixi owed her ascen-
“A Semi-Chinese Picture” 101

sion to power to the fact that she 

had borne the emperor’s only child. 

Following years of power struggles, 

Cixi found herself sole regent of 

China, supporting—or many would 

say controlling—first her son, then, 

following his death, her nephew.

Vos confronted an empress 

with a notorious reputation in both 

China and the West. While the first 

widely read and rather scandalous 

biography of her did not appear 

in England until 1910, she was by 

1905 already the subject of much 

gossip and speculation in the Western press. She was accused of virtually imprisoning and poisoning her 

nephew, having his favorite concubine thrown down a well, and using 

money allocated to the weakened 

navy to refurbish imperial palaces.11 But her initial support of the disastrous anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) did the most to tarnish her reputation among the 

foreign powers in Beijing and abroad. In a cover illustration from the French turn-ofthe-century weekly, Le Rire (Figure 4), published several weeks after the Imperial Court 

declared war on the foreign legations in Beijing, the empress is shown hunched behind a 

fan, her long thumbnail pointing upward like a claw. In her left hand, she holds a bloodied knife, and several decapitated heads and corpses are impaled on the pike behind her. 

Powerful images such as this one attributed the murder of Westerners in China directly 

to the hand of the empress.

The traditional sequestering of the imperial family within court walls added to 

the sense of distrust and suspicion that surrounded her. In the aftermath of the humiliating failure of the Boxer Rebellion, which greatly weakened the Qing dynasty, 

Cixi sought a rapprochement with the West. The empress dowager realized that 

in order to assuage the Western powers, she needed to make her court and herself 

more accessible.12

Despite the insular court structure, which hampered her actions and literally walled 

her off from the realities of everyday life among her subjects, the empress was well 

aware in 1905 of the powers of image making, as demonstrated by the pageantry of her 

4. Charles Lucien Léandre, S. M. L’Impératrice Douairière de 

Chine, front cover of Le Rire, 14 July 1900. Widener Library, 

Harvard College Library.
102 East–West Interchanges in American Art

awe-inspiring, eunuch-borne arrival, described by Vos. She admired and identified with 

Queen Victoria of England, whose assumption of power as a young woman, widowhood, and long reign paralleled her own. The British queen was famously media-savvy, 

distributing images of herself and her family to the press, via painting, photography, and 

prints, that fostered perceptions of her as a mother and wife who retained her femininity even in the context of her political power. The empress dowager hung engravings of 

Queen Victoria and the royal family in her own private apartments.13

She invited diplomats, missionaries, and (most importantly) their wives into 

the imperial sanctum where she charmed her guests with entertainment and gifts. 

The American women who thus had ongoing access to the empress proved to be 

among her most vocal defenders to their friends and family back home. One of 

Cixi’s frequent guests was Sarah Pike Conger, wife of the American ambassador to 

Beijing.14 Conger came to admire the empress dowager and proposed having a portrait painted of her to counter the negative images being published by the foreign 

press. With this intention, in 1903 Conger invited American artist Katherine Carl, 

trained at the Académie Julian in Paris and living in Shanghai with her brother, to 

Beijing. Carl’s large oil was shipped to America and exhibited at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904.15

Despite the accounts of her that prevailed in the press, the empress was respected 

and held in high regard by many who met her at court. The Carl commission caused 

a small rivalry for her favor between the legations.16 Officials of the Dutch legation, 

feeling slighted that Holland, with its strong tradition in the practice of portraiture, 

had been superseded in this instance by the Americans, advocated for Hubert Vos to 

come paint the empress dowager’s portrait. They were perhaps unaware that by the 

time of his arrival in 1905, he had become an American citizen.17

The story ofVos’s encounter with the empress survives primarily through letters he 

sent back home to his family, and the analysis presented in this paper of his interaction 

with the empress is reliant on the singular perspective of his voice; the artist may have 

exaggerated the scope of his contact with the empress for the benefit of his audience. 

Nevertheless, the terms of Vos’s descriptions of his experiences are enlightening, and 

he is explicit about the impact his fleeting interactions with Cixi had on the creation of 

the Summer Palace portrait. In his correspondence, Vos emphasized the difficulties of 

his commission: he had to appear at court at 5 a.m. to meet with the empress and had 

only four brief sessions with her; his studio, on the top floor of a Beijing hotel, was a 

sauna in the summer heat; the robes, accessories, and furnishings he had been promised by the eunuchs to use in his studio never materialized and he had to scrounge his 

own.18 And yet his fascination with the empress dowager was palpable in his description 

of her: “Erect, with a tremendous will power, more than I have ever seen in a human 
“A Semi-Chinese Picture” 103

being. Hard, firm will and thinking lines, 

and with all that a brow full of kindness 

and love for the beautiful. I fell straight 

in love with her.”19 Vos’s account, which 

stands in sharp contrast to the image of 

the demoniacal figure in the Rire caricature, conveys the charisma the empress 

exerted over her visitors. 

Vos began his work with a sketch of 

the empress, outlining her features and 

blocking in shading. His plan was to 

make a smaller study of her head and features while she modeled for him, then to 

create the full-length commission from 

that study.20 Following the second session, he said, she asked to see what he had 

done and through a translator expressed 

her critique, demanding “no shadows, 

no shadows, no shadows.”21 Another 

anecdote he shared with his family demonstrates the awe he felt in her presence 

and the pride he felt in her attention. In 

a pivotal moment after the third session, the empress approached Vos, taking his pencil 

in her own hand and making an experimental mark on his sketch. “This is the nearest 

ever a white man has been to her,” he wrote. In the end, he became a complete convert. 

“I resolved to paint her as if I were a Chinaman myself,” he stated.22

The formidable empress had an extraordinary impact on Vos: her imposing 

bearing, her outspoken critique of his work, his desire to please her, as a result of 

these factors he adapted his usual practices and conventions to her demands. To 

a certain extent, this meant setting aside his own European, academic preconceptions about portraiture. Chinese imperial portrait conventions dictated generality 

over specificity.23 Facial features were carefully delineated, but by the time of the 

Qing dynasty, imperial portraiture had become increasingly frontal, symmetrical, 

and decorative, as in the probably posthumous portrait of the Qianlong emperor’s 

mother-in-law (Figure 5). Renderings of emperors and empresses were more and 

more schematic and ritualized; there was almost no palpable body under the symbol-laden robes. As a result, imperial portraiture became less the depiction of an 

individual and more a symbolic representation of the state.24

5. Portrait of Lirongbao’s Wife, Qing Dynasty, 

18th–19th century. Hanging scroll: ink and color on silk, 6915⁄16

× 3813⁄16 in. Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 

Washington, DC, Purchase, Smithsonian Collections Acquisition 

Program, and partial gift of Richard G. Pritzlaff.
104 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Adding force to the empress’s opinions, perhaps, was the fact that she was 

trained as an artist herself. Most of her surviving paintings date from after the Boxer Rebellion, when she gave them as gifts to foreign visitors. She selected modest 

subjects—birds, flowers, and pines, or large-scale calligraphic paintings of a single 

auspicious character. An example of one of these works is Fungi and Bats of 1898, a 

delicately painted still life on a surface of light brown wash now in the collection 

of the Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.25 These works were, 

like Chinese export porcelain, geared toward a non-native audience; they were not 

produced in fulfillment of exacting Chinese artistic standards, but they succeeded 

in pleasing the empress’s visitors.

Vos grasped what the empress expected of him, despite his own preferences. 

As he initially noted, “I would have preferred a darker, more mysterious, less symmetrical background.”26 But he adapted to the empress’s wishes, and her influence 

is apparent in the final full-length portrait. Measuring 92 by 54 inches, the portrait 

is housed in a frame commissioned by the empress. Within the rigidly symmetrical 

composition, the tiny woman is ensconced among auspicious paraphernalia. The 

pyramidal stacks of apples, the peacock fans, the bamboo-painted backdrop, and 

the banner over her head (giving her name and title) dominate the composition. 

Rendered as requested with no shadows, the empress appears quite youthful, even 

ageless, and her body seems to disappear within her robes. The peony-decorated 

fan she holds across her body adds to that effect. Vos reserved his skills in realism 

for the accoutrements of the throne and surrounding elements, which are rendered 

in perspective and with shading. The stylistic combination thus incorporates two 

schemes of visuality, with a result that the painting appears not quite Chinese, and 

not quite Western. The difference in composition, lighting, and formality is especially apparent when Vos’s portrait of the empress is compared with the full-length 

rendering of his wife Eleanor (Figure 3) or his earlier ethnological portraits from 

1893 through 1899. Compared with the naturalism of those works, in which the 

figure seems to breathe before our eyes, his rendering of the empress is rigid and 

contained.

The painting was completed in mid-August, and Vos presented it at court. He 

astutely remarked, “The whole get-up is a symbolical and allegorical composition, 

more like a monument than a portrait.”27 Cixi’s pleasure was expressed in English 

directly to Vos: “Very good, very good,” she commented, according to Vos’s account.28 The portrait was a collaboration between sitter and artist. The empress 

dictated the symbolic setting, the pose, and the idealized rendering of her face and 

body. Vos translated her vision into a “monument” of fluid oil paint, combining 

Chinese and European styles into a hybrid image that falls into neither school.
“A Semi-Chinese Picture” 105

 Unlike Carl’s portrait of the empress, Vos’s painting seems to have been a private 

commission, intended for the audience of the imperial court. During Cixi’s brief remaining lifetime, it would not be displayed in an exhibition or hung in a public place 

for viewing, nor would it eventually function as a traditional ancestor portrait for acts 

of reverence toward the empress’s spirit. In a way, the very act of having the portrait 

painted—the empress’s gesture of summoning this artist from across the world to 

capture her likeness—may have been the central point. By inviting Vos, Cixi demonstrated to those at court her newfound “openness” to Western influence and practices. 

At the same time, Vos responded to her aesthetic and cultural sensibilities enough to 

create what he felt was, in his words, a “semi-Chinese picture.”29

The second, smaller portrait of the empress (measuring 66 3⁄4 × 48 11⁄16 inches), 

completed by Vos upon his return to New York in 1906, is probably based on the 

original sketch he began at court.30 If the Summer Palace painting represents a collaboration between artist and sitter, the Harvard portrait hews more closely to the 

artist’s preferences, while still revealing a certain amount of the empress’s influence.

The empress dowager would not have approved of Vos’s three-quarter-length 

image, as compositions that cropped the imperial body were considered inauspicious. This painting, however, was planned not for presentation at the imperial 

court but for exhibition at the 1906 Paris Salon, and Vos’s composition, which 

honed in on the empress’s face and figure, gave his intended audience a sense of the 

physical immediacy of his subject in a way that a full-length painting would not. 

This time, he also got his “darker, more mysterious, less symmetrical” background. 

He used dark, smoky tones and the image of a dragon slithering through clouds to 

create an atmospheric surround for the empress. Vos’s three-quarter-length composition and dark background draw out the beauty of her accessories: we can see the 

luster of the pearls in her pierced ears, the sheen of her silk robe, the glow of jade 

bracelets, nail guards, and rings. Adding to the dramatic presentation of his piece, 

Vos placed the painting in a massive, dark frame decorated with cloisonné panels 

and corner segments of open carving.31

At the same time, he largely adhered to the symmetry, frontality, and rigidity of 

the Summer Palace portrait, exoticizing his usual, more naturalistic style. As with that 

version, the empress’s body is lost here under the folds of her beautifully patterned 

robe. Although Vos described this painting as showing the empress “as old as she 

is,” he nevertheless couldn’t help deploying the tools of his trade to idealize her. By 

the age of 70, the empress’s skin was damaged from years of the lead-based make-up 

she wore, and she had suffered a stroke in 1904. In the manner of Chinese ancestor 

portraits, Vos’s treatment of her erased any evidence of her illness.32 When we compare his supposedly more realistic version with contemporaneous photographs of 
106 East–West Interchanges in American Art

the empress, we can see how Vos narrowed her face, shortened the distance between 

her nose and upper lip, emphasized her eyelashes, lifted her jawline, and softened 

what few shadows there are, giving her skin an airbrushed smoothness; all of this 

in keeping with Anglo-European conventions of beauty. The slight shadows at the 

corners of her mouth soften her forthright expression, so that she is at once severe, 

imperious, and feminine.

For his Salon audience, Vos countered negative images of the empress prevalent in the West with a visually compelling, dramatic, but stylistically eccentric 

portrait. Using his conservative, realistic style blended with some characteristics of 

imperial portraiture, the artist presented for his viewers his vision of the empress: 

charismatic, powerful, wealthy, and exotic. He advertised his skills and his social 

and political connections, as the portrait demonstrated his personal access to the 

“Goddess of four hundred million people,” a woman who remained largely inaccessible and controversial to Westerners. Her status was reflected in the reception 

accorded to Vos’s portrait at the Salon exhibition: it was not placed on the line, an 

honor usually accorded to sovereign portraits.33

Vos had grand hopes for his paintings of the empress and their impact on his 

career. He wrote, “The book of a reigning dynasty is a secret closed book and comes 

only to light . . . when her dynasty ends. Then her life and her reign will be written 

and I will figure in it.”34 In terms of his own career and critical reception, he was 

correct. Within the chronicles of Cixi’s life, however, Vos’s portrait is merely a footnote. The portrait she commissioned served her aims at the time, demonstrating 

her openness to Western culture and modernity to her intimate audience at court. 

But the portrait’s existence was for a long time overshadowed by the great political upheavals that took place shortly after her death in 1908, and lost within the 

cloud of scandals and rumors that obscured the accounting of the empress’s life and 

reign. For us, the two paintings remain as the unusual evidence of the encounter 

between two cultures, two aesthetics, and ultimately, two individuals.

Notes

The author thanks Grant Hayter-Menzies, Teri Hensick, David Hogge, William C. Kirby, Robert D. 

Mowry, Melissa Moy, David Odo, Melissa Renn, and Celka Straughn for their invaluable assistance 

and guidance with this project.

1. Hubert Vos and Eleanor Kaikilani Vos, “Adaptation of His Letters From Peking by his Wife, Lani, 

Thinking of a Magazine Article,” (typed transcript), undated, 5, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum 

curatorial file, 1943,162.

2. For Vos’s background, see “Hubert Vos Dead, Portrait Painter,” New York Times, 9 January 1935, 

19; Hubert Vos, “Autobiographical Letter,” in István L. Szénássy, Hubert Vos, Dutch-American Painter

(Stamford, CT: Stamford Museum and Maastricht, Netherlands: Bonnefantenmuseum, 1979), 9; and 

Rulers of the Far East: An Exhibition of the Works of Hubert Vos (New York: The Holland House Corporation 

of the Netherlands, 1944). Vos’s portrait of Queen Wilhelmina is reproduced in Anne van GrevensteinKruse et al., Hubert Vos: en het verhaal van een portret (Amsterdam: Arte et Cetera, 2008), 21.
“A Semi-Chinese Picture” 107

3. Vos, “Autobiographical Letter,” 9.

4. See “A Day’s Weddings,” New York Times, 6 November 1897, 7, and “A Romantic Marriage,” New 

York Times, 7 November 1897, 5. The latter article explained that Mrs. Vos was a cousin of the exqueen of Hawaii, and divorced from John Graham.

5. Vos believed there were different conceptions of beauty among the various races of the world. 

He wrote, “Of course the distinction I claim as original and most deserving in my opinion is, to do 

for the aboriginal races what has been done for centuries for the Caucasian races by so many gifted 

portrait painters.” Vos, “Autobiographical Letter,” 9–10. His notion that the different races were 

quickly vanishing was timely as it was at the 1893 Chicago Exposition that Frederick Jackson Turner 

presented his paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”; see The Early Writings 

of Frederick Jackson Turner, ed. Everett E. Edwards (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1938), 

185–229.

6. Through his friend Leigh Hunt, Vos received access to Korean nobility, so that he was able to 

make portraits of Prince Min-sa-ho, the American-educated cousin of the emperor, and the emperor 

himself. In China, Vos’s friend General Norman Munthe introduced him to Yuan Shi-kai, who 

recommended him in turn to Prince Qing. Vos, “Autobiographical Letter,” 10–11.

7. Ibid., 11.

8. “Hubert Vos Dead,” New York Times, 19.

9. For the quotes, see “Are Racial Types Dying Out?” New York Times, 1 November 1907, 8; and de 

Kay, “Painting Racial Types,” Century Illustrated Magazine 60, no. 2 (June 1900): 169.

10. “American Studio Talk: Notes on Art in New York,” International Studio 13 (April 1901): 150. See 

also István L. Szénássy’s analysis of Vos’s style in “Addenda H. Vos,” in Szénássy, Hubert Vos, DutchAmerican Painter, 21.

11. J.O.P. Bland and Edmund Backhouse, China Under the Empress Dowager: Being the History of the Life 

and Times of Tzu Hsi (London: William Heinemann, 1910). As one of the first biographies of Cixi, it was 

widely read and initially well received, but later discredited. Hugh Trevor-Roper in The Hermit of Peking: 

The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse (New York: Knopf, 1976) exposed Backhouse as a con man 

who had forged or looted rare books and documents he bequeathed to the Bodleian Library at Oxford. 

Arthur Hummel’s entry on the empress dowager remains a reliable if brief biography; Hummel, 

“Hsiao-ch’in Hsien Huang-hou,” Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (1644–1912), vol. 1 (A–O), 295–

300, (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943). More recent studies have attempted 

to open the historical records to find a more accurate representation of her actions. See, for example, 

Sue Fawn Chung, “The Much Maligned Empress Dowager: A Revisionist Study of the Empress Dowager 

Tz’u-Hsi,” Modern Asian Studies 13, no. 2 (1979): 177–96, doi:10.1017/S0026749X00008283. Sterling 

Seagrave also gives a sympathetic portrait in Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of 

China (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).

12. As Arthur Hummel wrote, “Her attitude toward foreigners was now one of gratitude for having 

spared her from deserved humiliation and for allowing her to return to power.” Hummel, “Hsiaoch’in Hsien Huang-hou,” 299.

13. Grant Hayter-Menzies discusses Queen Victoria’s distribution of images of herself and her 

family to the press as an example that Cixi looked to late in her own reign, Imperial Masquerade: 

The Legend of Princess Der Ling (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), 200, 213.

14. Conger documented her experiences at court in letters to her family, now in the collection of 

the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. See Sarah Pike Conger, 

Letters from China, With Particular Reference to the Empress Dowager and the Women of China

(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909).

15. Initially, the empress was resistant to having her portrait painted, as traditionally that was an 

honor reserved for the deceased in China; Grant Hayter-Menzies, Imperial Masquerade, 193–95. 

Imperial culture emphasized the sequestering of the royal family; for the empress dowager to 

suddenly allow photographs of herself to be made available and to commission both Carl’s and 

Vos’s painted portraits was revolutionary. Lin explains the initial resistance and eventual acceptance 

of photography by the imperial court, and the exchange among international rulers of images of 

themselves; in 1902, Cixi had received a family photograph from Czar Nicholas II of Russia. Xunling 
108 East–West Interchanges in American Art

(1874–1943), the son of Lady Yu Geng, senior lady-in-waiting to the empress, was allowed to 

take photographs of the empress dowager during the period 1903 to 1905; a number of these 

are in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, and the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian has 

44 photonegatives. See Lin Jing, The Photographs of Cixi in the Collection of the Palace Museum, 

trans. Shaoyi Li (Beijing: Forbidden City Publishing House, 2002). Like Vos, Katherine Carl made 

two portraits. One she gifted to the empress dowager; the other was transported to the U.S. for 

exhibition. This latter portrait was in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum until 

recently, when it was transferred to the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Carl wrote a memoir, With the 

Empress Dowager of China (New York: The Century Company, 1905).

16. According to a 1905 New York Times article, when Carl was appointed to paint the empress’s 

portrait, the U.S. Embassy took “all the honors” and the other legations “turned through envy and 

jealousy the color of jade and saffron.” “Painting an Empress: Hubert Vos, K.C.D.D., the First Man to 

Portray the Dowager Empress of China,” New York Times, 17 December 1905, X8.

17. See “Painting an Empress,” X8.

18. Letter from Hubert Vos to “My dear Friends,” (typed transcript), August 18, 1905, 4–5. Harvard 

Art Museums/Fogg Museum curatorial file, 1943.162.

19. Vos and Vos, “Adaptation of His Letters From Peking,” 6.

20. “I shall take a small canvas and paint the head from life in 2 sittings and paint the larger canvas 

afterwards from that and with the help of the photographs.” Letter from Hubert Vos to “My dear Lani,” 

(typed transcript), June 12, 1905, 5. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum curatorial file, 1943.162. 

There is some debate about whether or not Vos took photographs of the empress. No such photos 

exist today in the family collection; conversation of the author with Dr. Hubert D. Vos, the artist’s 

grandson, 13 July 2009. When asked in an interview if he took photos of the empress, the painter 

replied, “Yes, indeed. But of course they are for my own use. I would not have them developed in China 

for fear the photographer might sell copies”; “Painting an Empress,” New York Times, X8. He noted that 

photographs of the empress were for sale in Chinese bookstores.

21. “She now looked at my work and talked and pointed at different parts of my picture, and Wu 

Ting Fang translated and told me I had to make no shadows under or above the eyes, the eyes wide 

open, the mouth full and up, not drooping, the brows straight, the nose no shadows—no shadows, 

no shadows, no shadows, no wrinkles. . . . Finally, I began to understand that I was not allowed to 

paint realistically.” Vos and Vos, “Adaptation of His Letters from Peking,” 7.

22. In a 1905 interview, Vos commented, “I resolved to paint her as if I were a Chinaman myself, 

not omitting, of course, the technical qualities in which our painting differs from the Chinese and 

Japanese, but imagining myself an Oriental imbued with reverence for what is greatest in Chinese 

art, thoroughly saturated with the national awe for antique ceremonial objects.” “Painting an 

Empress,” New York Times, X8.

23. Alan Priest, “Portraits of the Court of China,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, 1, 

no. 5 (January 1943): 185. doi:10.2307/3257047.

24. Wen C. Fong, “Imperial Portraiture in the Song, Yuan, and Ming Periods,” Ars Orientalis, 25 (1995): 

47–60. Fong traces this shift, taking place beginning around 1500, to the influence of Tibetan mandala 

painting. “Tibetan influence continued to be felt at the imperial court through the fifteenth century, 

and imperial portraits after Xuande [the Xuande emperor, r. 1425–35] became increasingly frontal, 

culminating in a new, symmetrically balanced and flatly decorative hieratic composition, in the style 

of a Tibetan mandala.” 57. See also Jan Stuart and Evelyn S. Rawski, Worshiping the Ancestors: Chinese 

Commemorative Portraits (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2001), esp. 117–41. On symbolic 

representations of the state, see Fong, “Imperial Portraiture,” 57–58.

25. Claudia Brown and Ju-hsi Chou, Transcending Turmoil: Painting at the Close of China’s Empire 

1796–1911 (Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 1992), 10, 36. The scroll is reproduced on page 12. 

Attributions of Cixi’s work are complicated by the fact that she had a number of women artists 

(known as “substitute brushes”) working for her who produced some of these paintings; see Marsha 

Weidner’s catalogue entry for Pine and Fungi (May You Have Great Fortune and Longevity), 156–59 

in Weidner, et al., Views from the Jade Terrace: Chinese Women Artists 1300–1912 (Indianapolis: 

Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1988). Thanks to Robert Mowry and Melissa Moy for bringing the 

Harvard scroll to my attention. 
“A Semi-Chinese Picture” 109

26. Vos and Vos, “Adaptation of His Letters from Peking,” 5. The Summer Palace portrait was 

extensively restored in 2007–08. See Anne van Grevenstein-Kruse et al., Hubert Vos: en het verhaal 

van een portret (Amsterdam: Arte et Cetera, 2008).

27. Vos, “My dear Friends,” 18 August 1905, 2.

28. Vos was almost certainly paid for his commission, although he playfully denied it in the press; 

see “Painting an Empress,” New York Times, X8. In a letter to his wife, he said that he set an initial 

price for the commission thinking he was being summoned to paint ministers to the court, and 

that had he known his true subject was the empress, he would have doubled his price; Vos, “My dear 

Lani,” June12, 1905, 3.

29. Vos and Vos, “Adaptation of His Letters from Peking,” 10.

30. After completion of the full-size portrait, he wrote: “I have in the meantime my study from life, 

data, sketches, photos, etc. to paint a second picture for myself for exhibition and this time as old 

as she is . . . . I am gathering the different details I may need, so I am able to paint this picture in 

New York.” Letter from Hubert Vos to “My dear Lani and Friends,” (typed transcript), August 29, 1905, 

5. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum curatorial file, 1943,162. It is unknown whether or not the 

empress was aware of the second portrait. 

31. Of the 786 photographs of the empress in the Palace Museum collection, only one is a halflength composition; the others are all full-length. The photo is listed in an inventory as “1 Large 

Half-Length Imperial Portrait in Flowery Dress and with Hair Decoration,” in Lin, Photographs of 

Cixi, 14. Lin notes the negative connotations of cropped compositions, 22. The frame was almost 

certainly made in China during Vos’s stay there.

32. Hayter-Menzies, Imperial Masquerade, 267. Stuart and Rawski note how portrait painters in the 

late Qing dynasty, influenced by photography, could create a composite image that erases evidence 

of illness and instead project the subject’s “heavenly endowed visage and venerable old age,” 

Worshiping the Ancestors, 174.

33. One American writer compared the empress dowager to a “shrewd old Scotchwoman.” “Are 

Racial Types Dying Out?” New York Times, 8.

34. Vos, “My dear Lani and Friends,” August 29, 1905, 5.

Performing Identity
Overtly, Covertly, or Not at All

Putting “Japan” in Japanese American Painting

Bert Winther-Tamaki
113

The study of Asian American art of the mid-twentieth century has undergone a 

significant change in recent years. Not long ago, “Asian tradition” was still frequently identified as a definitive component of Asian American art. For example, 

in 1997 a major exhibition made ground-breaking contributions to knowledge 

about Asian American art history by focusing on relationships between “Asian 

tradition” and modern abstraction, while continuing to embrace such Orientalist 

propositions as “to the Eastern mind, nature is the irrefutable, ultimate source of 

all things, including artistic expression.”1

 In contrast, a 2008 multi-author volume on Asian American art history, the most extensive study of its kind, starts 

out in Gordon Chang’s foreword with a critical focus on the racial thinking that 

so often locked Asian American art into stereotypes: “Viewers could rarely free 

themselves from the assumption that art produced by persons who looked ‘Asian’ 

somehow had to express something ‘Asian.’ Mainstream spectators assumed that 

racial or immutable cultural sensibilities indelibly marked artistic production.”2

Another influential voice in this important recognition has been that of Elaine H. 

Kim, who sought to extricate Asian American art from the idée fixe of Asian race 

by affirming its interstiality and hybridity. “Instead of viewing Asian American art 

as . . . imperfectly replicating ‘real Asian art,’” she proposed situating it in “the 

untranslatable, incommensurate in-between, in the interstice between mainstream 

and Asian American (as opposed to Asian) cultural traditions.”3

 Thus, “Asia” or 

“Asian tradition” was retired from its status as an essential element of the study 

of mid-century Asian American art history in order to disencumber this art from 

racial assumptions. To be sure, the cumulative weight of the twentieth-century 

language that exoticized and marginalized Asian American artists is so staggering 

that one hesitates to revisit Kim’s move away from Asian tradition. Nonetheless, 
114 East–West Interchanges in American Art

jettisoning all concepts of “Asian tradition” or “Asia” makes it difficult to understand the 

context of art produced in the early and mid-twentieth century, before the cognitive term 

“Asian American” existed. Artists and viewers in this period typically thought about what 

we now consider “Asian American art” in the oppositional terms of “Asian” and “American,” or analogues such as “East” and “West,” rather than the hybridizing in-betweenness 

of “Asian American,” so ideas about Asia are critical to the recovery of the meanings their 

art possessed in earlier historical moments.

I propose three speculative categories for investigating the role of “Asian tradition” 

and more general concepts of “Asia” in mid-twentieth-century Asian American art. Art 

objects in the first category called the viewer’s attention to themes of Asia by means of 

conspicuous signs of Asianness emblazoned on their form. This was achieved by the selection of symbols, motifs, titles, materials, or techniques associated with Asia. But the term 

“Asia” designates a vast, open-ended pool of signs, or meanings, and it is important to 

emphasize that while they were recognizably Asian in places like New York, Seattle, and 

Berkeley, they were not necessarily perceived as Asian in Tokyo, Calcutta, or Urumqi. A second sort of Asian American art is characterized by an absence of references to Asia or Asian 

tradition. But although we may determine that an artist did not intend to refer to Asia 

in a given work of art, and we may even corroborate that intention with an art-historical 

judgment that there is no Asian presence in that work of art, racially determined readings 

of such works frequently projected a ghostly presence of Asia into their forms or content. 

In a final category, Asian American works were endowed with veiled references to Asian 

content, sometimes only recognizable with the aid of supplementary texts explaining the 

relationship of the work to Asian culture. This often entailed vague subjective assessments 

by viewers, such as the comment of a student in my seminar who looked at a painting and 

responded that “something about it feels Asian, but I don’t know what.” Such effects were 

often obtained through creative processes of combining Asian-associated forms together 

with forms alluding to other cultures. Typically, the aim of this type of art, however, was 

not hybridization but universalizing synthesis.

Each of these three types of Asian referentiality could be matched closely to works 

of art by Americans of other ethnicities; European American, African American, and 

Latino American artists could and did create works of art that emblazoned, omitted, 

or veiled references to Asia. Nevertheless, viewers’ presumptions about an involuntary 

link between the Asian American artist’s identity and the cultural signification of his 

or her work of art affected the reception and interpretation of such references to Asia 

in ways that did not pertain to artworks created by Americans of other ethnicities. 

Asian references in works by artists assumed to be of non-Asian identity were regarded 

as exoticizing or erudite forays into foreign culture, while similar references by American artists of Asian ethnicity were seen as evidence of a return to origins or as the 
Overtly, Covertly, or Not at All 115

racially determined expression of collective identity. 

Clearly, Asian referentiality—whether emblazoned, 

veiled, or even absent in the 

sense described above—

constitutes a significant 

optic that distinguishes 

Asian American art from 

other American art. 

This three-pronged optic of Asian American art 

did not always operate in 

the same manner for artists 

of different Asian American 

ethnicities, however. For example, as Gordon Chang 

has demonstrated, Chinese 

American and Japanese American artists’ experiences of World War II differed dramatically because China was a U.S. ally, while Japan was an enemy.4 Thus, I will restrict this 

study to the specific experiences of four Japanese American painters who worked before, 

during, and after World War II. Although Japanese referentiality emerged and subsided 

in each painter’s work in correspondence with his or her efforts to contend with specific 

social and cultural contexts of American history, these case studies also outline larger 

historical patterns in the development of Japanese American art. The first two modes 

of Japanese referentiality were more prevalent in the early twentieth century, though 

emblazoned signs of Japan became scarce during the war years when such signs were 

stigmatized by association with the Japanese enemy. Veiled references came into favor in 

the context of post-war abstraction.

European American admirers of the paintings of Chiura Obata (1885–1975) typically appreciated his pictures in terms that related them to Japan. They were aware that 

he had been trained as a painter in Tokyo before moving to California in 1903, and 

some were also aware that he acquired the silk, ink, and pigments for paintings like Setting 

Sun: Sacramento Valley (Figure 1) from suppliers in Japan. It was not hard to understand 

how the lacy gold-leafing on the edges of these tongues of flame relate to prototypes 

in the gold clouds and cresting waves of Momoyama and Edo period art. Moreover, 

this work is a hanging scroll with an ornate brocade silk mounting. In short, such 

California landscapes were emblazoned with conspicuous references to Japan. Viewers 

1. Chiura Obata, Setting Sun: Sacramento Valley, ca. 1925. Hanging 

scroll: ink, color, and gold on silk mounted on paper, 1071

⁄2 × 69 in. Collection of 

Gyo Obata. Photo courtesy of the Obata family.
116 East–West Interchanges in American Art

were fascinated by what a San Francisco Examiner critic described in 1932 as “America 

contemplated through the eyes of an Oriental.” The same critic remarked that Obata’s 

paintings “are pure Nippon, or, if you like, with just a suspicion here and there of 

Western influence, though even that is rather dubious.”5 No doubt, the “suspicion” 

that Obata might have embedded Western formal or technical influences in his pictures, marring the supposed purity of the Japanese lens he brought to his California 

scenes, was fostered by awareness that by 1932 he had resided in the Bay Area for 

nearly three decades.

It certainly would be a mistake to regard the beauty of Obata’s painting as “purely” Japanese, if this connotes some vision of a Japan untouched by either modernity 

or contact with European art. The artist’s father, Obata Rokuichi, was a painter associated with Yo

-ga, literally “Western painting,” a modern Japanese movement of 

oil painting focused on European techniques and canons. Obata himself was trained 

in Nihonga, literally “Japanese painting,” a modern reconstitution of certain types 

of past Japanese and East Asian art through a keen awareness of modern European 

painting. Moreover, Obata created the style that was appreciated by American viewers 

as a Japanese aesthetic during his early decades in the Bay Area through a process of 

negotiation with his American environment. During his 12 years (1915–27) working as an illustrator for Japan, a magazine published in San Francisco’s Japantown, he 

developed his artistic personality in the tense environment of the segregated Japanese 

minority community. The year before painting Setting Sun, Sacramento Valley, Obata, his 

12-year-old son, and two other Japanese Americans were hiking in northern California when a local accosted them and warned, “Japs have been prohibited in my county 

for 30 years. Get out of here as fast as you can. If you don’t, I make no guarantee for 

your physical safety.”6

 The violent threat of such racism was not to be pacified by the 

beauty of “pure Nippon,” but many European Americans in California were drawn to 

Obata’s creative work because of its manifestation of a combination of beauty, skill, 

and materials that they perceived to be Japanese. Worth Ryder, a professor in the art 

department at the University of California, Berkeley, was his devoted companion during a strenuous six-week sketching trip to Yosemite in 1927. At one point in their 

trek through the High Sierras, Ryder humorously proclaimed Obata to be “an emissary for the Mikado looking for the most beautiful spot on the earth.”7

 Inspired by 

his Japanese American companion, Ryder became a devotee of Japanese ink-painting 

and was also instrumental in the appointment of Obata in 1932 as his colleague on 

the Berkeley art faculty. Thus, the appeal to European Americans of the mode of 

Japanese tradition that Obata developed in California as well as Japan had tremendous 

consequences for the artist; by invoking the notion of an apolitical, ahistorical, “traditional” Japanese aesthetic, he secured the interest and amity of individuals like Worth 
Overtly, Covertly, or Not at All 117

Ryder as well as high honors 

and enviable success among 

California art cognoscenti in 

a larger environment of antiJapanese racism.

The idyllic quality of Obata’s painting was not disabled 

entirely, but transformed by 

his imprisonment as an enemy 

alien in 1942, first at the Tanforan Assembly Center south 

of San Francisco, and then in 

desert barracks of the Topaz 

Relocation Center in Utah. 

In Topaz, Obata returned to 

the same glorious vision of 

the sunset that he had painted 

in Sacramento in better times 

almost 20 years earlier. But 

in his Sunset, Water Tower, Topaz

(1943), the scarlet flames lighting up the sky became the backdrop to the silhouette 

of a water tower, a structure referencing the camp where Obata was incarcerated by the 

War Relocation Authority on account of his racial and national identity.8

Miné Okubo (1912–2001) was an art student in Obata’s department at Berkeley, obtaining her master’s degree in art there in 1938. She was also a nisei (secondgeneration Japanese American), and was probably aware of Professor Obata’s outspoken views about how nisei should position themselves vis-à-vis Japan and the 

United States:

Since you have received the blood of Japanese people, I hope you would take 

interest in the Japanese people who were cultivated through that blood, and 

search deeply for Japan. Then, face the great nature of the America that you 

live in and develop your path. Listen to nature. Listen quietly to the voice 

nature calls out to you. Apply the cultivation you receive from nature, and 

contribute to your future society, to American society.9

Obata urged nisei to do what he presumably attempted when he painted the sunset at 

Topaz, namely transcend American racism with a Japanese racial aesthetic articulating 

the beneficent magnanimity of nature. In her Mother and Cat (Figure 2), however, Okubo 

2. Miné Okubo, Mother and Cat, 1941. Tempera on masonite, 

293

⁄4 × 24 in. The Oakland Museum of California, Gift of the Collectors 

Gallery. Photo courtesy Oakland Museum of California.
118 East–West Interchanges in American Art

turns her back on the path advocated and modeled by Obata. According to Betty La 

Duke, Okubo’s painting would not manifest an interest in “Japanese heritage” until 

the late 1950s or 1960s.10 Indeed, rather than study with Professor Obata, Okubo 

had trained under other faculty members at Berkeley in techniques of fresco and mural 

painting, attaining skills that led, in 1939, to a stint working under Mexican muralist 

Diego Rivera on a San Francisco mural project. Stylistically, these references predominate in Okubo’s Mother and Cat, a picture constructed in simplified, rounded forms filled 

with short, dry, parallel brushstrokes and bounded by thin, sinuous contour lines. Moreover, the gentle warpage of perspective and anatomical deformation give the painting a 

naïve style typical of modernist painters who were interested in American folk art.11

Despite the lack of artistic reference to “Japan” in Okubo’s Mother and Cat, this 

painting does make an important statement about the artist’s own Japanese American identity through its monumental depiction of the woman identified by the 

title as her mother. It was painted around the time of Okubo’s mother’s death, no 

doubt explaining its static commemorative character. Obata’s comment that “you 

have received the blood of Japanese people” refers to family and racial ties to the 

Japanese nation, and Okubo’s mother was perhaps the artist’s most tangible link to 

Japan. But the Rivera-like manner of her portrayal does little to visualize the Japanese memories and experiences of this issei (first-generation) woman, who, in fact, 

had studied calligraphy and painting at the Tokyo Art Institute before immigrating 

to California. Rather Okubo shows her mother clasping a Bible in her powerful, 

3. Miné Okubo, People were in Shock, 1943. Charcoal on paper, 14 × 20 in. Japanese American National 

Museum, Los Angeles.
Overtly, Covertly, or Not at All 119

sensuous hand and reigning with reassuring calm over an idyllic view of the rural 

town in Southern California where the artist grew up.

This serene nostalgia collapsed with Okubo’s evacuation by the War Relocation Authority to the same desert barracks as Obata. But while Obata invested an 

almost religious faith in the rich warmth of the sunset sky, Okubo funneled the 

darkness from the dust clouds in the sky into the interiors of the bodies of fellow internees (Figure 3). The internment experience moved the artist to develop 

extraordinary bonds of empathy with members of her Japanese American community, and she expressed these powerful feelings through a modernist language 

of expressive draftsmanship.

Much like Okubo, Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889–1953) darkened the faces and 

depressed the spirits of his figures, evoking associations with the Japanese enemy 

status that alienated him from his environment at a time of total war. Both artists left their expressions of this experience ambiguous enough to permit more 

universal thoughts of the tragedy of war, a vagueness of reference necessary in 

wartime America, where the sympathetic expression of specifically Japanese or 

Japanese American suffering attributed to American aggressors would have been 

unthinkable. Kuniyoshi’s painting avoids Obata’s obvious references to Japan or 

Japanese tradition, much like Okubo’s painting and charcoal study. But unlike 

Okubo, who created People Were in Shock while living among fellow Japanese Americans at the desert barrack camp in Utah, Kuniyoshi kept his imagery remote from 

the Japanese American community as well.

Kuniyoshi crafted his art for the European American dominated art world centered in New York City, and indeed was the most successful Japanese American artist of his generation in terms of purchases, critical acclaim, and awards. Kuniyoshi’s 

success was gravely threatened but not reversed by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. In striking contrast to Chiura Obata on the West Coast, Kuniyoshi 

appealed to New York cognoscenti with a scrupulous avoidance of conspicuous 

signifiers of cultural alterity—or “otherness”—in his painting. In 1942 the Art 

News reviewer Rosamund Frost explained that about 10 years earlier Kuniyoshi had 

already “assimilated something from his contemporaries—a touch of [Alexander] 

Brook in the pose, a little of [Bernard] Karfiol in the glance, a trace of [Jules] Pascin’s voluptuous softness.” Thus, Frost concluded, “[P]erhaps this is the point at 

which he stopped being an Oriental and became the American he is today.”12 Indeed, 

the style, materials, imagery, and sultry mood of Kuniyoshi’s canvases such as Relaxing (Figure 4) share a strong American period resemblance with the works of his 

European American friends and rivals, such as the artists Frost named, painters who 

were considered leading lights of American art at this time.
120 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Actually, Japanese oil 

painters working in Tokyo 

during the same period—

Yasui Sôtarô, Matsumoto Shunsuke, and Asô 

Saburô, for example—

painted in a similar mode 

to that of the New York 

artists identified by Frost 

as the beacons of Kuniyoshi’s American style.13

Kuniyoshi was well aware 

that School of Paris styles 

of painting were as prevalent in Tokyo as New 

York due to a 1931 trip 

to Japan, encounters with 

traveling Japanese artists, 

and exposure to contemporary Japanese art magazines. But Frost and most 

New Yorkers were either 

oblivious to modern Japanese art or derided it as derivative of “the West.” They focused on cultivating 

an American national aesthetic based on minor differences between American and 

European art and were unwilling to countenance the fact that similar minor differences between Japanese and European art had brought about a situation where New 

York painting was visually similar to much of what constituted contemporary Japanese art. Therefore, if Kuniyoshi had wished to convey a positive sense of Japanese 

alterity to his New York spectators at this time without depending on assumptions 

about his racial identity, he probably would have had to use anachronistic iconographic attributes such as dressing his women in kimonos or placing Imari vases at 

their elbows. In the war climate, however, even such quaint signifiers of Japan had 

become anathema to American audiences. 

Despite the absence of references to Japan in the painting of both Okubo and 

Kuniyoshi before and after the invasion of Pearl Harbor, both artists were called upon by 

American institutions to illustrate the Japanese enemy during the war. Fortune magazine 

commissioned Okubo to illustrate stereotypical images of Japanese civilians and soldiers in 

4. Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Relaxing, 1942. Oil on canvas, 1515⁄16 × 12 in. 

Collection of Soichiro Fukutake, Okayama, Japan © Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi/

Licensed by VAGA, New York.
Overtly, Covertly, or Not at All 121

1943,14 while the Office of 

War Information (OWI) 

commissioned Kuniyoshi 

to illustrate anti-Japanese 

war propaganda posters in 

1942. Neither artist had 

any particular experience 

illustrating Japanese subject matter, but as scholar 

ShiPu Wang has written of 

the selection of Kuniyoshi 

for creating propaganda 

posters, “it was precisely 

because of his race (and 

nationality) that [OWI] 

officials regarded him as 

an appropriate artist to 

portray the enemy—not 

the Germans, nor the Italians, but the Japanese.”15

Kuniyoshi’s role in fashioning the American image of the Japanese enemy contributed to his wartime reputation 

as, in Rosamund Frost’s words, “America’s favorite Japanese.”16

Serving as an illustrator of images of the Japanese enemy to teach Americans who 

they were fighting against put Kuniyoshi in what must have been a psychologically 

tortuous position, for now it was his job to reinforce negative American stereotypes 

of Japanese men—stereotypes that imperiled his own standing in American society. 

One of the drawings Kuniyoshi submitted to the OWI (Figure 5) depicts a menacing 

Japanese soldier accosting a woman who closely resembles the dark-complexioned but 

vaguely Caucasian women that he painted so often in works such as Relaxing. The soldier’s nationality is signified by his physiognomy and by the attribute of a ceremonial 

Japanese sword. Even before this period, the racialization of paintings such as Relaxing, from which Kuniyoshi had excluded references to Japan, was a routine thought 

process that provided the terms even for appreciative art criticism. For example, in 

1937 a reviewer admired Kuniyoshi’s painting as “the work of a strong-minded and 

deliberate individual through whose brain and through whose fingers happen to run 

the blood stream of the Orient.”17 But in his rape scene, Kuniyoshi’s resistance to the 

racialization of his art collapsed. The ghostly presence of an alien Japaneseness, an 

5. Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Rape, 1942. Pencil on paper, 163⁄4 × 133⁄4 in. 

Collection of Soichiro Fukutake, Okayama, Japan © Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi/

Licensed by VAGA, New York.
122 East–West Interchanges in American Art

essentializing identity that had been projected by racially deterministic thinking onto 

his paintings, is vividly and explicitly materialized as a monstrous stereotype in his 

OWI poster design. This exceptional and shocking exposure invites an understanding 

of the more characteristic stance of his painting—that of omitting signs of Japanese 

otherness—as a posture of assimilationism. Drawing on Anne Cheng’s psychoanalytic 

study of assimilation in Asian American literature, we might say that the “camouflage” 

was ripped away from a “subject who is constituted by debilitating difference.”18

When not constrained by the desires and expectations of patrons such as the 

OWI or Fortune magazine, most Japanese American artists continued to avoid references to Japanese culture for a time after the war. In Miné Okubo’s words, “anything 

Japanese was still rat poison.”19 But this situation changed dramatically in the early 

1950s. Disempowered by defeat in war, Japan became an attractive field for American cultural consumers, ranging from scholars to avant-gardists to souvenir hunters. The first peak of this post-war American enthusiasm for Japanese culture came 

in the year 1954, when multiple Japanese-themed events were organized in New 

York City, including the construction of a temporary traditional Japanese house 

in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art and an exhibition of new Japanese 

abstract art from Tokyo at the Riverside Museum in New York City. This broad 

interest in Japan greatly affected Japanese American artists and their ambitions for 

success in the overwhelmingly European American art world centered in New York 

City. The same racial determinism that had led American cultural leaders to believe 

that a Japanese American artist would be uniquely suited to represent the Japanese 

enemy now led to the assumption that Japanese American artists were valuable 

sources of information about the mysteries of such Japanese cultural properties as 

calligraphy, Zen Buddhism, the tea ceremony, and ink painting. The first post-war 

wave of American interest in such Japanese topics coincided with the emergence 

of second-generation Abstract Expressionist painters. In this context, numerous 

European American as well as Asian American artists developed innovative ways to 

inscribe elements of Asian culture into their abstract paintings.20

One such artist, Mike Kanemitsu (1922–1992) had been painting figurative works 

as a student of Kuniyoshi at the beginning of the 1950s, but was soon won over by the exciting new abstraction of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and other Abstract Expressionists. 

Kanemitsu became an intimate of this circle and would remember one friend from this 

milieu, the abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, as an erudite scholar knowledgeable in all fields 

of Asian philosophy and culture.21 And while Kanemitsu was first groping his way toward 

abstraction and enthusiastically observing the innovations of another personal friend, Jackson Pollock, Reinhardt advised him, “Don’t go along with crazy J.P. You’re not an Expressionist—you’re a natural romantic Impressionist.”22 This enigmatic injunction prompted 
Overtly, Covertly, or Not at All 123

Kanemitsu to investigate 

relationships between his 

gestural abstraction and the 

East Asian art of calligraphy. 

In works such as Quarter to 

Five (Figure 6), however, the 

artist’s professed interest in 

calligraphy remains a subtle 

presence, veiled beneath 

bright color, architectonic 

structure, and the viscous 

medium of oil on canvas.

While continuing to 

work in oil on canvas, Kanemitsu also pursued a parallel practice of abstraction in the Japanese medium of sumi, black liquid ink on paper.23

His black-and-white abstractions resonated with similar works by Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock, Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Philip Guston, but this practice held 

distinct attractions and risks for Kanemitsu and other Asian American artists. On the 

one hand, the artist’s Asianness endowed the link between his abstract imagery and the 

East Asian art of calligraphy with a type of authenticity that appealed to the modernist ethos of an unmediated relationship between the artist’s subjective identity and his 

creative work. On the other hand, many in this environment looked askance at what 

they regarded as an artist’s too conspicuous or too deliberate reference to his or 

her Asian heritage. Thus, the prominent Japanese critic and art historian Fujieda 

Teruo would write, “One distinctive characteristic in Kanemitsu’s oeuvre is the use 

of the calligraphic black line on a white ground. This immediately brings to mind 

the notion of a Japanese look. . . . But being an intelligent nisei artist, Kanemitsu 

understood that creating art that appeared Japanese for the sake of obtaining a 

Japanese look was a too-easy use of nationality.”24

This rather narrow view of nisei artists presumed that they deliberately catered to an American taste for Japanese exotica. In fact, many Asian Americans 

were sensitive to the racial determinism that often stimulated European American 

desires to see evidence of Japanese identity in their art. And this awareness sometimes inhibited the expression of such interests or provided an incentive to veil 

them deeply within the mysterious forms of abstract tableaus. Still, Kanemitsu 

said that he felt a powerful attraction to calligraphic abstraction, including the 

work of contemporary Japanese avant-garde calligraphers such as Morita Shiryû 

6. Mike Kanemitsu, Quarter to Five, 1959. Oil on canvas, 494⁄5 × 601⁄16 in. 

Osaka Contemporary Art Center, Japan.
124 East–West Interchanges in American Art

and Hidai Nankoku. He attributed this attraction to a sense of nostalgia that 

was a consequence of his long years of residence in the United States away from 

Japan.25 This emotion-laden distance from Japan endowed Kanemitsu’s veiled 

calligraphic abstraction with a personal significance that differentiated it from 

formally similar works by European American painters like Motherwell as well as 

Japanese artists like Morita Shiryû.

The four artists considered here illustrate historical patterns in the development 

of Japanese American painting that resonate broadly through the careers of many 

others. Chiura Obata’s Setting Sun exemplifies a tendency in the prewar years to deliver accentuated signs of Japan, and this proved to be an effective way to contend 

with a social environment defined by a fascination for a particular view of Japanese 

aesthetics as well as anti-Asian racism. Both Miné Okubo and Yasuo Kuniyoshi rejected Obata’s recommendation to seek Japanese aesthetic solutions for racism in 

America, and both excelled in their practice of mainstream styles of American art in 

their day. Although their art typically avoided Japanese referentiality, both Okubo and 

Kuniyoshi were chosen for the task of visualizing notions of “Japan” on account of 

their race, and both obliged by producing racialized Japanese images. Working in the 

milieu of second-generation Abstract Expressionism at a time when Japanese culture 

was a popular interest among many Americans, Mike Kanemitsu responded by investigating relationships between abstraction and calligraphy. Nonetheless, he veiled the 

presence of Asian content in his work, perhaps to avoid the appearance of catering to 

an exoticizing American taste for Asia. This veiling was more opaque in Kanemitsu’s 

abstractions in oil on canvas than his works in sumi on paper, a medium that exposed 

tensions produced by his position between the Japanese and American art worlds.

As suggested at the outset, recent studies of Asian American art history have 

shifted away from earlier preferences for works manifesting “Asian tradition” in favor 

of greater sympathy for works that omit Asian references. But one lesson to be drawn 

from the case studies discussed here is that each of the three modes of Asian referentiality possessed potential gains and risks. Perhaps the best path for future studies of 

Asian American art of the mid-twentieth century is to put aside preferences—whether 

for art that references Asia overtly, covertly, or not at all—and recognize that each of 

these modes of painting was created under difficult circumstances of East–West race 

thinking, and each held great potential to be art that is beautiful, original, or admirable for its social content or critical stance.

Notes

1. Jeffrey Wechsler, “From Asian Traditions to Modern Expressions: Abstract Art by Asian Americans, 

1945–1970,” in Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions: Asian American Artists and Abstraction, 1945–

1970, ed. Jeffrey Wechsler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli 

Art Museum, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, 1997), 89.
Overtly, Covertly, or Not at All 125

2. Gordon H. Chang, “Emerging from the Shadows: The Visual Arts and Asian American History,” 

foreword to Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970, ed. Gordon H. Chang, Mark Dean Johnson, 

and Paul J. Karlstrom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), x.

3. Elaine H. Kim, “Interstitial Subjects” in Elaine H. Kim, Margo Machida, and Sharon Mizota, Fresh Talk/

Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 36.

4. Gordon H. Chang, “Deployments, Engagements, Obliterations: Asian American Artists and World War II,” 

in Chang et al., Asian American Art, 111–39. This essay uses the term “Japanese American artist” to refer to 

artists who immigrated to the United States from Japan or whose ancestry was partly or wholly Japanese.

5. Quoted in Chiura Obata: California Art Research, ed. Gene Hailey, vol. 20, part 2 (WPA Project, 1937), 149. 

6. Quoted in Shimojima Tetsurô, Samurai to Kariforunia: ikyô no Nihon gaka Obata Chiura (Tokyo: 

Shogakukan, 2000), 151.

7. Janice T. Driesbach and Susan Landauer, Obata’s Yosemite: The Art and Letters of Chiura Obata 

from His Trip to the High Sierra in 1927 (Yosemite Association, 1993), 48.

8. Obata’s Sunset, Water Tower, Topaz is illustrated in Karin Higa, The View from Within: Japanese 

American Art from the Internment Camps, 1942–1945 (Los Angeles: Japanese American National 

Museum, 1992), 25.

9. Quoted by Shimojima, Samurai to Kariforunia, 159.

10. Betty La Duke, “On the Road: The Life of Miné Okubo,” Art Education 40, no. 3 (1987): 46. 

doi:10.2307/3193056.

11. Mark Dean Johnson, in Asian | American | Modern Art, Shifting Currents 1900–1970, ed. Daniel 

Cornell and Mark Dean Johnson (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Berkeley: 

University of California Press, 2008), 62.

12. Rosamund Frost, “Kuniyoshi, American of Two Decades” Art News 41, no. 7 (15–31 May 1942): 19.

13. For the contextualization of Kuniyoshi’s painting in contemporaneous Japanese art, see Kiki no 

jidai to kaiga, 1930–1945 (Painting in Crisis, 1930–1945), ed. Kenichiro- Makino and Hidenobu Kujirai, 

partial trans. by Keiko Katsuya (Nagoya: Aichi Ken Bijutsukan, 1999).

14. Chang, “Deployments, Engagements, Obliterations,” 118.

15. ShiPu Wang, “Japan against Japan: U.S. Propaganda and Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Identity Crisis,” 

American Art 22, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 35. doi: 10.1086/587915.

16. Frost, “Kuniyoshi, American of Two Decades,” 25.

17. Harry Salpeter, “Yasuo Kuniyoshi: Artists’ Artist,” Esquire 7, no. 4 (April 1937): 113.

18. Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race; Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: 

Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 73–74.

19. Miné Okubo, quoted in Deborah Gesensway and Mindy Roseman, Beyond Words: Images from 

America’s Concentration Camps (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987), 74.

20. See Bert Winther-Tamaki, “Calligraphic & Metaphysical: Abstract Expressions,” in The Third 

Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, ed. Alexandra Munroe (New York: Solomon R. 

Guggenheim Museum, 2009), 145–57.

21. See Kanemitsu’s comment in interview with Matsumi Kanemitsu by Marjorie J. Rogers, 

editor-interviewer, UCLA Oral History Program, (for Los Angeles Art Community: Group 

Portrait, tape II, side one, January 14, 1976, 67); online at Calisphere http://content.cdlib.org/

view?docId=ft729006sg&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=d0e141&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=calis

phere&query=reinhardt.

22. Wechsler, Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions, 75.

23. See William Hemmerdinger, Matsumi Kanemitsu: Works in Black and White, 1958–1988 (Los 

Angeles: Japanese-American Cultural and Community Center, 1988).

24. Fujieda Teruo, “Maiku Kanemitsu ni tsuite no geijutsu-teki na omoide” in Kanemitsu Matsumi

(National Museum of Art, Osaka, 1998), 5.

25. Kanemitsu in Paul Jenkins, Jules Langsner, and Kanemitsu Matsumi, “Gendai bijutsu: Amerika to 

Nihon o megutte, zadankai,” Mizue 718 (December 1964): 12. 
Chinese Painting Comes to America

Zhang Shuqi and the Diplomacy of Art

Gordon H. Chang
127

Discussions of cultural interactions between Asian countries and the United States often take fixed, unexamined categories, such as “East and West” 

or “Asian and Euro-American,” as their starting point. The categories are 

sometimes thought of as opposed, with the Asian construed as traditional 

and unchanging and the Western as modern, dynamic, and international. 

Recent scholarship and thinking, however, suggests that these concepts and 

assumptions are problematic in considering artistic interchanges in the early 

twentieth century, if not earlier. We now understand that artistic exchanges 

across the Pacific have been more complicated, mutual, and interactive than 

previously assumed.

Consider the first identified artist of Chinese ancestry who worked in 

America. Lai Yong came from southern China to California sometime in 

the mid-nineteenth century. During the 1860 and 1870s, he enjoyed a successful career as a portrait artist and photographer in San Francisco, where 

leading members of the elite sat for his Western-style oil portraits. Members of the Chinese community also served as subjects of his photographic 

work, which was both compelling and sensitive in approach. Lai Yong spoke 

out against anti-Chinese prejudices of the day and was an early proponent 

of equality and civil rights. But where did he learn the craft of his art, which 

had no putative Oriental look? Most likely, he received his training from 

George Chinnery (1774–1852), a noted English artist who had settled in 

Hong Kong and Macao, or from Chinese artists whom Chinnery had influenced. Examples of Lai Yong’s work survive, but the artist himself disappeared from San Francisco and from the historical record after 1882, the 

year Congress passed what is known as the Chinese Exclusion Act.1
128 East–West Interchanges in American Art

This essay focuses on 

the life and career of Zhang 

Shuqi (1900–1957), one 

of the earliest Chinese artists to have had a direct 

impact on large American 

audiences and their understanding of Chinese 

brush painting.2 Under the 

auspices of the Chinese 

government, Zhang traveled to the United States 

in 1941 to promote SinoAmerican understanding 

and friendship. He toured 

the country extensively 

over the next five years and 

held solo exhibitions at 

major museums, where he 

conducted public demonstrations of his technique. 

The popular and art press 

devoted great attention to these events, which attracted thousands of people. Before 

his arrival in the country, the Chinese government had presented one of the artist’s 

large compositions to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. That gift also had received 

extensive media coverage, making it then, and perhaps even today, the most wellknown Chinese painting in America.

For most Americans (and many Asians), Zhang’s work appeared to be of a traditional Chinese idiom, but his training, technique, and approach to art was fully modern in China. It combined Western and Chinese features, and he thought of himself 

as both an international and Chinese artist. Though highly successful in China in the 

1930s and 1940s, his subtle hybrid style and life overseas have complicated historical 

evaluation of Zhang (Figure 1) in China. In the United States, Zhang is not considered part of American art history at all. But for many in this country, it was Zhang 

Shuqi who brought Chinese painting to America. Zhang came to the United States 

to advance the Chinese government’s practice of cultural diplomacy, reaching out to 

the West after Japan’s invasion of China in 1937. I play with the word “diplomacy” to 

refer not just to the formal interaction of states but also to suggest informal artistic 

1. Li Yishi, Sketch of Zhang Shuqi, 1930. Ink on paper, 12 × 8 in. Chang 

family collection.
Chinese Painting Comes to America 129

interpolation and mixing; both definitions are useful to understand Zhang’s work and 

possible influence. But it was also twentieth-century modernity that enabled Chinese 

painting to reach a mass audience in America. Chinese paintings, like other objects, 

had long been found in American homes and institutions, and a few Americans had 

even studied them, but Chinese painting as a process or method as well as something 

available to wide numbers of people was virtually unknown before the mid-twentieth 

century. World politics and changing technologies opened new possibilities of learning, influence, and exchange.

Chinese arts and crafts had come early to the attention of Americans. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many Americans, elite and the everyday, filled their 

homes with Chinese porcelains, decorative ware, furniture and the like. This chinoiserie

was widely appreciated and admired, but it was not until 1838 that the American 

public could view Chinese paintings firsthand. In that year, Nathan Dunn, a Philadelphia merchant enriched by the early China trade, opened what became known as 

the Chinese Museum to the American public. According to one estimate, more than a 

100,000 people toured Dunn’s collection to view 1,200 objects he had acquired when 

he lived in China. These items ranged from natural history specimens to garments, 

tools, home wares, and fine paintings. Much impressed the crowds who visited: some 

paintings were huge, extending nine feet wide by five feet high. But the artwork left 

Dunn, a Sinophile, somewhat ambivalent. He wrote in the museum catalogue that the 

several hundred paintings in the show provided clear evidence of Chinese artistic ability, which was even better than many had thought. But though Chinese painters could 

render images with “great correctness and beauty,” Dunn concluded that “shading,” 

a staple of the Western Renaissance, was something “they do not well understand.” 

For his path-breaking efforts, the American Philosophical Society bestowed on Dunn 

membership in its esteemed ranks.3

Dunn’s museum remained open for three years in Philadelphia before he moved 

it to London. A few years later in 1847, John R. Peters, who had been a member 

of the first official American delegation to China, displayed his own Chinese art 

collection to the American public. It was even larger than Dunn’s, with 500 paintings, including some in oil color depicting everyday life in China. Other paintings 

presented birds and flowers “exquisitely done.” Overall, Peters was more diplomatic 

than Dunn in his catalogue’s evaluation of the artwork. “All the paintings in the 

Museum,” he wrote, “are the work of Chinese artists, and for execution and finish 

speak for themselves.”4

By the late nineteenth century, important figures in America developed a critical 

appreciation of Chinese painting and arts more on their own terms. Wealthy collectors began to amass important holdings of high Chinese artwork—first porcelains 
130 East–West Interchanges in American Art

and then classical paintings, though little that was contemporary. Considerations

of Chinese and Japanese artworks appeared in the paintings of such artists as John 

La Farge, James McNeill Whistler, and the European Impressionists. As historian 

Warren I. Cohen has noted, “East Asian art became intertwined with modernism, 

with avant-garde Western painting. Each prepared the way for the other.”5

In China, a few artists from Europe had had a small presence in court arts going back at least to the sixteenth century, but they little influenced the embedded 

tradition until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then the challenge 

of the West threw everything into chaos in China. Many political reformers came 

to believe that Westernization, including in the arts, would be critical for China’s 

salvation and future. Art students were sent abroad to Japan and Europe to bring 

back the new learning. In contrast to Europe, where realism came increasingly under fire, academic realism, Post-Impressionism, and other schools were considered 

to be modern in China. One of the leading apostles of the new art training in 

China was Liu Haisu, who styled himself as the Chinese Vincent Van Gogh. Liu 

founded the Shanghai Art Academy, the first fine arts college of modern China. 

It taught Western art techniques exclusively; no training in Chinese ink painting 

was even offered in its first years.6

Zhang Shuqi was born into this crucible of political and artistic ferment in 1900, 

which was also the year of the Boxer anti-foreign uprising. His birthplace in Pujiang 

County, Zhejiang Province, was near the art centers of Hangzhou and Shanghai. As a 

precocious youngster, he displayed a creative talent that impressed his artist relatives. 

But his first formal training came at Liu Haisu’s Shanghai academy, which he entered 

in 1921 as one of its earliest students. His instruction was in Western techniques. “I 

painted day and night,” he recalled, “I learned oil, water color, and charcoal. I got the 

foundation of painting from that school.” Zhang largely trained himself, however, in 

techniques of Chinese brush painting and the well-established Chinese genre of birds 

and flowers, for which he later became most well known.7

After graduation, Zhang became a practicing artist and instructor, and he taught 

brush painting at various schools in China, including 10 years beginning in 1930 at 

the National Central University in Nanjing, then the national capital. The dean of the 

art department, Li Yishi (1886–1942), a European-trained oil painter, completed a 

quick sketch of Zhang one day (see Figure 1) that captures the likeness of the young 

artist. But it also reflects the then-dominant Western-influenced artistic temperament 

at that important institution through its suggestions of direct observation of the 

model and use of shading to create an impression of three-dimensionality. (Zhang’s 

inscription on the sketch, added in 1952, reads in part, “In the fall of that year, on a 

fine day with clear sky and crisp air, Mr. Li invited me to go to Jiming Temple [Cry of 
Chinese Painting Comes to America 131

the Cock] for tea and a chat. Mr. Li drew this portrait of me . . . and captured me not 

only in appearance but also in spirit in just a few minutes.”)

Zhang and his contemporaries responded to China’s political and cultural crisis in different ways. Some, such as Liu Haisu and Li Yishi, embraced Western oil 

painting; others such as Zhang sought to invigorate traditional Chinese painting 

and develop an updated, distinctive national style. His friends and associates came 

to include such leading artists as Fu Baoshi, Xu Beihong, Pan Tianshou, Wu Fuzhi, 

Zhao Shao’ang, Qi Baishi, Gao Jianfu, and Zhang Daqian. Zhang mastered the use 

of the Chinese brush but applied its use in compositions that reflected his Western 

art study. To the eyes of most contemporary observers, his work, employing the socalled boneless style of freehand ink painting technique, fell clearly in the tradition 

of nineteenth-century Chinese ink painters such as Ren Bonian and Wu Changshuo. At the same time, the influence of his foundation in Western techniques is 

clearly visible, and Chinese art commentators would sometimes compare Zhang to 

Van Gogh, Jean Francois Millet, and other European artists.8

Zhang’s career developed rapidly in the 1930s, with his work included in exhibitions of contemporary Chinese painting that traveled to Paris, Berlin, and Moscow.9

His painting also came to the attention of Chinese political elites (both Communist 

and Nationalist), and in 1940 the Ministry of Education asked him to complete a 

large composition for the occasion of Roosevelt’s election to a third presidential 

term. As Japanese bombs fell on Chongqing, the wartime capital and Zhang’s new 

residence, he completed his monumental Messengers of Peace, also known as A Hundred 

Doves (Figure 2). The president of the relocated National Central University, Luo 

Jialun, and the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek added inscriptions. A few days before 

2. Zhang Shuqi, Messengers of Peace (also known as A Hundred Doves), 1940. Ink and color on silk mounted on paper, 

64 × 140 in. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, NY.
132 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Christmas 1940, Zhang formally presented the painting to the United States ambassador to China, Nelson T. Johnson, who forwarded it to the White House.

The painting was a good choice: it appeared to be within Chinese tradition but 

would appeal to American audiences. The rendering of the birds was realistic and 

lively, the color vibrant, and the brush strokes bold and energetic. The composition 

contained a Western perspective, which Johnson, a leading China specialist, specifically noted in his cover letter to Roosevelt. Conveying the sentiment as well as the 

energy of the painting, Johnson reported that the artist “desired to make a picture 

which would be symbolic of the position which the President of the United States 

holds in the present world situation and after choosing the dove spent three weeks 

working out the composition.” Johnson explained: “Then in one day he painted the 

first fifty doves. Later others were added until he had painted 97. The last three 

added to make up the hundred are the dove at the extreme left, the white one in the 

center and the one faintly seen at the far distance coming from behind the foliage.” 

For this painting, Zhang used gouache as well as Chinese wet colors, as he regularly 

did in his work.10

Messengers of Peace was said to have graced the White House after its acceptance, 

and it later was displayed in the exhibition hall of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, where it is now permanently 

held. The Ferargil Galleries in New York City exhibited it in 1942. Numerous 

newspapers, books, and periodicals reproduced the image, which became famous in 

the United States; to this day it is also celebrated in China.11

Zhang followed the painting to the United States, arriving in the fall of 1941. 

Traveling on a diplomatic passport with Chinese government financial support, he 

was presented as China’s “ambassador of art and goodwill.” His mission was to 

introduce Chinese culture to the American people and promote friendship in what 

quickly became a common cause after Japan’s December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor. 

Unable to return to China, Zhang spent the next five years in the United States 

frenetically advancing cultural diplomacy. 

 He had brought 400 of his own paintings with him, but also continued to 

paint actively in America. He sold many of his works and participated in events to 

raise money for United China Relief, the non-government organization that rallied 

Americans to support the Chinese people during the war. Zhang participated in 

group shows of contemporary Chinese painting, such as a 1943 exhibition at the 

Metropolitan Museum in New York. And he held numerous large one-artist shows 

in museums throughout the country, including several at the de Young in San 

Francisco, the Seattle Art Museum, the Chicago Art Institute, the Nelson Gallery 

in Kansas City, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of 
Chinese Painting Comes to America 133

Art, and the Ontario Museum in Toronto. He exhibited at galleries and gave talks 

at clubs, civic organizations, and universities from Portland to Chicago to Washington, DC. Museums and collectors, such as Henry Luce, purchased his paintings. 

The writers Pearl Buck and Lin Yutang, the philosopher Hu Shih, and other specialists in Chinese life and culture in America admired his work. At his shows, his 

public demonstrations of his painting attracted large audiences of spectators who 

saw for the first time what Chinese brush painting was all about. Zhang returned 

to China after the end of World War II and then came back to the United States 

in 1949. He opened a studio a block away from the California College of Arts and 

Crafts and resided in the Oakland hills until his early death in 1957.12

Space does not allow a full discussion of Zhang Shuqi’s work as it evolved 

in the conditions of life in the United States other than to present a few observations. Zhang was a serious artist who constantly studied both Chinese 

and Western art texts and paintings. Sometime in the early 1940s when he 

was in America, for example, he explored using black paper and board, which 

was highly unusual in the Chinese art tradition. Some of the resulting images seemed to invoke the work of John La Farge from the 1860s. La Farge 

had completed a composition of a water lily against a dark background after 

studying Japanese brush painting, and he might have inspired Zhang, who 

completed a similar composition and then reproduced it as a widely circulated note card in the 1940s. In China, Zhang had also become known for 

his “whiteism,” the liberal use of white pigment, which was untraditional 

in Chinese painting, and he continued using white ink for his painting and 

even calligraphy, recalling Mark Tobey’s “white writing.”13 One also wonders 

about possible conversations between the work of Morris Graves and Chinese 

bird-and-flower artists such as Zhang. In the early 1940s, Zhang exhibited 

his pictures and performed demonstrations of his technique at the Seattle Art 

Museum, which purchased his paintings for its collection and where Graves 

worked for a time.

Zhang never broke with representational painting—he was technically so skillful with the Chinese brush and steeped in Chinese naturalism that Western notions 

of abstraction never persuaded him to abandon his approach. But his work clearly 

evolved in the United States, and we can only speculate as to the influences that 

played on him.

Take, for example, one of his compositions completed on a screen, one of the 

traditional supports for Chinese painting (Figure 3). Brightly colored sunflowers 

evoke Van Gogh, of course, but Zhang also employs the vigorous use of black ink 

calligraphic brush strokes. The rendering of the flowers, in contrast, is accomplished 
134 East–West Interchanges in American Art

with thick, layered pigment that may recall the impasto of western oil paints. He 

completed this in the United States and certainly intended it to stay in America. 

Other works display what he considered to be the hallmark of Chinese artwork, 

“rhythmic vitality” or sheng dong, but perhaps with even greater force, color, and 

abstraction than what he completed in China. He experimented with new ways 

to apply his paints, such as the use of kitchen and natural sponges. He sketched 

with ink pens and wax crayons. He worked on American watercolor cardboard, cut 

in dimensions for Western wood framing. He even painted on ceramics, such as 

tiles and lamp stands. We also see a move toward simplification, an effort to find 

essential formal elements, and new subject matter from the California natural 

and physical landscape, which he loved. He added California quail, redwood trees, 

and Sierra pines (Figure 4), along with Yosemite and Carmel, to his expanding 

subject repertoire.14

Although Zhang considered himself to be in the tradition of Chinese classical 

masters, he fully embraced modern technologies of reproduction and publicity. In 

China, he had produced note cards of his work, indicating his appreciation of the 

commercial potential that machine printing offered. Stranded in the United States 

during the war, he took the opportunity to start a business on a larger scale. He reproduced his work as fine stationery, lithographs, note cards, Christmas cards, and 

even as decorative items such as wallpaper, placemats, and tallies for scoring the card 

game of bridge (which obsessed him), as well as table napkins and paper table cover3. Zhang Shuqi, Sunflowers, 1952. Chang family collection.
Chinese Painting Comes to America 135

ings. These reproductions sold well throughout the country and internationally, in 

curio stores and in fine homeware emporiums. They were marketed from the 1940s 

through the 1970s, circulating to tens of thousands of consumers. Zhang also authored a richly illustrated book that offered instruction on Chinese painting and its 

techniques, including brush use and composition. Viking Press published an English 

translation of the book in 1960 under the title Painting in the Chinese Manner, recognizing that it was one of the first treatises on Chinese painting in America by an actual 

practitioner of the art form.15

Another modern dimension of the presentation of his art was the live demonstration. It is unclear when Chinese painters began to offer these performances, 

which became more common in the latter half of the twentieth century, but we know 

that Liu Haisu gave public demonstrations when he toured Europe in the 1930s.16 

Within China, there was no tradition of painting in public. Live demonstrations 

were completely unknown, though when artists socialized they could paint with one 

another in friendship, often collaborating on compositions over wine or a repast. 

Zhang himself did so in his own homes. But in the United States, Zhang quickly 

added personal appearances and painting demonstrations to his exhibitions. Widely 

advertised, these events attracted great crowds who watched in rapt and astonished 

attention as he produced complicated compositions within a matter of minutes.

4. Zhang Shuqi, Lone Cypress, ca. 1955. Chang family collection.
136 East–West Interchanges in American Art

They were performances in every sense of the word with expectant and hushed 

audiences, a stage (the painting table), a charismatic figure who spoke in English 

with an unfamiliar inflection, and action that could not be recaptured. Art became 

a moment and movement, not just an object. Zhang became known for his extraordinary technical skill and speed, which Life magazine featured in a 1943 article 

about him (Figure 5), complete with photos of his minute-by-minute progress 

on a painting as a clock indicated the passing time. As the title of the Life photo 

spread declared, “Chinese Painting: Professor Chang shows how he does it in eight 

minutes flat.” Technical speed impressed the magazine’s editors, in good American 

style, but they were oblivious to the creative and expressive possibilities of the rapid 

strokes that many traditionally appreciated in Chinese painting.17

Many things intrigued his American audiences at the demonstrations, including 

his unusual handling of materials, especially the brush, the application of paints, 

and his composition. Zhang’s rendering of simple scenes of natural beauty captivated; his birds and flowers created an “alternative reality” to the stresses of war and 

5. “Chinese Painting: Professor Chang shows how he does it in eight minutes flat,” Life magazine, 

15 March 1943, 65–66.
Chinese Painting Comes to America 137

of daily life.18 But there was something more, which critical observers at the time 

noted, implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, contrasting his work with traditional 

Western approaches to painting. This was the ability of the art to capture expressive gesture resulting from the interplay of trained, physical effort and contingency. 

Here is what Alfred Frankenstein, the well-known art critic of the San Francisco 

Chronicle, wrote in 1943 after attending one of these demonstrations:

Watching Chang at work is like hearing [Jascha] Heifetz play the fiddle; 

i.e., the results of the virtuosity are directly and immediately apparent as 

they seldom are in watching a Western painter at his easel. The parallel 

goes further in that, with Chang, one has a sense of manual dexterity 

trained to the last degree of subtle muscular control. He has a spiccato 

and a legato, he has mastered harmonics in double stops, and the right 

and left hand pizzicato as well. Furthermore a painting by Chang is 

and has to be a one-sitting performance. He can no more stop and knock 

off and come back than Heifetz can stop and knock off while playing the 

Brahms concerto in public. He works very wet, and he works entirely 

without model, drawing a vast stock of motifs out of memorized observation and tradition. And until you see him you do not know what a 

subtle, plastic and varied instrument a Chinese brush can be.19

Other writers also spoke of Zhang’s performances as magical and full of spirit, 

spontaneity, and quiet emotion. The San Francisco artist and writer John Garth 

witnessed Zhang at the de Young Museum and emphasized the fluid physicality of 

his act of painting: “The way in which Professor Chang moves his brush through 

its series of graceful curves, swirls and touches as the painting steadily evolves 

beneath his handsome hand reminds the watcher, oddly enough, of the apparent 

free but exactly controlled execution of a difficult dance routine by some master or 

mistress of the classic ballet.” In a dig at some of his fellow American artists, Garth 

also complimented Zhang for his “calm grace of execution unknown to the western 

modern, who nowadays appears always to have tortured the paint on to his canvas 

in a frantic agony of spiritual doubt and indecision.”20

As the Life photo-essay suggests, there is another technology of dissemination that 

we need to consider: the technology of filmic production—that is, still and moving 

photography. Zhang was keen on both. In China, he used photos to record his work for 

his own reference and for publicity. He had individual pieces photographed, as well as 

his exhibitions and even his gifting of Messengers of Peace. He understood the power of 

promotion and employed professional photographers to record his time in the United 

States and create portfolios of himself and his performances (Figure 6). In these 
138 East–West Interchanges in American Art

portraits, he could be the gowned master draped in the silk of a Chinese scholar with 

brush in hand, or the modern international celebrity sporting a sharp, tailored wool 

suit, with tie, wingtips, and a casually held cigarette.

In the 1940s his work became the subject of motion picture documentaries, 

early examples of films showing an artist at work. His unfamiliar style, still exotic 

for American audiences, and his ability to paint in an energetic and intriguing way 

were perfect for the motion picture. Through these captivating documentaries, we 

can still see Zhang at work today, somewhat as his museum demonstration audiences did more than 60 years ago.

One of these films was made in 1943, a joint production of the Harmon Foundation, which is best known for supporting African American artists, and the China 

Institute in America, an organization that promoted the understanding of Chinese 

culture. American philosopher-educator John Dewey and Hu Shih, the famous Chinese intellectual, helped found the Institute in New York in 1926. The film’s producer was Wango Weng, an art scholar and connoisseur who also narrated the documentary.21 Several things about the film stand out. One is its use of Zhang’s art as 

a way of introducing Chinese painting to an uninitiated, general American audience. 

In attempting to instruct, it focuses on matters that were unusual to audiences at 

the time: the rhythmic power of Chinese brush strokes, the effort to present nature 

6. Zhang Shuqi presents a live demonstration of his painting technique in Chicago, 1943. Zhang Shuqi Papers, Hoover 

Institution Archives, Stanford University, California.
Chinese Painting Comes to America 139

from the mind and not from an established model, the rigorous training, and the 

idea of temporality in the act of painting. The film, which shows Zhang painting 

and completing compositions, introduces the viewer to central elements of Chinese 

artistic production: the sequence of brush strokes, their irretrievability, their interconnectedness and contingency, and the stylized representation of an identifiable 

subject. Within minutes, Zhang transforms a blank void into a virtual reality of 

flowers, leaves, birds, insects, and colors, visualizing a moment in imagined time. 

The narrator has to remind an incredulous viewer that the act of creation was occurring in “real time,” not edited or mechanically quickened visually.22

Zhang could be presented as the prototypical Chinese artist carrying on some 

timeless tradition, but his actual work was a subtle interpolation within strongly 

held cultural assumptions. His own identity when he was alive was elusive and not 

transparent. Today it is still a challenge to attempt to interpret his life and work. 

Zhang helped to bring Chinese painting to America. He brought not just paintings 

as objects—which museums had long held, elite patrons admired, and scholars had 

studied. Under the exigencies of global conflict, he brought Chinese painting as 

event, as activity, and as something accessible to a broad spectrum of Americans. 

Technologies, market conditions, and international politics created the occasion. 

Artistic currents in America soon came to embrace their own versions of the gesture, the spontaneous, and the display of psychic energy. Zhang’s personal style of 

art fit the times and opportunities.

Zhang was unique, but he was also representative. As with many of his Chinese 

contemporaries, he sought to reinvigorate Chinese painting while also wanting to 

make an impact on America and advance the internationalization of art. In China, 

the line between the intellectual and artistic world, on the one hand, and the political world, on the other, has been more permeable than in the West. Zhang’s career 

was similar: his art and activity in America complemented political diplomacy to be 

sure, but he also helped to negotiate new, more porous boundaries between art in 

China and America. His was also a “diplomacy of art.”

In international relations, “diplomacy” broadly refers to the formal interaction 

of states, while the term “art of diplomacy” honors the creative effort required to 

move beyond established positions and to forge new relationships. And so it is with 

the “diplomacy of art.” Within the world of art, references are made to media, to 

various ways to present and articulate. But art is itself a medium, a platform that 

can serve to advance dialogue across various sorts of boundaries rooted in traditions, beliefs, social practices, geographies, times, and values. Art is an avenue of 

cultural exchange and interaction. And specific works of art can themselves embody 

those very conversations, with the creation of the new, unexpected, and arresting.
140 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Zhang hoped to see the end of the East–West artistic divide, a trope that 

dominated the world he inhabited, and he was encouraged by the warm reception 

he received here and the art that he saw in America. Artists from Asia were learning 

from the West, he observed in the 1940s, and “occidental artists are beginning to 

pay attention to design by the mind much more than before”—something he believed Chinese artists had done all along. All this inspired him to “foretell a union 

between the East and the West.” He took pride in his contributions to East–West 

artistic interaction and the diplomacy of art.23

Notes

1. For new perspectives on East–West artistic interaction, see Gordon H. Chang, Mark Dean 

Johnson, and Paul J. Karlstrom, eds., Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970 (Stanford, CA: 

Stanford University Press, 2008); Alexandra Munroe, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate 

Asia, 1860–1989 (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2009); and Jeffrey Wechsler, ed., Asian 

Traditions/Modern Expressions: Asian American Artists and Abstraction, 1945–1970 (New York: Harry 

N. Abrams, 1997). On Lai Yong, see Chang, et al., Asian American Art, 469–79.

2. The author of this essay is the son of the artist and draws from personal papers in the family 

collection for some of the source material. Zhang Shuqi’s name is also rendered as Shu-chi Chang, 

which is how he was commonly known in America during his lifetime. The Hoover Institution 

Archives holds the Zhang Shuqi papers.

3. See Warren I. Cohen, East Asian Art and American Culture: A Study in International Relations (New 

York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 1–11, 30–32; Nathan Dunn, A Descriptive Catalogue of 

the Chinese Collection in Philadelphia: With Miscellaneous Remarks Upon the Manners, Customs, 

Trade, and Government of the Celestial Empire (Philadelphia, 1839), 77; and Jonathan Goldstein, 

Philadelphia and the China Trade, 1682–1846: Commercial, Cultural, and Attitudinal Effects 

(University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978), 74, 77–79. In 1832, Dunn also 

constructed a manor on his New Jersey estate with Chinese architectural motifs, a practice 

common among the elite in these years. The structure still stands in Mt. Holly.

4. John R. Peters Jr., Miscellaneous Remarks upon the Government, History, Religions, Literature, 

Agriculture, Arts, Trades, Manners, and Customs of the Chinese: As suggested by an examination of the 

articles comprising the Chinese Museum (Philadelphia: G. B. Zieber & Co., 1847), quotes at 192–93.

5. Cohen, East Asian Art, 31.

6. Most scholarship on Liu Haisu is unavailable in English, but images and basic biographies may 

be found online. In Shanghai, the Liu Haisu Art Museum was opened in 1995 to house works he 

donated and to display modern Chinese art.

7. Zhang Shuqi, “The Story of My Painting Life,” unpublished manuscript, ca. 1944, Chang Family 

collection.

8. See Yifeng (Art Wind) 3, no. 11 (1935). The entire issue is devoted to Zhang’s work.

9. Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, eds. Chinese Painting on the Eve of the Communist Revolution: 

Chang Shu-chi and his Collection (Stanford, CA: Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, 

2006), 5–6.

10. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum holds documentation related to 

the gifting of the painting and some of its subsequent history in the Roosevelt administration. 

See Wendell A. Parks to Gordon H. Chang, November 13, 1997. Johnson to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 

December 24,1940. Chang Family collection.

11. See, for example, Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe [Shanghai People’s Fine Art Publishing 

House], Zhang Shuqi baigetu [‘Zhang Shuqi’s One Hundred doves’] (Shanghai, 1997); and Hong 

Tuan, Zhang Shuqi (Hubei: Hubei meishu chubanshe [Hubei Fine Arts Publishing House], 2005). 

12. An Exhibition of Modern Chinese Paintings (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1943), with 

introductions by Hu Shih, Kinn-Wei Shaw, Lin Yutang, and Alan Priest.
Chinese Painting Comes to America 141

13. The La Farge painting is The Last Waterlilies, an 1862 oil in the collection of the Colby College 

Museum of Art. In 1932, Zhang and four Chinese artist friends founded the Baishe (White Society), 

which explored the use of white in painting. 

14. Zhang also became active in American professional circles, including the Western Society of 

Artists. In 1956, he won the top award in its annual competition. He was a member of the faculty 

of the University of California at Berkeley. 

15. Shu-chi Chang, Painting in the Chinese Manner (New York: Viking Press, 1960). In the book, 

Zhang devotes most attention to what can be called the techniques and formal qualities of Chinese 

painting rather than its philosophy and aesthetics. He wrote the book in Chinese, with the Chinese 

title “Shuqi’s painting method.” It was translated by his wife, who provided the English title. 

16. The Studio, vol. 109 (1935): 50, includes a photograph of Liu Haisu painting in public at the 

New Burlington Galleries in London. It accompanies an article by him entitled “Aims of the Chinese 

Painters.”

17. “Chinese Painting: Professor Chang shows how he does it in eight minutes flat,” Life, 15 March 

1943, 65–66. The ideal of speed in Chinese painting is discussed in James Cahill, “Quickness and 

Spontaneity in Chinese Painting: The Ups and Downs of an Ideal,” in his Three Alternative Histories 

of Chinese Painting (Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1988), 70–99.

18. On “alternative realities,” see Richard Vinograd, “Temporalities in Early Twentieth Century 

Chinese Painting,” in Andrews and Shen, eds., Chinese Painting, 1–2.

19. Alfred Frankenstein “The Chinese Send Us Chang Shu-chi,” San Francisco Chronicle, 14 November 1943, 

“This World,” 12.

20. John Garth, “The Art World,” San Francisco Chronicle, 19 November 1943. Among the other 

Asia-trained artists who came to the United States in the first half of the twentieth century are 

Chiura Obata, Chiang Yee, Dong Kingman, and Paul Horiuchi. Zhang was especially close to Chiang 

Yee, another pioneer in introducing Chinese arts to America.

21. In 2007, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston presented an exhibition of the Weng family’s painting 

collection, Through Six Generations: The Weng Collection of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy. At least 

one other film showing Zhang painting was made, “A Chinese Artist: The Method and Technique of 

Chang Shu-chi”; it was produced by Leslie P. Thatcher for the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology 

in 1942.

22. A portion of this 10-minute-long film may be found at www.americanart.si.edu/research/

symposia/2009/webcast/.

23. Zhang Shuqi, “On Occidental and Oriental Painting,” unpublished manuscript, ca. 1943, Chang 

Family collection.
New Negro on the Pacific Rim

Sargent Johnson’s Afro-Asian Sculptures

John P. Bowles
143

Between 1923 and 1925, Sargent Johnson (1887–1967) created a porcelain portrait of his infant daughter Pearl that alludes to Chinese Buddhist 

sculpture (Figure 1). When Johnson exhibited Pearl and two drawings in 

the Harmon Foundation’s 1933 “Exhibition of Productions by Negro 

Artists” in New York, he was awarded the prize for “Most Outstanding Work in [the] Exhibit.”1

 Despite this early attention, Pearl—along with 

his other sculptures incorporating Asian subject matter or stylistic references—has been ignored by art historians, who have privileged those works in 

Johnson’s oeuvre that resemble African art, such as his hammered-copper 

masks of the 1930s.2

For much of his lifetime, however, Johnson was best-known for the prizewinning sculptures of children he made between 1923 and 1935 (Figure 2). 

These works incorporate a diverse array of stylistic references ranging from 

ancient Egypt, Rome, and Quattrocento Florence to West Africa, China, and 

India. A decade later, in a 1944 scholarship application to visit Mexico, Johnson emphasized the eclecticism of his art, noting that he was especially interested in the sculpture of “the great cultures of Egypt, Greece, the Orient, the 

Middle Ages and primitive societies.”3

 Despite scholars’ subsequent emphasis 

on African and African American aspects of Johnson’s sculpture, much of his 

professional success derived from the genuinely multicultural variety of his 

art and the different interpretations that this multiculturalism elicited.

Johnson’s success may have depended upon his ability to construct two 

distinct, but mutually reinforcing, professional identities, comfortably occupying a place among California transnational modernists as well as a role within the national New Negro movement.4 His interest in art from around the 
144 East–West Interchanges in American Art

world, including the arts of Asia, 

West Africa, modern Mexico, PreColumbian Latin America, and ancient Greece and Egypt, provided 

Johnson with a way to participate 

in the local San Francisco art scene 

and its discourse of multicultural 

modernism without being pigeonholed as a Negro artist. At the same 

time, Johnson’s interest in African 

art could be singled out as a sign of 

his solidarity with the anti-racist, 

anti-colonial, democratic cultural 

nationalism of Alain Locke, W. E. B. 

Du Bois, and other African American leaders. This strategy appears 

to have enabled Johnson to establish a strong reputation in the Bay 

Area despite the “color line” that 

sundered America so strikingly in 

the early twentieth century.

Johnson moved to the Bay Area 

in 1915, a time when artists and civic leaders alike represented the region as modern 

America’s cultural and economic interface with Asia; this was considered an important 

part of what made the Bay Area cosmopolitan. Contemporary business and civic leaders 

touted the Bay Area as the U.S. gateway to the Pacific Basin, book-ending the era with 

a pair of grandiose world’s fairs to assert their claims. The Panama Pacific International 

Exposition of 1915 commemorated the opening of the Panama Canal and represented 

San Francisco as a capital city of the Pacific Rim; and the Golden Gate International 

Exposition of 1939 hailed San Francisco as the western states’ gateway to the Pacific 

with architecture and monumental sculptures—some by Johnson—orchestrated to 

create the impression of a “Pacific Empire.”5

 Between the fairs, San Francisco sculptors responded to the region’s boosters. Finding themselves bound by no single artistic 

tradition, they sometimes referred to themselves as “California artists”—an identity 

suggesting distance and independence from art circles on the East Coast and an affinity for the arts of Pacific Rim nations.6

 Civic leaders regarded San Francisco as a liberal 

and welcoming city, free from the racism they saw elsewhere. Likewise, the San Francisco Art Association could sometimes point with self-contentment to the active role 

1. Sargent Johnson, Pearl, 1923–25. Stoneware with glaze. 

Location unknown. Black-and-white photograph by James Latimer 

Allen, published as the frontispiece in Exhibition of Work by Negro Artists

(New York: Harmon Foundation, Inc., 1933).
New Negro on the Pacific Rim 145

Chinese and Japanese artists took 

in local exhibitions, disregarding 

the racism and anti-immigrant 

sentiment they faced regularly 

in the Bay Area.7

It was in this context that 

Johnson made several sculptures 

between 1923 and 1935 that articulate a relationship with cultures of the Pacific Rim, giving 

form to New Negro cosmopolitanism on a local stage that was 

also already self-consciously transnational. Johnson’s Orientalist and 

Africanist allusions situate him in 

the Bay Area, looking east to Africa, south to Latin America, and 

west through the Golden Gate and 

across the Pacific to Asia.

For Pearl, the portrait of his 

daughter, Johnson incorporated references to traditional Buddhist iconography as 

well as his own multicultural community in the Bay Area. He sculpted his daughter in 

porcelain glazed blue-green—a medium that would have been associated with Asian 

ceramics—and gave her a contemporary hairstyle popular in both Asian and European 

American communities. He also portrayed her in a relaxed pose that is both childlike 

and suggestive of the royal ease reserved for only the highest order of Buddhist deities 

and royalty. He placed Pearl atop a throne, evoking a motif found in representations 

of the Buddha throughout Asia. Johnson may have thought he was representing the 

Buddha, but, in fact, the baby Buddha is typically not seated (the sutras say he stood 

up immediately) or chubby. There is, however, a tradition of child deities, particularly 

of young pilgrims that become deified figures. A lotus-flower motif of the artist’s own 

design ornaments the base, perhaps also referring to Egyptian art, as Aaron Douglas 

would do with stylized papyrus blossoms in his illustrations of 1926 and later. But the 

lotus blossoms in Pearl might also represent Johnson’s Orientalist allusion to a popular 

and auspicious Buddhist image: pure, newly born souls, represented in the form of babies, each seated on his or her own lotus-flower throne to hear the Buddha preach.8

Pearl is not only an intimate portrait of the artist’s own baby; it is also an invention, a figure for Johnson’s imagined relationship to China, India, and Japan. It 

2. Sargent Johnson, Elizabeth Gee, 1927. Stoneware with glaze 

on wood stand, 13 1

⁄8 × 10 3⁄4 × 7 1⁄2 in. San Francisco Museum of 

Modern Art, Albert M. Bender Collection, Gift of Albert M. Bender.
146 East–West Interchanges in American Art

is not Buddhist but a Buddhist-inspired figure that counters stereotypical representations of African Americans in mainstream culture. In the early decades of the 

twentieth century, when Johnson was emerging as an active participant in the New 

Negro renaissance, Locke, Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and other African American 

political leaders found deep affinities between the fight against racism in the United 

States and the nationalist, anti-colonial movements in India and China and, even, 

at times, with Japanese imperialism and self-determination.9

 Only two years after 

Johnson first exhibited Pearl, Du Bois reimagined racial identification in his novel 

Dark Princess in a strikingly similar way. The book figures the salvation of “the darker 

peoples of the world” as a baby born to an African American father and a princess 

from a fictitious kingdom in India.10 In Du Bois’s novel, transnational solidarity 

among anti-racist activists, figured literally in terms of race-mixing, threatens to 

render racial distinctions obsolete while giving birth to a new generation who will 

continue the struggle for global cultural democracy. Johnson’s sculpture is less polemical but perhaps no less optimistic.

Considered in more local terms, Pearl and some of Johnson’s other sculptures, 

through the metaphor of innocent children, established the artist’s place in a diverse community and provided evidence of a cosmopolitan future. Only one of 

Johnson’s portraits of children, Elizabeth Gee (Figure 2), represents an Asian resident 

of his multi-ethnic Berkeley neighborhood, but at least two, Pearl and Head of a Boy, 

clearly incorporate Asian motifs, as do some of his other sculptures of the 1930s. 

The tender realism of Johnson’s portraits bespeaks an intimacy between the artist 

and his subjects in a multicultural neighborhood. When Johnson made these small 

sculptures, he had moved across the San Francisco Bay with his family to a house 

he purchased near San Pablo Park, in a Berkeley neighborhood that was attracting many middle-class African American families. The area was already home to a 

large Japanese community as well as many European immigrants and some ethnic 

Chinese. Johnson’s home was four blocks from the local Japanese Buddhist temple, 

and neighborhood children attended fully integrated public schools.11 Elizabeth Gee, 

made between 1925 and 1927, is a portrait of Pearl’s playmate, a Chinese American 

girl who lived only a block from the Johnsons, who has since described the San 

Pablo Park neighborhood as “a racial oasis in a desert of discrimination” during the 

1920s and 1930s.12

Elizabeth Gee, both Asian-inflected and intimate, is a sensitive rendering done in a 

realist style. But do Pearl and Elizabeth Gee represent a cosmopolitan New Negro consciousness or merely a fashionable taste for Asian ceramics, symbols, and hairstyles? 

Chester (Figure 3), Johnson’s portrait sculpture of the early 1930s, most often 

characterized as illustrating the artist’s interest in representing “the pure American 
New Negro on the Pacific Rim 147

Negro,” provides a helpful 

model for understanding 

his clear allusions to Asian 

art in other sculptures made 

at approximately the same 

time.13 Chester is Africanist 

in the same way that Pearl

and Elizabeth Gee are Orientalist, evoking a romanticized, idealized, and distant 

culture in order to reflect 

critically upon the contemporary moment. The sculpture appears to be a portrait 

of an African American boy, 

rendered realistically but 

with an elegant simplicity 

betraying Johnson’s modernist archaism. Johnson’s 

only published statement 

about Chester identifies it 

simply as being modeled on 

“That kid [who] used to come to my studio.”14 Like Pearl and Elizabeth Gee, Chester

represents one more child from Johnson’s Berkeley neighborhood through a multicultural amalgamation of hybrid sculptural forms.15

Seeing Chester in 1931, Alain Locke recognized the sculpture’s cosmopolitanism and proclaimed Johnson one of the leading New Negro “Africanists,” or NeoPrimitives. In two articles that year, “The African Legacy and the Negro Artist” and 

“The American Negro as Artist,” Locke argued for the important lessons “Negro 

artists” could draw from African art, and he singled out Johnson for praise: compared with the work of other New Negro artists, the “stylistic analogies” Johnson 

drew in Chester were the “most direct of all.”16 “It is a long stretch from an isolated 

Negro sculptor living and working in California to the classic antiques of bygone 

African cultures,” Locke wrote, “but here it is in this captivatingly naïve bust for 

those to see for whom only seeing is believing.”17 In Locke’s description, Johnson’s 

Chester figures an imagined identification with Africa at the same time that it marks 

the distances imposed by history and geography: Chester epitomizes the New Negro 

self-conception.

3. Sargent Johnson, Chester, 1931. Cast terra cotta on wood base, 

8 1

⁄2 × 5 1⁄2 × 7 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Albert M. Bender 

Collection, Bequest of Albert M. Bender.
148 East–West Interchanges in American Art

In the mid- to late 1920s, when Locke first made his case for the New Negro’s 

interest in African art, he characterized the New Negro perspective in a phrase familiar from his description of Johnson’s attitude toward Africa: African art, Locke 

wrote, “may seem a far cry from the conditions and moods of modern New York 

and Chicago and the Negro’s rapid and feverish assimilation of all things American. 

But art establishes its contacts in strange ways.” In this passage, Locke positioned 

African art in contrast to “assimilation of all things American,” providing evidence 

of a Negro “folk temperament” as a tradition of cultural resistance.18

As a consequence, Locke characterized New Negro art not through any particular formal concerns but according to a new self-reflexive and critical “point of 

view” on history, by the clear recognition that “the Negro’s situation in the past has 

forced him to a counter-attitude in life and a spectator’s attitude toward himself.”19 

The American Negro tradition was a set of strategies for adaptation and accommodation, manifest in cultural pluralism.20 For Locke, Johnson’s allusions to African 

art are significant not because they resurrect a forgotten inheritance but because 

Johnson’s modernist practice poses the New Negro’s relationship to Africa as a 

question of historical distance. In Chester, the seemingly natural affinities between 

what Locke identifies as an African precedent and a New Negro subject articulates 

a deliberate goal of multicultural solidarity. Most important for Locke is Johnson’s 

engagement in a critical reappropriation of African art—the cultural product of a 

conventionally marginalized “classic” civilization—with the specific purpose of articulating an alternative perspective on history.21 In short, Johnson’s portrait sculptures of the 1920s and 1930s measure cultural difference, a core value of Locke’s 

cultural politics, figuring the Negro’s new critical role in the culture of the United 

States and the world.

Johnson’s multicultural perspective is characteristic of Locke’s New Negro 

project, but he also shared it with his teachers and colleagues in San Francisco, 

almost none of whom were African American. The depth of Johnson’s interest in 

African art seems to have been unique among San Francisco artists, although it 

would most likely not have struck his contemporaries as out of the ordinary. In 

the spirit of cultural democracy, local artists were respected—if sometimes also 

marginalized—for articulating their ethnic heritage in their art. For example, when 

Diego Rivera visited San Francisco from 1930 to 1931, he painted local subjects 

in a style that was understood to express his perspective as a Mexican artist. During 

that same visit, when Rivera spoke to a meeting of the Chinese Art Club of California, a group comprising Chinese students at the California School of Fine Arts, he 

advised them “not to imitate American or European art but to cling to [y]our own 

Chinese art.” Furthermore, during his visit Rivera was a member of the jury that 
New Negro on the Pacific Rim 149

awarded the Medal of First Award for Sculpture in the San Francisco Art Association’s 1931 annual exhibition to Johnson’s Chester.

22 Rivera’s impressions of Johnson’s work are not recorded, but it is possible he saw in it the same thing Locke had 

only months earlier: an informed engagement with African art from the perspective 

of a modern Negro living and working in California. Other members of the San 

Francisco Art Association may have agreed, but it is notable that in the extensive 

press coverage of the annual exhibition that year some journalists cited Johnson’s 

local renown—he was clearly accepted among the local community of artists—but 

not a single author identified Johnson as Negro or commented that Chester appeared 

to be inspired by African art. Scholar Helen Shannon has demonstrated that Johnson must have been familiar with the Egyptian “reserve heads” (life-sized funerary 

portrait head sculptures from Egypt’s fourth dynasty) that likely inspired Chester. 

It is not certain, however, that many people in the San Francisco art community 

would have recognized these sources. Even Locke does not seem to have noticed the 

similarity. Instead, local viewers focused on the realism of the work, perhaps thinking of it in terms of the more academic sculptures, such as Esther and Anderson, that 

Johnson made between 1929 and 1930.23

Another possibility is that Chester’s simplified yet delicately expressive form is 

so abstracted that it might have been understood as drawing upon any number of 

artistic traditions, a quality that simply signified a modern style. For example, Ralph 

Stackpole, a leading local modernist and Johnson’s teacher at the California School 

of Fine Arts for two years, wrote in 1935 that sculptors might look to the “few places 

dotted over the globe where sculpture has flourished,” from Asia Minor to “Egypt and 

Greece, around to India and China and Java, then over to Mexico and up to British 

Columbia (the nearest point to us) where the Columbian Indians made totem poles, 

masks, etc., and back to Africa, where Negro art grew, as fine as any.”24

Whichever of these traditions Johnson intended to draw upon, local art critics did not try to discern his sources. Johnson’s achievement with Chester was its 

capacity to exemplify different meanings to different audiences. The San Francisco 

Examiner’s art critic, for example, simply described Chester as “a strong and moving conception.” She also asserted Johnson’s local professional standing without 

mentioning his race, referring to him as a “well known San Francisco artist.”25 San 

Franciscans’ liberal conception of themselves as opposing racism and welcoming 

people of all races and ethnicities—despite evidence of discrimination gathered 

by local civil rights organizations and widespread support for anti-immigration 

laws—enabled them to support a Negro artist as a cosmopolitan modernist even 

as others encouraged him to focus on more clearly Negro subjects. While for Alain 

Locke, Chester established Johnson as an Africanist and, therefore, a member of the 
150 East–West Interchanges in American Art

New Negro interpretive community, in San Francisco the 

artist’s work was absorbed into 

a more generalized interpretive 

framework.26

In fact, Locke had more in 

mind than reductivist, or essential race consciousness. In a 

1925 essay, he called on American Negro artists to reach multiracial audiences with a multicultural practice, giving them a 

choice he framed in terms of a 

trans-oceanic metaphor: “new 

Armadas of conflict or argosies of cultural exchange and 

enlightenment.”27 Johnson sets 

African and Asian traditions 

into more explicit dialogue in 

another sculpture of the early 

1930s, Head of a Boy (Figure 4). 

Although nothing is known of the sitter, this sculpture resembles the busts Johnson 

made of neighborhood children—especially Chester, in the sensitive details of eyes 

and lips carved in the manner of Egyptian “reserve heads”—and, notably, it rises 

from a base that resembles the sort of Buddhist throne alluded to in Pearl. While 

Johnson seems to have invented the decorative elements on Pearl’s base, the wooden 

base he carved for Head of a Boy refers more directly to Buddhist iconography. With a 

pair of lions reclining symmetrically on either side of a form that may represent the 

wheel of Dharma or an incense burner, Johnson has replicated the imagery found on 

thrones supporting many Chinese and Indian sculptures of the Buddha. A solitary 

head is an image never found in Buddhist art, however; in this respect, Johnson’s 

sculpture of Pearl more closely resembles the Buddhist sculptures he must have 

studied.

Although it is not known precisely which Asian sculptures were available to 

Johnson, he had many opportunities to study Buddhist art. His greatest patron 

of the time, Albert Bender, was a major collector of Asian art, donating works to 

several museums in the Bay Area as well as to the national museum of his native 

country, Ireland. Johnson’s teacher Beniamino Bufano is also reported to have had 

4. Sargent Johnson, Head of a Boy, 1934. Terra cotta on wood 

base, 7 1

⁄4 × 6 × 6 in. Formerly in the collection of the San Francisco 

Museum of Modern Art, current location unknown. Photo courtesy San 

Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
New Negro on the Pacific Rim 151

a large collection of Chinese sculpture.28 And in Johnson’s Berkeley neighborhood, 

the artist might have seen Buddhist devotional sculpture in the homes of Chinese 

or Japanese neighbors or, four blocks from his house, in the Japanese Buddhist 

temple, the Higashi Honganji, on Oregon Street. Finally, Head of a Boy is more 

didactically straightforward in its cultural references than Pearl: Johnson pairs the 

African-inspired terra cotta portrait head with a distinctly Buddhist base in a different medium, wood. Rather than assimilating disparate cultural references, he has 

kept the Asian and the African elements separate, calling attention to the distinctive 

qualities of each and to their harmonious relationship within the sculptural whole.

Taken as a group, Johnson’s busts create a collective portrait of the Negro middle 

class, integrated with its Chinese American neighbors in 1920s and 1930s Berkeley. Was Johnson’s perspective unique among African Americans or did others feel a 

similar affinity for Asia, too? I am still researching the attitudes of African Americans 

toward their Asian neighbors in San Francisco and the East Bay, but I think Du Bois, 

in his 1913 account of a visit to the West Coast published in the Crisis under the title 

“Colored California,” offers a clue. Du Bois observed, “Here I had my first sight of 

the Pacific and realized how California faces the newest color problem, the problem of 

the relations of the Orient to the Occident. The colored people of California do not 

quite realize the bigness of their problem and their own logical position.”29 For Du 

Bois, this “problem” was local as well as national and transnational, a critical matter 

for California’s Negroes to debate and one Du Bois discussed for the sake of his nationwide readership. Johnson’s amalgamation of African and Asian art within a local 

modernist form rooted his work in a view of American history defined not only by 

the violent disruptions of the Middle Passage and slavery but also aggressive trade 

policies toward China and Japan, racist exclusion acts and housing discrimination, 

African American traditions, and the cultural contributions of Asian immigrants. 

Manifest in portraits of neighborhood children, Johnson invented an optimistic 

iconography for California’s multicultural future. 

 If the portrait busts represent a personal, perhaps even romantic, notion of multiculturalism, Johnson’s work with the sculptor Beniamino Bufano hints at a more 

pragmatic and political approach. From the end of 1935 until 1940, Johnson worked 

as Bufano’s assistant on the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration 

(WPA).30 Most accounts of this period describe a one-sided relationship, with Bufano 

influencing—or even stifling—Johnson. There is evidence, however, that Johnson’s 

role in some of Bufano’s best-known public art projects, including his memorial to 

Sun Yat Sen (Figure 5), the Chinese nationalist leader and first provisional president 
152 East–West Interchanges in American Art

of Republican China, reveals the touch of a politically informed New Negro 

sculptor.

In a 1964 interview 

for the Archives of American Art, Johnson explained 

that as Bufano’s assistant 

he sometimes created 

small clay sculptures approximately “a foot and 

a half” tall upon which 

Bufano would base large 

projects, including the 

monument to Sun and another work entitled Peace.

31

Johnson’s comments in 

the interview can help us 

to understand that his role 

in some of Bufano’s WPA 

projects was greater than 

historians have previously suggested—an uneasy collaboration and an expression 

of mutually compatible interests.

Although Johnson told the interviewer that the WPA allowed him to make the 

sort of work he wanted to, he also complained about working for Bufano, saying 

the senior sculptor kept all the WPA projects for himself, refusing to share with 

other sculptors. Johnson’s charge is borne out by Willis Foster, a WPA supervisor 

who told one of Bufano’s biographers that “Benny was supplied plenty of assistants, 

though he was always a bit slow to name them or share credit with them.”32

By the time Johnson and Bufano joined the WPA at the end of 1935, Johnson had 

already made and exhibited Forever Free (Figure 6), a sculpture that seems to have established a columnar model for Sun Yat Sen and Peace.

33 In the interview, Johnson described 

Forever Free as “just a straight log. In relief on the log was a mother and two children.” 

According to Johnson, Bufano was incredulous when he returned to San Francisco and 

saw the work: “When he came back he said, ‘You know that you are not allowed to do 

that.’” Despite his initial dismissal of Forever Free, the columnar form to which Bufano 

objected subsequently became the central motif of his own monumental work from this 

period, coinciding with Johnson’s work on preliminary models for him.34

5. Beniamino Benvenuto Bufano, Sun Yat Sen, St. Mary’s Square, 

San Francisco, 1937. Stainless steel, granite, and mosaic. Photograph dated 

13 November 1937. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.
New Negro on the Pacific Rim 153

During the Archives of American Art interview, Johnson looked at photographs of 

Peace and Sun Yat Sen and noted that Bufano, 

initially dismissive of Forever Free, decided to 

produce both sculptures according to Johnson’s innovation. Johnson recalled the history of the making of Sun Yat Sen with a mixture of pride, authority, and bemusement. 

While giving Bufano full credit for the final 

product, Johnson also described—and takes 

credit for—part of the process. “He’s gone 

over those things many times and change[d] 

them,” Johnson explained.35

Johnson’s role in creating the Sun memorial is important, not simply in terms of 

score-keeping or aesthetic innovation, but 

because for Johnson, a New Negro sculptor 

with a demonstrated interest in Asian art and 

culture who found the subject matter for his 

work in a multiethnic community, Sun would 

likely have been a figure of liberation and selfdetermination. Bufano had met Sun in China, 

a story told in 1937 as one motivation for his 

project.36 Johnson might also have considered 

Sun significant, as many African Americans 

did, particularly those who felt the affinity of 

solidarity for Chinese republicanism. Johnson, whose New Negro consciousness was 

informed by his participation in the National Association for the Advancement 

of Colored People, probably read the Crisis, where Du Bois described Sun and the 

Chinese Republic as a model for African American self-determination.37 Finally, 

Sun played a role in San Francisco’s self-conception as a cosmopolitan city. Many 

San Franciscans had supported Sun’s cause during his lifetime and were proud that 

he had lived among them on three occasions. The Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) had a significant membership among the local Chinese community and 

helped finance the project.38 The Sun memorial was considered an important piece 

of monumental sculpture by many San Franciscans, and its dedication was reported 

in the city’s English-language and Chinese-language newspapers.39

6. Sargent Johnson, Forever Free, 1933. 

Wood, gesso, cloth, and lacquer, 36 × 11 1

⁄2 × 9 1⁄2

in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of 

Mrs. E. D. Lederman.
154 East–West Interchanges in American Art

If Johnson’s columnar figure served as the basis for the early maquettes of Sun Yat 

Sen, then the monument might be considered in relationship to Forever Free, a sculpture 

that, E. J. Montgomery reports, Johnson made using a lacquerware technique “of 

the ancient Egyptians, Orientals, and experienced frame makers.”40 San Francisco 

Museum of Modern Art conservator Barbara Schertel supports this claim. Based on 

her examination of Forever Free and a similar sculpture, Negro Woman (1935), Schertel 

concludes that Johnson made them using a frame maker’s technique for “Japanning” 

furniture in emulation of Japanese lacquered furniture.41 Sun Yat Sen is made of different materials: stainless steel, red granite, and concrete. Nevertheless, whether or not 

Bufano was aware of Sun’s importance to African Americans, it strikes me as likely 

Johnson would have invested himself in the memorial project—if not in Bufano’s 

ideas for it—in ways that lent the figure a measure of its quiet dignity. In the end, Sun 

Yat Sen must have been a key project for both Johnson and Bufano, if for each his own 

reasons. For Johnson, in this case, the personal also must have been political.

Johnson’s sculptures of children and work on Sun Yat Sen might indicate a path distinct from those available to African Americans in the South or in other cities across 

the nation, enabling him as a Bay Area resident to identify himself with California as 

well as with the Pacific Rim, a localized response to the “color line.” Furthermore, 

the deliberate study of both African and Asian art established a process by which 

Johnson and other African American artists might engage transnational cultures of 

modernism as equal participants and, crucially, from a potentially critical perspective. 

On the one hand, the reevaluation of African and Asian art promised to demonstrate 

that aesthetic values derived from Europe were not necessarily the best or the most 

appropriate for an increasingly cosmopolitan world. On the other, the New Negro’s 

unique perspective on modernism promised to demand attention and respect on the 

international stage. Whether Johnson looked through the Golden Gate and across the 

Pacific Ocean or down the block to his Chinese neighbors, when he saw himself in relationship to the art and culture of Asia, his resulting sculptures articulated a process 

of self-reflection expressed through a desire for solidarity.

Notes

1. “57 Negro Artists Presented in Fifth Harmon Foundation Exhibit,” Art Digest 7, no. 11 (1 March 

1933): 18. Edward Alden Jewell, “Sargent Johnson Wins Chief Prize at Exhibition by Negro Artist, 

Sponsored by Harmon Foundation,” New York Times, 21 February 1933, 22. 

2. For two exceptions, see Tommy L. Lott, “Black Consciousness in the Art of Sargent Johnson,” in 

Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture, a City Lights Anthology, ed. James Brook, Chris 

Carlsson, and Nancy J. Peters (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998), 196. Angela L. Miller, Janet C. 

Berlo, Bryan J. Wolf, and Jennifer L. Roberts, American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity

(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008), 509–10.
New Negro on the Pacific Rim 155

3. Sargent Johnson to the Board of Directors, The Abraham Rosenberg Scholarship, San Francisco 

Art Association (hereafter SFAA), October 20, 1944; see Rosenberg Traveling Fellowship, 4th Award, 

Sargent Johnson, 1944–45 file, Anne Bremer Memorial Library, San Francisco Art Institute (hereafter, 

Bremer Library).

4. Judith Wilson discusses this possibility in her essay, “Sargent Johnson: Afro-California Modernist,” 

in Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins and Wilson, Sargent Johnson: African American Modernist (San Francisco: 

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 27–31.

5. See Anthony W. Lee, Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (Berkeley: 

University of California Press, 2001), 167–74. Also see Anne Schnoebelen, Treasures: Splendid 

Survivors of the Golden Gate International Exposition (revised edition; Berkeley: GGIE Research 

Associates, 2009), and Burton Benedict, ed., The Anthropology of the World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s 

Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Berkeley: Scolar Press, 1983), 123–24.

6. Lloyd La Page Rollins, “Striking Advance in San Francisco’s Art: Exhibition at Palace of the Legion of 

Honor Shows Progress in Development of Talent in Cultural Affairs,” San Francisco Chronicle, 10 May 1931, 

clipping, 1931 SFAA Annual file, Bremer Library. On the gap between the East and West coasts, see the 

editorial San Francisco Art Association Bulletin 1, no. 9 (January 1935): 4. On the value California artists 

placed on their “isolation” from the East Coast, see Richard Cándida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, 

Poetry, and Politics in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 3–9. 

7. Mark Dean Johnson, “Uncovering Asian American Art in San Francisco, 1850–1940,” in Asian 

American Art: Asian American History, 1850–1970, ed. Gordon Chang, Mark Dean Johnson, Paul 

Karlstrom, and Sharon Spain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 9–16. Chang and 

Johnson, introduction to Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900–1970, ed. Daniel 

Cornell and Johnson (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2008), 13 n2. Coverage 

of local exhibitions of traditional Asian art appeared regularly in the SFAA’s newsletter; see, for 

instance, Roi Partridge, “Chinese Art at Mills College,” San Francisco Art Association Bulletin 1, no. 7 

(November 1934): 5; and Marian Hartwell, “A Review of the Chinese Collection—S.F. Museum of 

Art,” San Francisco Art Association Bulletin 2, no. 1 (May 1935): 1–5.

8. Caroline Goeser finds an early example of the stylized papyrus blossom in Douglas’s Krigwa 

Players Poster, published in the May 1926 issue of the Crisis; see Goeser, Picturing the New Negro: 

Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 

2007), 29–30. I have been unable to locate Pearl, last exhibited in the Harmon Foundation’s annual 

exhibition of 1933, or to determine its exact dimensions.

9. See Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Paul Gordon 

Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University 

of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); and David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the 

American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), 388–421. I thank Gordon 

Chang for sharing information with me about Marcus Garvey’s support for Sun Yat-Sen.

10. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 246.

11. I have documented Johnson’s employment and residences from 1915, when he arrived in 

San Francisco, through the 1940s through information in the federal census, local city directories, 

exhibition catalogues and entry forms, and correspondence. Johnson seems to have moved with 

his wife, Pearl, and daughter, Pearl Adele, to the house at 2777 Park Street, Berkeley, in 1925; see 

Catalogue: 48th Annual Exhibition, 1925 (San Francisco: San Francisco Art Association, 1925), 85. 

His residence is given as “Berkeley” in Crocker-Langley San Francisco Directory (San Francisco: H.S. 

Crocker Co., 1925), 1012. My characterization of the neighborhood surrounding San Pablo Park 

is based on a survey of the 1930 census and drawn from the Writers’ Program, Works Progress 

Administration in Northern California, Berkeley: The First Seventy-Five Years (Berkeley: Gillick 

Press, 1941); J. Douglas Allen-Taylor, “South Berkeley Residents Gather in Honor of Berkeley 

Pioneer,” Berkeley Daily Planet, 7 February 2006; “San Pablo Park Plans Centennial Bash,” Berkeley 

Daily Planet, 24 August 2007; and Preserving California’s Japantowns, www.californiajapantowns.

org/berkeley.html. Johnson may have moved his family to the East Bay because housing 

discrimination was less pervasive there than in San Francisco; on discrimination, see Albert S. 

Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954 (Lawrence: 

University Press of Kansas, 1993), 31–37.
156 East–West Interchanges in American Art

12. Gee’s comments on the neighborhood can be found in Allen-Taylor, “San Pablo Park Plans 

Centennial Bash.” According to the 1930 census, Elizabeth Gee’s family lived at 2773 Acton Street. 

Gee confirms this in a “Note to the File,” added to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s file 

on Elizabeth Gee on 27 March 1998, composed by Janet Bishop upon a visit to the museum by Gee. 

I date Elizabeth Gee to 1925–27 on the basis of this note. Janet Bishop, “Note to the File,” 27 March 

1998, Sargent Johnson binders, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

13. “San Francisco Artists,” interview with Sargent Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle, 6 October 

1935, D3.

14. Mary McChesney, oral history interview with Sargent Johnson, 31 July 1964, Archives of 

American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

15. Helen Shannon argued in “From ‘African Savages’ to ‘Ancestral Legacy:’ Race and Cultural 

Nationalism in the American Modernist Reception of African Art” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia 

University, New York, 1999), 324, that in the cases of Elizabeth Gee or Chester, Johnson simply 

chose for each a medium appropriate to the sitter’s ethnicity. Pearl, a portrait of an African 

American girl made to resemble the traditionally Chinese medium of porcelain glazed blue-green, 

complicates this argument. Furthermore, Chester’s medium, terra cotta, is not specifically African 

but is also well-known to potters throughout Asia and much of the rest of the world.

16. On the leading “Africanist,” see, for example, Alain Locke, “The American Negro as Artist,” in 

“Africa and American Art,” edited by Frederic Allen Whiting, American Magazine of Art 23, no. 3 

(September 1931): 218. Alain Locke, “The African Legacy and the Negro Artist,” in Exhibition of the 

Work of Negro Artists (New York: Harmon Foundation, Inc., 1931), 11.

17. Locke, “The African Legacy and the Negro Artist,” 10, 11. Months later, Locke rephrased his 

evaluation of Chester, saying Chester “has the qualities of the African antique and recalls an old 

Baoulé mask. It is a long stretch from an isolated Negro sculptor living and working in California 

to the classic antiques of bygone Africa, but here it is in this captivating, naïve bust for even the 

untutored eye to see.” Locke, “The American Negro as Artist,” 218.

18. Alain Locke, “The Negro and the American Stage,” Theatre Arts Monthly 10 (February 1926): 119, 

120.

19. Alain Locke, “Introduction: The Drama of Negro Life,” in Plays of Negro Life: A Source-Book of Native 

American Drama, ed. Locke and Montgomery Gregory (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927), n.p. 

20. Alain Locke, “Internationalism: Friend or Foe of Art?” The World Tomorrow 8 (March 1925): 76. 

21. See Alain Locke, “African Art: Classic Style,” American Magazine of Art 28 (May 1935): 271.

22. Chinese Art Association of America Record Book, 1930–1984, Asian American Studies Archives, 

Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Anthony Lee has demonstrated that this is 

also what members of the Chinese Revolutionary Artists’ Club were attempting when they also met 

with Rivera; Lee, Picturing Chinatown, 201–6. Chiura Obata gave similar advice to the Bay Area’s 

Nissei artists, according to Bert Winther-Tamaki, “Overtly, Covertly, or Not at All: Putting ‘Japan’ in 

Japanese American Painting,” in this book. For an analysis of Rivera’s reception in San Francisco, see 

Lee, Painting of the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco’s Public Murals (Berkeley: 

University of California Press, 1999). Notably, this was the first time the jury had included someone 

from outside the Bay region: Fifty-Third Annual Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association (San 

Francisco: San Francisco Art Association, 1931), 7.

23. Shannon, “From ‘African Savages’ to ‘Ancestral Legacy,’” 320–21. Johnson’s prize was reported in 

each of San Francisco’s important newspapers in accounts dated 24–26 April 1931; see, for example, 

Nadia Lavrova, “Art Association’s Annual Opens,” San Francisco Examiner, 26 April 1931, E11.

24. Ralph Stackpole, “The Local Sculpture Show,” San Francisco Art Association Bulletin 2, no. 4 

(September 1935): 4. On Johnson’s studies with Stackpole, see Montgomery, Sargent Johnson, 10.

25. Lavrova, “Art Association’s Annual Opens.” 

26. Tommy L. Lott, “Black Consciousness in the Art of Sargent Johnson,” in Reclaiming San Francisco: 

History, Politics, Culture, a City Lights Anthology, ed. James Brook, Chris Carlsson, and Nancy J. Peters 

(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998), 184, 197.

27. Quote from Alain Locke, “Enter the New Negro,” in “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” special 

issue edited by Locke of Survey Graphic 6, no. 6 (March 1925): 634.
New Negro on the Pacific Rim 157

28. Bender donated works of Asian art to the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of 

San Francisco, the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, 

and other Bay-area institutions. See also Audrey Whitty, A Dubliner’s Collection of Asian Art: The Albert 

Bender Exhibition (Dublin: National Museum of Ireland, 2009–10). H. Wilkening; and Sonia Brown, 

Bufano: An Intimate Biography (Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1972).

29. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Colored California,” Crisis 6, no. 4 (August 1913): 194.

30. Johnson became supervisor for at least two large-scale WPA projects in San Francisco: carved 

green terrazzo friezes with mosaic fountains and a mosaic mural for the Aquatic Park Bathhouse 

(1939–40) and a cast-concrete frieze depicting high school athletics for George Washington High 

School (1940–42). Before 1940, he held several other WPA positions.

31. McChesney, interview with Johnson, 1964. While Sun Yat Sen was dedicated in 1937, Peace

was not displayed publicly until 1957, when it was sited on the entrance road to San Francisco 

International Airport. Peace was removed in 1996; it is pictured in Mary Ann Sullivan, Digital 

Imaging Project, Blufton University, www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/bufano/peace.html.

32. Rather, Bufano and the U.S.A., 38.

33. Forever Free is not mentioned in the press until 1934 but the San Francisco Museum of Modern 

Art dates the sculpture to 1933. Ralph Stackpole, “Montgomery Street Gossip,” San Francisco Art 

Association Bulletin 1, no. 6 (October 1934): 1. Exhibition of Productions by Negro Artists (New York: 

Harmon Foundation, Inc., 1933), 27. “Art: Sculptors’ Business,” Time (22 June 1936): 53. Johnson 

says in the Archives of American Art interview that he began the sculpture while Bufano was in 

France, in 1931 or 1932. Johnson exhibited two related drawings, Defiant and Mother and Child, in 

the Harmon Foundation exhibition of 1933, two and a half years or more before he began working 

for Bufano and at least three years before the “preliminary designs” for Sun Yat Sen were approved 

by the Sculpture Project of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, the San 

Francisco Art Association, and the Park Commission.

34. Bufano had made vertically oriented sculptures before the 1930s but none are columnar in the 

way that Forever Free, Sun Yat Sen, and Peace are. This columnar form becomes characteristic of 

much of Bufano’s work for the rest of his career.

35. On the question of whether Bufano took credit for work done by his assistants, see also Thomas 

Albright, “The Art World: In the Wake of the Art Festival,” San Francisco Chronicle, 6 October 1977, 

60; and Alfred Frankenstein, “The Gentle Clown—and Man of Steel,” San Francisco Chronicle, 23 

August 1970, Datebook section, 38–39.

36. “San Francisco Monuments: Sun Yat Sen” subject file, San Francisco History Center, San 

Francisco Public Library. The story of Bufano’s encounter with Sun has been repeated many times; 

see, for example, John Reddy, “Stormy Benny,” Saturday Evening Post 217, no. 31 (27 January 1945): 

23; Valentina Fogher, Beniamino Bufano: A Retrospective (San Francisco: Museo ItaloAmericano, 

2000), n.p.; and Rather, Bufano and the U.S.A., 15.

37. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 388–421. Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois on Asia.

38. William Hoy, manuscript about Sun Yat Sen, and [San Francisco Downtown Association?], Sun 

Yat Sen, both in the William Hoy Papers, 1935–49, Chinese Historical Society of America collection, 

Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. “Statues,” Time (22 November 1937): 35.

39. For two photographs of memorial ceremonies, see Mme. Chiang Kai Shek, along with a crowd of 

thousands, pays homage to Sun Yat-Sen’s statue in St. Mary’s Square of 28 March 1943 (AAA-9598) 

and Tse Kiong Sun Placing Flowers at the Foot of Statue Dedicated to His Grandfather Sun Yat Sen of 

12 November 1943 (AAA-9596), San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco 

Public Library, http://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=0200000301.

40. Montgomery, Sargent Johnson, 14.

41. Barbara Schertel, personal communication, 13 July 2009. Schertel, examination report for Negro 

Woman and Forever Free, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 28 April 2009.

Encounters and Transference
“Gold Mine in Southeast Asia”

Russel Wright, Vietnamese Handicraft, and 

Transnational Consumption

Jennifer Way
161

In a 1956 essay, the designer Russel Wright (1904–1976) confessed that 

on his first trip to Vietnam, “I expected to find little or nothing to export.” 

Instead, he found a gold mine, a Southeast Asia “bursting with opportunities for the American importer or developer who goes there with designs 

and merchandising know-how.”1

 Best known for his contributions to interior and industrial design in the United States, Wright was also, during the 

Cold War era, involved in a transnational relationship with Southeast Asian 

craftsmen based on the reciprocity of production and consumption. 

In the 1940s and 1950s, Wright’s Melmac plastic dinnerware was on 

the tables of millions of Americans, and his organization of “The American 

Way” led to a consortium of artists, craftsmen, and manufacturers working 

together to produce low-cost home furnishings for sale in major department stores. After World War II, when American cultural production became an important element of global diplomacy, Wright’s successful designs 

and activism as an ambassador for good design attracted the attention of the 

U.S. State Department, and in 1955 he contracted to help the new Republic 

of Vietnam improve “the design, production and distribution of Vietnamese 

handicraft products for export and domestic consumption.”2 Wright also 

traveled with Ramy Alexander, a craft expert, and Josette Walker, a fashion designer, to Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Hong Kong in 

1955–56 to assess the larger region’s potential to produce handicraft items 

for American domestic markets. In Vietnam, he and his colleagues observed 

people making pottery, handloom textiles, needlework, baskets, silk weavings, wood furniture, and lacquerware at sites ranging from cooperatives 

to semi-mechanized factories, schools, and refugee camps. Afterward, he 
162 East–West Interchanges in American Art

submitted a report to the State Department and published an article in Interiors

magazine entitled “Gold Mine in Southeast Asia” about the possibilities he saw 

for craft export.3

 He ultimately oversaw the establishment of several handicraft 

centers in Southeast Asia, mounted trade shows and department store exhibitions 

of handicraft in the United States, and designed materials for furnishing middleclass American homes that he named after places in Southeast Asia. By 1958, when 

hopes had dimmed for the success of handicraft exports from Vietnam to America, 

Wright proposed a “Handicraft Program for Tourism” in Vietnam. He established 

the “Russel Wright Program Silk Screen Workshop” in Saigon the next year and 

oversaw its teaching of color, design, and printing.4

In the American design world, Wright was considered an educator and called a 

“designer diplomat” in recognition of his efforts.5 His work in Southeast Asia came 

about as part of the State Department’s promotion of handicraft production from 

the mid-1950s to the early 1960s as a means to foster economic conditions conducive to establishing and maintaining democracy in the nations there. The U.S. 

government wanted to help the new Republic of Vietnam meet its economic challenges, considering it “the proving ground of democracy in Asia,” as Senator John 

F. Kennedy put it.6

 In the years following the French withdrawal from Vietnam in 

1954 and the division of Vietnam along the 17th parallel and before the arrival of 

the first U.S. combat troops in 1961, the American government largely described 

its role in terms of giving aid to the anti-communist republic that was established 

in the south. The U.S. Army Area Handbook for Vietnam, for example, reported that 

American cultural influence there had risen steadily, thanks to an influx of educators as well as U.S. economic aid and military assistance, noting, “Substantial U.S. 

assistance has been given to the government of South Vietnam in the fields of 

graphic arts and crafts, music, motion pictures and the publication of textbooks.”7

The Army handbook presented the relationship between Vietnam as unidirectional geopolitics. Yet, if we examine Wright’s trips to Vietnam, the information about modern 

design, American culture, and middle-class American life that he brought to Southeast 

Asia, the mobility of the things he collected there and brought back to the U.S., the 

images and texts about Asia that he and his colleagues circulated, and the handicraft 

objects he oversaw being produced and then displayed in Southeast Asia and the United 

States, it is clear that they participated not only in nation-state geopolitics but also in 

an in-betweenness of place characterizing transnationalism.

“Transnational” refers to activity between and crossing national borders. To be sure, 

methodologically, it alerts us to activity that is “inter-national,” or between nations. But 

crucially, a transnational approach invites us to consider the agency of nongovernmental 

people and to look at programs, goods, and services crossing national borders as part 
“Gold Mine in Southeast Asia” 163

of temporary and long-term initiatives in addition to the activity 

of governments’ diplomatic corps 

and armies. Using transnationalism as a methodological framework for scholarship helps us to 

consider the ways in which flows 

and exchanges across borders have 

been uneven in regard to power, 

and to examine dynamic processes 

that involve but in many ways exceed the nation state.

With regard to Wright’s involvement with handicraft and 

Southeast Asia, such an approach 

invites us to identify many kinds 

of cultural artifacts—photographs, films, pamphlets (Figure 

1), references to historical art 

and culture, exhibitions, vanguard modern Western art and design, and Southeast Asian handicraft objects—and 

inquire about their significance in linking South Vietnam and the United States in 

the context of U.S. policies during the Cold War. Doing so advances existing scholarship about American governmental and corporate use of cultural diplomacy abroad 

during the 1950s, in the interlude before the conflict that many Americans would call 

the Vietnam War and many Vietnamese the American War.8

 By examining transnational aspects of American government-sponsored handicraft programs in Vietnam, we 

broaden the scope of a new body of scholarship on U.S.–Vietnam relations that looks 

at the period before the 1960s, including books such as Kathryn Statler’s Replacing 

France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam.

9 Recent work in American studies 

reminds us to push beyond cultural imperialism as “too simple a model to understand 

how culture works” and to open for consideration “the place of the Asian in American 

life and her or his understanding of America” as well as “the cultural work that forms 

originating in the United States do in cultures outside this country, studying their 

reception and reconfiguration in contexts informed by a deep understanding of the 

countries where that cultural work is taking place.”10

Wright, along with other Americans and Southeast Asians, was also participating in a transnational activity based on the interconnectedness of production and 

1. Viet-Nam (Washington, DC: Press and Information Office, 

Embassy of Viet Nam, ca. 1959). Pamphlet. Folder, Foreign Activities, Box 

45, Russel Wright Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse 

University Library, New York.
164 East–West Interchanges in American Art

consumption as people, ideas, services, and goods crossed national borders. This 

was a relationship under study by contemporary American economists. Ruth Mack, 

for instance, explained that “the economics of consumption and production intermesh”; “effect becomes cause and cause effect.”11 In this case, American business and 

the middle classes were targeted as consumers of Southeast Asian culture. Yet Southeast Asian artisans also were encouraged to consume American and Asian culture in 

the very process of making handicrafts for export—to design and make craft objects 

in ways that anticipated what the U.S. market wanted, tailoring their products to its 

desires. This important feedback loop rendered Vietnamese handicraft less indigenous than already transcultural—or between cultures.

“The Refugee Problem”

The U.N. Economic and Social Council issued a report in 1951 on a survey 

of 10 Asian nations’ readiness and potential to export handicrafts to the United 

States, where “a great demand exists for goods in the house furnishing line” due to 

record home construction after World War II. The survey, based on a specialist’s tour 

and observations, noted that in Indochina, including Phnom-Penh, Saigon, and Biên 

Hòa, handicrafts arts were “very highly developed” and training facilities excellent. It 

identified some financial disincentives for Americans exporting handicraft from Indochina, however, and problems including “poor quality” and “lack of standardization.” 

And it cautioned Asian handicraft exporters not to expect that Americans “will like 

or want the same things which local markets prefer.” Instead, exporters must ensure 

that handicrafts created abroad are styled “for the [American] buyer’s taste,” it said, 

urging participating nations “[t]o study the American market requirements and to 

be prepared to shift production to those items in demand.” Furthermore, it recommended that the U.S. government “engage services of a capable American merchandising expert to assist in introducing products to the American market and in guidance 

in understanding the requirements of that market.”12

A few years later, the U.S. government put many of the survey’s recommendations into practice. With the departure of the French, the political division of 

Vietnam in 1954, and the founding of the Republic of Vietnam in South Vietnam, 

the U.S. Operations Mission to Vietnam [USOM] sought to help the new republic 

counter communism and attain economic stability by providing programs based 

in part on educating the populace.13 “The United States is proud to be on the 

side of the effort of the Vietnamese people under President [Ngo Dingh] Diem 

to establish freedom, peace, and the good life,” the State Department reported in 

1956.14 That same year, Senator Kennedy explained Vietnam’s significance as “the 

cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia,” with an “economy . . . essential 
“Gold Mine in Southeast Asia” 165

to the economy of all of Southeast Asia,” and the U.S. International Cooperation 

Administration dedicated $767 million to support personnel from government and 

business to help establish economic pathways linking America and Southeast Asia. 

Their efforts included working with small industries and craftsmen to raise the 

quality of their products, and locating markets for their work at home and abroad.15

A Hoover Commission report in early 1955 had criticized the U.S. foreign aid program for not directly aiding the craftsmen of so-called underdeveloped countries.16 

In response, and in correlation with the U.N.’s “Handicrafts Marketing Survey,” 

the State Department summoned American industrial designers for help in completing surveys in different countries. Wright was one of those called into action.

A crucial issue that Wright latched onto in his tour of Vietnam was what he 

termed “The Refugee Problem.”17 By this he meant the people who, following the 

division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel, left their homes to migrate from the north, 

ceded to communist forces, to the south before the border dividing the nation 

closed in May 1955. They moved south to flee the Viet Minh as part of what the 

U.S. Navy called Operation Passage to Freedom, and the U.S. distributed funds to 

help integrate these refugees.18

In an unpublished essay summarizing his travels in Southeast Asia during 

1956, Wright wrote that “of all the needs in this area, none is more pressing than 

that of help to refugees.” Moreover, he said, in Vietnam “our Technical Mission is 

taking part in the project of resettlement on reclaimed land.”19 In his article in Interiors magazine that same year, Wright described the refugees as “helpless Southeast 

Asians who, cut off from their past, look to the United States for a road to the 

future.”20 His phrase “road to the future,” like the Navy’s use of the word “passage” 

for its refugee aid operation, could refer to the means of access provided to people 

moving from north to south Vietnam. Additionally, the phrase suggests progress 

toward a destination, and implies that American aid could shepherd Vietnam into 

the territory of the Free World and a modern era that embraces the future.

A simply designed landscape scene on the cover of a report published by the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, DC, illustrated these ideas of movement through 

space and time to a better life (Figure 1). The focus is on the middle foreground, 

where a single, androgynous figure dressed in traditional pants, a jacket, and hat 

strides from left to right, carrying two farming implements over the shoulder. Behind 

the figure, the landscape changes dramatically. On the left, on a low hill, a farmer rides 

atop a very full wagon pulled by a water buffalo. Several people walking in front of the 

wagon balance enormous loads, some above their heads. This is a land and way of life 

the West conceived as a pre-industrial economy. On the right, a row of electric towers recedes across a taller hill covered by an orderly tilled field. In the foreground, the 
166 East–West Interchanges in American Art

figure strides away from 

the pre-industrial economy toward the place 

characterized by modern 

methods of farming and 

forms of energy and its 

distribution. In doing so, 

the figure visually narrates the government’s 

expectation that its citizens actively move in the 

direction of epic change 

for the nation. Inside the 

pamphlet, short essays 

give the government of 

the Republic of Vietnam 

credit, with assistance 

from the United States, 

for achieving what the 

cover depicts.

On the title page of 

the essay “The Designer 

as Economic Diplomat” 

published in Industrial Design, a photograph of Wright speaks more directly about U.S. initiatives to provide 

Vietnam with a “road to the future” (Figure 2). Like the pamphlet cover, it references 

mobility and aid leading to a change for the better. From the vantage-point of bird’seye-view perspective, the photograph invites readers to look down on the scene that the 

caption describes as “Russel Wright, far-flung designer, disembarking on the banks of 

the Mekong (Vietnam).” In the photograph, Wright stands inside a boat (the second 

figure from the left, holding a hat in his left hand), waiting to disembark along with a 

retinue of unidentified design colleagues, U.S. officials, and local dignitaries.

Interestingly, mobility, modernity, and resources for an improved way of life contrast with the immobility and provincialism the U.S. Army Area Handbook associated 

with the refugees. The handbook stated, for example: “The Vietnamese . . . do not 

readily migrate”; “Their ancestor cult tends to bind them to their birthplaces, and to 

leave the family land remains for most Vietnamese an extremely serious step.” The 

observation weds the people to their land and family, and renders the choice to leave 

2. Russel Wright photograph in Avrom Fleishman, “The Designer as 

Economic Diplomat: The Government Applies the Designer’s Approach 

to Problems of International Trade,” Industrial Design 3 (August 1956): 68.
“Gold Mine in Southeast Asia” 167

an example of the Vietnamese commitment to what the 

U.S. conceived as the larger 

political issues at stake: 

“That over 900,000 Vietnamese in the Communistcontrolled north chose, after 

the division of the country 

in 1954, to go as refugees to 

the South [w]as an indication of the strength of their 

feelings about conditions 

under Communists.”21

Wright creatively emphasized the refugees’ potential as a workforce, writing: “There are between 

500,000 and 800,000 

refugees in Vietnam eager 

to work but with little to 

do.”22 He sought to help 

attract the patronage of the 

American businesses and middle classes by turning the refugees from a potential 

political liability into cultural artisans ready to participate in transnational economic and cultural flows. A major contribution to the effort came from blackand-white photographs Wright published in his article in Interiors, including some 

photos by renowned photographer Henri Gilles Huet. Huet was then working for 

USOM after serving as a combat photographer for the first Indochina War (and 

before covering what Americans refer to as the Vietnam War). The pictures evoked 

the homelessness of refugees from Cambodia and northern Vietnam by visually emphasizing their singularity (Figure 3). For example, one individual sits surrounded 

by baskets with eyes downcast, focusing on his handicraft. The caption explained, 

“The young basketmaker . . . in the Xom Moi refugees camp, Vietnam, is typical of 

millions of willing but helpless Southeast Asians, who, cut off from their past, look 

to the United States for a road to the future.” 23 Equally, the images championed 

the refugees’ personal industry. Photographs show refugees making hats, lacquerware (baskets), and lace as well as weaving, dying cotton yarn, throwing pottery, and 

preparing kaolin (Figure 4).

3. Russel Wright, “Gold Mine in Southeast Asia,” Interiors 116, no. 1 

(August 1956): 94.
168 East–West Interchanges in American Art

A comparison of these images with line illustrations published two years earlier 

in a French book entitled Connaissance du Viêt-nam (Figure 5) helps us to see how the 

photographs modify as well as affirm existing visual narratives about Vietnamese 

handicraft. The line illustrations do not individualize artisans or indicate the times 

and places of their work. Instead, they stage them in a silent tableau suggesting 

timeless materials, techniques, forms, and makers. In contrast, some aspects of the 

photographs Wright published seem to render handicraft artisans topical rather 

than timeless. The glossy pages of Interiors magazine, the graphic quality of the 

black-and-white photographs, and Wright’s text referring to the refugees’ homelessness loosely associate them with the look and subject matter of American mass 

print media reporting on current events.

Yet other aspects push the photographs beyond reportage. For example, they emphasize the vulnerability of the subjects with dramatic angles and chiaroscuro (see 

Figure 3) and promote a visual narrative similar to the illustrations in certain respects. Like the line illustrations, the photographs avoid making direct political references. Nor do they suggest that handicraft production has a changing history. Most 

interesting is the photographs’ omission of visual references to the refugee status of 

many of the artisans, who lived and worked in camps along with thousands of other 

migrant people. The title of Wright’s article—“Gold Mine in Southeast Asia”—takes 

this treatment a step further. It refers to the refugees collectively, as a malleable, 

precious element that the U.S. government, business, and trades could mine and refine. The endeavor would turn the refugees themselves into consumers of American 

4. Russel Wright, “Gold Mine in Southeast Asia,” Interiors 116, no. 1 (August 1956): 98–99.
“Gold Mine in Southeast Asia” 169

culture and inspire Wright to engage with places in Southeast Asia in his own work. 

Before considering some examples, it is necessary to review how Wright represented 

Vietnam to the United States and what ideas about American consumers shaped his 

approach to facilitating handicraft production and distribution abroad.

Opportunities for Importers

An especially revealing element of the 1956 essay is a two-page spread of blackand-white photographs of crafts workers. A caption states, “With guidance, these 

skillful hands can serve the decorative trades and enable designers to carry out developmental experiments.”24 Wright was saying that under the tutelage of American 

designers, refugee artisans could make handicrafts for the American decorative arts 

market. They also would serve as resources for American designers’ “developmental 

experiments.”Interiors’ readership was consuming references to refugees that signified 

both their need for assistance and their labor potential. In addition, these readers may 

have absorbed the idea that Southeast Asian handicraft artisans themselves amounted 

to a resource American designers could use to advance their own agendas.

Interestingly, Wright set limits on the extent to which the Asian artisans’ consumption of American culture should affect their work. He told American readers of 

5. Gustave Dumoutier, in Pierre Huard and Pierre Durand, Connaissance du Viêt-nam (Hanoi: 

École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1954), 155.
170 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Interiors that he wanted handicraft artists to “improve their condition within their actual potentialities, rather than concentrating on an unhappy, piece-meal imitation of 

us.” In addition, Southeast Asian handicraft production should avoid modern technological production. He urged, “Instead of becoming the helpless victim of industrialization, village crafts, revitalized, could play a minor, perhaps, but active part in a new 

kind of over-all development.”25 The call for Southeast Asians to preserve pre-modern 

craft production dovetailed with comments by U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge 

Jr. associating craft with heritage. At the opening of the Southeast Asia Rehabilitation 

and Trade Development exhibition held in the First International Housewares Show 

at the New York Coliseum, Lodge commented, “Economic development should not 

mean disrupting old cultures, uprooting people or throwing away the best heritage 

of past centuries.”26 It also dovetailed with a post-war American rediscovery of handcraft and concomitant valorization of natural materials and evidence of hand labor 

as compensation for what the objects of everyday life lost by being made in modern, 

mass industrialized processes.27 In the draft of an essay Wright wrote in response to a 

letter Lodge sent to the New York Times, he argued that “this need for the old and the 

handmade grows right along with the new, machine-made products.” But he clarified, 

“The best way we evolved to have the Asian small producer make things that Americans would want to buy was to have Americans design the products.”.

 Thus, “rather 

than poor copies of Western goods that have no place in their life,” he said, “native 

designers must learn the demands of the U.S. consumer” and designers will “train 

them to our standards of production” so “we can get people who have never seen 

American life to create things that Americans may buy.”28

Wright’s remarks belie power coursing along transnational pathways. By expressing 

“a desire to rescue ‘authenticity’ out of destructive historical change,” in anthropological terms, Wright denied subjects in relations of power a complete “contemporaneity 

and a modern history of their own.”29 In a draft for a lecture about his travel throughout 

Southeast Asia Wright specified, “[I]n each country I saw that there was a small advanced 

guard group that were ashamed of this wholesale and vulgar imitation of the west.”30 He 

asked, “This is what happens in highly industrialized countries such at [sic] the U.S.—

but in our country, handicraft labor is almost extinct—so how will the increased need 

for handicraft products be supplied to the industrialized nations?” Rhetorically, Wright 

responded, “We want handmade products from foreign countries but we want them to 

have the character and the personality of the particular foreign country from which they 

come. And so the great population of handcraftsmen of the Far East can supply a goodly 

amount of the increasing and eternal need for handicraft products in the western industrialized countries. However, it is necessary that such products be designed for a world 

of which the Asian handcraftsman has little knowledge or understanding.”31 Wright 
“Gold Mine in Southeast Asia” 171

demonstrated his power to determine what alterations could be allowed in regard to 

handicraft even as he brought American ideas, materials, and resources, such as modern 

design and visual and material culture, to the artisans, for whom it modeled consumer 

expectations and good design.

Markets and Adaptation

As a result of his first trip to Southeast Asia, Wright concluded that in Vietnam 

handicraft production was already operating at a level close to readiness for export. 

He thought this would be feasible with American “assistance . . . by means of design 

and styling” and a “program of education in design and technical training.”32 The 

assistance Wright provided included his selection of “some 1,500 articles made by 

hand in Southeast Asia” for the Southeast Asia Rehabilitation and Trade Development exhibition, not as evidence of art’s history or a living culture but rather, as the 

New York Times reported, “on the basis of their appeal to American merchants and 

consumers” and “leading department store executives, import-export companies 

and manufacturers” who will study them.”33 The following year, Russel Wright Associates contracted to participate in the handicrafts development program in Vietnam, to “increase output, improve quality, extend marketing product variety and 

reduce costs of village and urban craft industries so as to raise living standards for 

the large sections of populations who depend on these industries for most of their 

livelihood and material goods.” Wright would also design castings in the United 

States and at the Lai Thieu pottery factory in South Vietnam.34

During the late 1950s Wright oversaw the establishment of handicraft centers. 

In 1958 he supervised Ken Uyemura of Russel Wright Associates and Michiko 

Uyemura in launching “A Handicraft Development Center [in Saigon that] . . . 

provided organization and technical assistance and also extended long-term loans 

to craft enterprises.”It exported types of hats worn by Vietnamese women along 

with hall and floor coverings, window blinds, table mats, basketry, and lacquerware. 

The center also organized traveling exhibitions of lacquerware and reproductions 

of Khmer sculpture and ceramics.35 Wright received permission to go to temples in 

Cambodia “to reproduce metal castings of sculpture to export”; he explained, “In our 

homes the ancient motifs can create a new dimension for walls.” The reproductions 

had cultural value as simulations of works of art, commercial value as things created for sale, and pedagogic value, as did the “more than 200 demonstration items 

designed by the Uyemuras that were sold there to the Vietnamese and the large 

American colony and the tourists that came through Saigon.”36 USOM praised the 

handicraft program in Vietnam overall for “greatly expand[ing] both the domestic 

and foreign handicraft market.”37 Beginning in 1959, the Handicrafts Sales Center 
172 East–West Interchanges in American Art

in Saigon directly sold the work of artisans and small industrialists. The Area Handbook for Vietnam credited the center’s “financial and technical assistance to craftsmen” 

and its store with achieving “an expanded domestic market for handicraft products” 

and for its progress in creating “a foreign market which shows promise of becoming 

increasingly important.”38

Throughout these initiatives, Wright consistently warned handicraft artisans 

not to produce “an unhappy, piece-meal imitation of Americans,”while at the same 

time encouraging them to adapt to American tastes, adopting a bit of a topsy-turvy 

strategy.39 In early 1956, when Wright returned to the United States from his 

first trip to Southeast Asia, he “started right in adapting Asian handcraft products 

to twentieth-century American usage.” He believed that producing handicraft for 

American markets necessitated establishing chains of production and consumption 

linking the United States and Vietnam, with handicraft ranking as a key link. “We 

do not simply make designs expecting the producers to produce them somehow, and 

then sell them somehow. The essence of our method is—the joining of a specific 

market to a specific production.”40

Rita Reif of the New York Times reported that this was how it worked: “Once a 

product is successful here [in the United States],” Mr. Wright acquaints the producers and craftsmen abroad on how it is used in American homes. . . . Mr. Wright films 

interiors of homes, shows the well-stocked shelves of department stores and small 

shops and educates artisans abroad on how their work has meaning in our homes,” she 

reported.41 Among other methods used “to bring out in the students a strong sense 

of Vietnamese design and thus establish a design style which could be identified as 

Vietnamese in character” was the relay to Southeast Asian craftsmen of information 

relating to modern design, as evidenced by slides of “The Logic and Magic of Color: 

An exhibition celebrating the centennial anniversary of the Cooper Union,” 1960. To 

Vietnam Wright also brought material on American culture, world culture, and design, for example, prototypes for costume jewelry, a “Survey of Oriental influence in 

the current U.S. Home Furnishing Market,”films about Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio, 

Taliesin, and the arts of India and Japan, and slides and the catalogue of the Museum 

of Contemporary Crafts’ exhibition, “Designer-Craftsmen USA 1960,” which featured the theme of objects “designed and handcrafted for use.”42

The archives suggest that Wright facilitated the consumption of American culture in Southeast Asia as part of the process of handicraft production there for 

distribution and consumption in the United States. Ostensibly, from studying examples of good design and American culture and lifeways, artisans would learn how 

to make items pleasing to Americans yet still identifiable to them as Vietnamese. 

With regard to silkscreen training, Wright explained that “throughout the course 
“Gold Mine in Southeast Asia” 173

of study and practice, effort was made to bring out in the students a strong sense 

of Vietnamese design and thus establish a design style which could be identified 

as Vietnamese in character.” The efforts proved successful insofar as they “awakened in the Vietnamese people themselves real awareness of Vietnamese handicrafts 

which they had not known of or had taken for granted.”43

At the same time, Wright was working with DuPont market research to create an 

upholstery line called “Cambodia, A Fabrilite Upholstery that Breathes for Greater 

Comfort,” “executed both in light pastels and rich, deep-toned colors, given the 

exotic, deeply sculptured texture of handcrafted oriental fabric”—in Mekong Tan, 

Malacca Yellow, Salavan Chartreuse, Bandai Green, Kanchow Coral, Tonkin Turquoise, Saigon Tan, Malaya Green, Nanking Red, Rupat Pink, Tahan Brown, Amoy 

Pepperwhite, and Kangar Ivory.44 The names of the upholstery colors transpose the 

geography of China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Burma into a palette for 

decorating the American middle-class home.

As part of this elaborate feedback loop of production and consumption, Wright 

helped to build an American market for Southeast Asian handicrafts with displays 

at trade fairs at the New York Coliseum in 1956 and 1958. In 1958 Russel Wright 

Associates also launched an exhibition of Vietnamese handicrafts and art at W. & J. 

Sloane in New York City that traveled to 11 major American department stores.45

Wright’s displays in all of these venues promoted the allure of items based not 

on current political and economic relations but on their association with far off 

places of mystery and exoticism. The displays recycled photographs taken during 

Wright’s first trip to Southeast Asia, but they lacked contextualization. For American viewers, the displays referenced a kind of cosmopolitanism, a way of knowing 

the world that comes from traveling widely or being exposed to cultures of many 

places. The tone echoed what the Washington embassy for the Republic of Vietnam 

was promoting in those pre-war years: “Viet-nam as a tourist center” that is “likely 

to appeal to the tourist who seeks relaxation and quiet comfort in an exotic atmosphere” and to “the admirer of the arts [who] will find Viet-Nam’s historical treasures an unending source of interest.”46 Wright noted that the lacquerware paintings on wall panels and decorative screens “while highly regarded by collectors in 

the Orient and in Paris, have never been seen in the U.S. Typically oriental in their 

rich, highly decorated style, their craftsmanship is extraordinary.”The items forged 

a pathway for the transnational consumption of Vietnamese handicraft as part of 

an American practice of using cultural worldliness as a sign of status. How worldly? 

The New York Herald Tribune explained, “Objects on view are typical of ancient crafts 

excelled in by the natives. In some cases the natives have been encouraged to adapt 

proportions and design changes suited to our needs.”47
174 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Notes

1. Russel Wright, “Gold Mine in Southeast Asia,” Interiors 116 (August 1956): 94–101, quotes at 100.

2. “Amendment No. 5 to Agreement between the United States of America International Cooperation 

Administration and Russel Wright doing business as Russel Wright Associates” (July 11, 1957), 1; box 

46, Russel Wright Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library (hereafter 

Wright Papers).

3. “Survey and Recommendations for Advancing the Economic Welfare of Workers in Small 

Production Shops and Cottage Industries of Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Hong Kong 

(December 20, 1956),” box 44, Wright Papers. Wright, “Gold Mine in Southeast Asia,” 94–101.

4. “Final Report on Services and Accomplishment by Russel Wright Associates to the Republic of 

Vietnam under contract with International Cooperation Administration” (May 1961), 2–3; box 45, 

Wright Papers.

5. “Design as a Political Force, Part 2,” Industrial Design 4, no. 4 (April 1957): 44–60. See also Conrad 

Brown, “ICA’s Technical Assistance of U.S. Industrial Designers and U.S. Craftsmen Promise Some 

Exciting Results in Their Efforts to Aid the Asiatic Craftsman,” Craft Horizons 18, no. 4 (July/August 

1958): 29–37.

6. John F. Kennedy, “America’s Stake in Vietnam: Cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia,” 

Vital Speeches of the Day 22 (1 August 1956): 617–18.

7. George L. Harris et al., Area Handbook for Vietnam/US Army (Washington, DC: American 

University, Foreign Areas Studies Division, September 1962; reprint, October 1964), 108.

8. Robert Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s (Washington, 

DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997).

9. Kathryn C. Statler, Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam (Lexington: 

University Press of Kentucky, 2007). See also Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: 

The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 

2000); and James M. Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954–1968

(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

10. For the first and last quotes, see Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures: The 

Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, 

November 12, 2004,” American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (March 2005): 33, doi:10.1353/aq.2005.0004. 

“The place of the Asian” quote is from Gordon H. Chang, “Emerging from the Shadows: The Visual 

Arts and Asian American Art History,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 1, no. 1 (17 February 

2009): xii.

11. Ruth Mack, “Trends in American Consumption and The Aspiration to Consume,” American 

Economic Review 46 (May 1956): 67.

12. The report issued by the U.N. Economic and Social Council outlined the results of a survey 

sponsored by the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE), which sent a handicraft 

marketing specialist to 10 nations. See ECAFE, “Handicrafts Marketing Survey” (U.N. Economic and 

Social Council, 15 February 1951), 39, box 43, Wright Papers, 65, 69, 73.

13. USOM Vietnam operational report no. 7 (Saigon: Republic of Vietnam, 1961), 71; box 45, Wright 

Papers.

14. Walter S. Robertson, “Progress in Free Viet-Nam,” Department of State Bulletin 34 (11 June 

1956): 973.

15. “Design as a Political Force,” 45–46.

16. Brown, “ICA’s Technical Assistance,” 29.

17. Russel Wright, “Gold Mine in Southeast Asia,” 96.

18. “U.S. Gives Viet-Nam $37 Million for Refugee Resettlement,” Department of State Bulletin (6 

February 1956): 208.

19. “Far East Article,” box 43, Wright Papers.

20. Wright, “Gold Mine in Southeast Asia,” 95.

21. Harris et al., Area Handbook for Vietnam/US Army, 49.
“Gold Mine in Southeast Asia” 175

22. Wright, “Gold Mine in Southeast Asia,” 100.

23. See Horst Faas and Tim Page, eds., Requiem: By the Photographer who Died in Vietnam and 

Indonesia (New York: Random House, 1997). Wright, “Gold Mine in Southeast Asia,” 95.

24. Wright, “Gold Mine in Southeast Asia,” 99, 98.

25. Ibid., 96.

26. For the Lodge quote, see “Caution is Urged in U.N. Aid Role,” New York Times, 26 June 1956.

27. George William Eggers, “Handcraft, The Lore of Substances,” Craft Horizons 14, no. 6 

(November-December 1954): 11.

28. “A Bamboo Bridge: Aid Where it is Needed Most” (typewritten manuscript labeled as a draft, 

1961), 7; Box 38, Wright Papers.

29. James Clifford, “Of Other Peoples: Beyond the ‘Salvage’ Paradigm,” in Discussions in 

Contemporary Culture, no. 1, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987). Johannes Fabian, Time and the 

Other: How Anthropology Makes its Objects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 97.

30. “Far East Drafts,” ca 1957, 2; box 38, Wright Papers.

31. “Market for Asian Handicrafts in the US” (January 1960 slide lecture), 8, 12; box 38, Wright Papers.

32. “Recommendations for Development of Handicrafts Products in Vietnam,” Survey and 

Recommendations for Advancing the Economic Welfare of Workers, 142.

33. “Caution is Urged in U.N. Aid Role,” New York Times, 26 June 1956; box 43, Wright Papers.

34. “Contract with USA Foreign Operations Administration” (30 June 1955), 2; box 46, Wright Papers.

35. Design Derby, Miami (1958), 5; box 38, Wright Papers. 

36. Harriet Morrison, “Designs from S.E. Asia Coming Here,” New York Herald Tribune, 2 April 1958, 

2:2; box 45, Wright Papers. 

37. USOM Vietnam operational report no. 7 (Saigon: Republic of Vietnam, 1961), 71.

38. Harris et al., Area Handbook for Vietnam/US Army, 392.

39. Wright, “Gold Mine in Southeast Asia,” 96. “Market for Asian Handicrafts in the US,” 12.

40. “Movie Narrative for Vietnam,” Survey and Recommendations for Advancing the Economic 

Welfare of Workers, 173. Design Derby, Miami (1958), 3.

41. Rita Reif, “Art Works from Orient Seek American Market,” New York Times, 29 August 1960, 19.

42. Final Report on Services and Accomplishment by RWA to the Republic of Vietnam under Contract 

with ICA (May 1961), 5, 9, 7, 8. Box 45, Wright Papers.

43. Ibid., 5, 10.

44. DuPont (1956–57); box 7, Wright Papers.

45. “New Business with Vietnam,” memo paper from RWA; box 38, Wright Papers. The schedule 

for the Vietnamese handicrafts and art object show traveling September 1958 to June 1959 

included stops at W. & J. Sloane, New York; Hudson’s, Detroit; Jordan-Marsh, Boston; Wanamaker’s, 

Philadelphia; Woodward & Lothrop, Washington, DC; Rich’s, Atlanta; Pogue’s, Cincinnati; Scruggs, St. 

Louis; Foley’s, Houston; W. & J. Sloane, Beverly Hills; W. & J. Sloane, San Francisco; and Frederick & 

Nelson, Seattle. 

46. Exhibition of Art and Handcraft of Viet Nam, Russel Wright Associates, New York; box 43, Wright 

Papers. Viet-Nam (ca. 1959), 20. On correlations between cosmopolitanism and exoticism, see 

Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice

(Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2002): 1–22, esp. 7.

47. Exhibition of Art and Handcraft of Viet Nam, 1–2; box 43, Wright Papers. Harriet Morrison, “Art 

Objects of Vietnam,” New York Herald Tribune, 17 September 1958, 2:2; box 45, Wright Papers.
ROCI East

Rauschenberg’s Encounters in China

Hiroko Ikegami
177

In the long and celebrated career of Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), the 

Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange project has occupied an uneasy 

place. ROCI (pronounced “Rocky”) took place from 1985 to 1991, when the 

artist created and exhibited works of art in 11 countries and regions to promote 

peace and understanding among diverse cultures. He deliberately chose what he 

called “sensitive areas” (i.e., areas that had little contact with American art and 

culture because of differences in their economic and political systems), and the 

whole international art project ultimately encompassed ROCI Mexico, ROCI 

Chile, ROCI Venezuela, ROCI China, ROCI Tibet, ROCI Japan, ROCI Cuba, 

ROCI USSR, ROCI Berlin, and ROCI Malaysia.1

 It concluded in 1991 with a 

large exhibition entitled ROCI USA at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where no less than 171 works inspired by the hosting countries were 

on view (for the sake of clarity, titles of actual ROCI exhibitions are italicized 

in this chapter, whereas titles of projects are not).2

A project of this magnitude has never been undertaken by any other artist, 

and Rauschenberg even made a speech at the United Nations in December 1984 

to announce it to ambassadors and diplomats. A couple of months before his 

speech, he wrote the “Tobago Statement” explaining its purpose:

Emphasis will be placed on sharing experiences with societies less 

familiar with non-political ideas or communicating “worldly” 

through art . . . I feel strong in my beliefs, based on my varied and 

widely traveled collaborations, that a one-to-one contact through 

art contains potent and peaceful powers, and is the most nonelitist way to share exotic and common information, seducing us 

into creative mutual understandings for the benefit of all.3
178 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Despite these lofty ideas, the venture was largely dismissed as unconvincing in artistic value and ethically questionable in concept when ROCI USA opened in Washington. While some reviewers praised his creation as “Rauschenberg Renaissance,” 

most greeted it with skepticism, commenting on a “cultural arrogance” that lay 

behind the artist’s optimistic promotion of world peace.4

 One even called him an 

“art imperialist,” who behaves like a “big-time visiting American aided by ambassadors and surrounded by his entourage.”5

 In the age of post-colonial theory, ROCI 

seemed to some critical eyes like a project of cultural invasion.

Before ROCI is dismissed as American cultural imperialism, however, it is important to examine with care the ways in which host countries received the project. This 

essay focuses on ROCI China, which took place at the National Art Museum of China 

in Beijing in 1985. The exhibition coincided with the country’s “culture fever” with 

Western art and culture, and a number of contemporary artists recall the show as a 

bold and generous gesture, and a significant event that influenced their subsequent 

careers. Chinese artists and critics whom the author interviewed in the summer of 

2009—including Xu Bing, Zhang Wei, Gao Minglu, and Li Xianting—stressed that 

the exhibition did a great favor to the emerging avant-garde art scene, which was in 

desperate need of information from the outside world after the Cultural Revolution. 

They emphasized the difficulty of organizing a Western contemporary art show in 

China at the time, and said that only Rauschenberg was willing to take up the challenge. In the local context, therefore, ROCI China functioned as a much-needed catalyst for Chinese artists to begin familiarizing themselves with the global art scene.

This poses an intriguing paradox: while Rauschenberg’s home audiences faulted 

him for his cultural arrogance, audiences in China appreciated his real contribution 

to the beginnings of Chinese contemporary art. Another facet of this paradox is an 

assumption held by both American and Chinese artists that it was somehow necessary 

to have a contact with “Western” art in order to begin authentic contemporary art. 

To unravel this paradox, it is necessary to consider the issue of “cultural time lag,” 

or cultural divide between the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc in the last stages of 

Cold War, which was a crucial factor that determined the reception of ROCI in host 

countries. In this sense, the phrase “East–West interchanges” had a double meaning 

for China, a country that belonged to the East both culturally and politically at the 

time. A discussion of ROCI China can lead to a reconsideration of not only American art but also the art of the Eastern Bloc in a global context, allowing us to assess 

ROCI’s ambivalent legacy in a larger discourse of world art history.

ROCI’s origin dates back to the 1964 world tour of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which Rauschenberg joined as a costume and set designer.6

Together with the company, he visited 30 cities in 14 countries, including India, 
ROCI East 179

Thailand, Japan, and, behind the Iron Curtain, Czechoslovakia and Poland. During the tour, he produced not only sets and costumes for the dance company but 

also created his own works from local materials—including “Combines” that reassemble found materials. In Tokyo, for instance, he made a major Combine entitled 

Gold Standard, collecting junk objects from the streets and assembling them on a 

traditional gold folding screen. This engagement with a local culture set a pattern 

for Rauschenberg’s future international enterprises. In addition, as he had the responsibility of “taking the most impoverished, impossible spaces and turning them 

into real theatrical events” as a stage manager, he considered the 1964 world trip a 

“good out-of-town rehearsal for ROCI.”7

Conceived by Rauschenberg as a kind of peace mission to create global connections 

in art, however, ROCI was different in nature from his previous international engagements. In fact, the idea for ROCI took shape during his first visit to China in 1982 

(Figure 1). Visiting the Xuan Paper Mill, the oldest paper mill in the world, in Jingxian, Anhui Province, he was shocked to see people deprived of the freedom to travel 

in their own country, completely disconnected from the outside world. According to 

Donald Saff, a print artist who accompanied him on the trip and later acted as ROCI’s 

project manager, the Americans’ freedom in China was quite limited as well. Despite 

the central government’s permission, Rauschenberg and his crew had to stay at Yellow 

Mountains for a while, hindered by Jingxian officials who feared that the Americans 

might steal their secret of papermaking.8

 Even after they entered the village, they were 

not allowed to work inside the mill. Rauschenberg, therefore, had to give craftsmen 

1. Robert Rauschenberg working on 7 Characters series, Xuan Paper Mill, Jingxian, China, June 1982. 

Photo © 1982 Ruth Saff.
180 East–West Interchanges in American Art

his designs and ideas so 

that they could work on 

them in the mill, show 

him what they did, and 

continue with the procedure until he completed 

a series of paper-based 

works entitled 7 Characters 

(Figure 2).

In Beijing, Rauschenberg visited the Central 

Academy of Graphic Art 

and saw that the students 

were skilled but producing mediocre works because they were not allowed to create anything 

beyond the official style 

and subject. Feeling a responsibility to introduce 

them to the world, he and 

Saff gave a lecture on the 

history of Western modern art, and the students’ 

enthusiastic responses convinced him of their need for communication with outside 

cultures. As Rauschenberg had already entertained an idea for an international traveling show, he decided to focus on countries that had little exposure to contemporary 

Western art (Japan and Mexico, two close allies of the United States, were exceptions). Constantly incorporating his responses to different cultures, Rauschenberg 

envisioned ROCI as an ever-evolving, accumulative project, in which people of diverse 

backgrounds could communicate with one another through his art.

While the project seems optimistic to a fault today, it satisfied a craving for 

Western art in China. With the end of Cultural Revolution in 1976, China had 

started receiving Western modern art by the mid-eighties. In 1981, works by Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock and Hans Hofmann in the 

collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, were shown for the first time in 

China. The MFA exhibition, accompanied by a Chinese-language catalogue that 

included an essay on American abstract painting, traveled from the National Art 

2. Robert Rauschenberg, 7 Characters: Individual, 1982. Silk, ribbon, paper, 

paper-pulp relief, ink, and gold leaf on handmade Xuan paper, 43 × 31 in. From a 

suite of 70 variations published by Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles © Estate of Robert 

Rauschenberg/Licensed by VAGA, New York.
ROCI East 181

Museum of China in Beijing to Shanghai Museum.9 The “anti-spiritual pollution 

campaign” of 1983 put a hold on this trend for one year, however, and it was only 

at the end of 1984 that the Central Communist Party started a massive program to 

open up the country to Western arts and thoughts.10 As a result, Chinese artists encountered modernism and postmodernism all at once, mainly through publications. 

It was at this crucial moment that ROCI China took place, meeting their desire to 

see works of contemporary Western art in person.

Still, Rauschenberg’s project was inevitably burdened by a long and complicated process. Although he had approached the Chinese Ministry of Culture during 

his 1982 visit, he had to wait for the end of the “anti-spiritual pollution campaign” 

before starting a real negotiation. When the campaign began to wane in the summer 

of 1984, an American-based Chinese woman named Chun-Wuei Su Chien, who had 

acted as his coordinator and translator in 1982, returned to China and resumed the 

discussion with the Chinese Exhibition Agency. Her husband, Chih-Yung Chien, a 

physics professor at Johns Hopkins University, also did a considerable amount of 

advance negotiation with the government—including making a slide presentation 

of selected works by Rauschenberg with his wife’s introductory text in Chinese—

when he attended the thirty-fifth anniversary of the establishment of People’s Republic of China as an honored guest in October 1984.

By that time, government officials recognized the merit of ROCI China in the 

context of increasing cultural exchange, but a solo show of a Western avant-garde 

artist, who was still alive and very active, was unprecedented and a potential political risk. Thus they demanded that Chun-Wuei Su Chien assume full responsibility 

for the selection of artworks and the catalogue production, and that all of the correspondence on the subject go through her.11 Rauschenberg nominated her as a curator of ROCI China, and Chien traveled to Beijing again in November 1984 to reach 

an agreement with the Chinese Exhibition Agency about the budget, installation, 

and content of the exhibit.12 The agency’s requirements were stringent: it would 

check in advance all the works and video materials to be included in the show, and 

the Rauschenberg side would be responsible for all exhibition expenses, including 

the cost of a dance performance by the Trisha Brown Company that was planned in 

conjunction with the exhibition opening. Together with the National Art Museum’s 

gallery rental fee of $26,000, the overall budget amounted to about $45,000.13

As the first Western contemporary art exhibition in the country, ROCI China 

unleashed a great shock in Beijing, attracting more than 300,000 visitors during 

its three-week run. First of all, the scale of the exhibition was unprecedented as it 

used four large exhibition halls on the first floor of the National Art Museum of 

China, occupying 2,250 square meters (about 7,380 square feet). Secondly, it was 
182 East–West Interchanges in American Art

presented in multiple media. 

While most of Rauschenberg’s works involved the 

use of mixed media, the 

Summerhall series, which consisted of photographs taken 

by the artist in various parts 

of China, was installed as a 

100-foot-long photo installation on the arched wall of 

the circular gallery. In addition, television monitors 

were scattered around the 

exhibition; one of them introduced Rauschenberg’s 

life and work at the entrance, while others showed 

his activities in different 

ROCI host countries as well 

as American popular culture 

such as cartoons and musicals. Thirdly, the walls of the exhibition space were repainted. Since the National Art Museum had been built in 1962 as a showcase for 

idealized Chinese art and Communist propaganda, its walls had never been touched. 

But when Chien arrived in Beijing in July 1985, she brought over “rollers, trays, and 

2,000 RMB [Renminbi, Chinese currency]” to have the dusty walls repainted fresh 

white before the installation began.14 Rauschenberg’s crew then added temporary 

walls and installed his freestanding and wall pieces in the space newly fashioned to 

Western standards.

Finally, the most shocking aspect of the show was Rauschenberg’s extensive use 

of readymade and other contemporary art strategies that had never been seen in China 

before. While he used such everyday objects as umbrellas and even discarded cardboard in 

his creations in China, the Kabal American Zephyr series he had produced in the early 1980s 

also demonstrated his deployment of light and motion in his art. Moreover, photo transfer was visible on shiny metal plates in works from ROCI Chile, and Japanese Clayworks, 

which incorporated images of Mona Lisa and other famed paintings, demonstrated that 

even “art history” could be an artist’s readymade material. Xu Bing (Figure 3), who saw 

the exhibition with his students as a young faculty member at the Central Academy of 

Fine Arts, recalls that it was hard to decide whether he liked Rauschenberg’s work or 

3. Xu Bing at Robert Rauschenberg’s ROCI China exhibition in 

Beijing, The National Art Museum of China, 1985. Photo courtesy Xu Bing 

Studio Inc.
ROCI East 183

not, because he had nothing to compare it with. Although he knew about Duchamp’s 

readymade, he had not seen it in person. The only thing he knew that looked remotely 

similar to Rauschenberg’s work was a farmer’s house decorated with a variety of farming tools, which he had seen in the countryside where he was sent during the Cultural 

Revolution. The show nonetheless left a deep impression on him, because, combined 

with an exhibition of North Korean art held around the same year, it gave him an occasion to think about his art and future, convincing him that he needed to get out of his 

environment and stop producing work in the official Chinese art style.15

The diversity of Rauschenberg’s contemporary art strategies offered a great inspiration for other young artists as well—artists who already were forming what 

would be called the ’85 Movement all over the country.16 Compared with Duchamp’s 

conceptual readymade, Rauschenberg’s prolific and indiscriminate use of found objects seemed more approachable as a point of reference. Most importantly, it vividly 

suggested an effective alternative to “socialist realism” and “traditional art,” the two 

dead-end avenues of expression available in Chinese art at the time. For instance, in 

7 Characters, shown as part of ROCI China, Rauschenberg combined traditional paper 

with found images of contemporary Chinese life, not in an idealized realist style but as 

part of formal composition. As the critic Li Xianting suggests, this approach provided 

Chinese artists a non-ideological, or better, a critical way to deal with their reality in 

artistic practice.17 According to him, even artists outside Beijing made a trip to the 

capital to see ROCI China and many artists both inside and outside academies started 

4. Wu Pingren, History: Series of Conflicts, 1985. Mixed media. From Gao Minglu, ed., The ’85 Movement: The 

Enlightenment of the Chinese Avant-Garde (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 1988), 290.
184 East–West Interchanges in American Art

playing with readymade. For 

instance, Wu Pingren exhibited History: Series of Conflicts

(Figure 4) in the Xuzhuo 

Contemporary Art exhibition in May 1986. Although 

it has yet to be confirmed 

whether he saw ROCI China

or not, what we might call 

the “Rauschenberg effect” is 

clearly visible in this work, 

for the artist incorporated 

art-historical references such 

as Mona Lisa and a plaster 

cast into his mixed media 

painting.

Such a drastic artistic 

impact, however, combined 

with Rauschenberg’s personal presence in Beijing, was 

bound to unsettle the Chinese art scene. In particular, 

his encounter with the local 

underground artists revealed an issue of “cultural time lag,” a key term to understand 

the ambivalence of the ROCI project. This encounter took place at an underground 

exhibition specifically organized for Rauschenberg, held at the apartment of an American journalist, Marlowe Hood (Figure 5). A reporter for South China Daily, Hood 

was friendly with a group of underground artists who had no official art education at 

academies or elsewhere. They included such painters as Zhang Wei, Ma Kelu, and Zhu 

Jinshi, who had been engaged with impressionistic landscape under the banner of the 

No Name Group in the 1970s and moved on to abstraction in the 1980s. Thinking 

that it would be an interesting experience for them to meet Rauschenberg, Hood arranged a private show for the American artist.

Zhang Wei was a central figure in this underground art community in Beijing (Figure 

6). Since the authorities still did not permit abstraction, he held a number of underground 

exhibitions in his apartment, creating a cultural scene of “Apartment Art.” According to 

the art historian Gao Minglu, the space of an apartment was a kind of totality, as it was 

used not only as a living space but also as a studio, salon, and exhibition space, which 

5. Robert Rauschenberg visiting Seven-Person Exhibition, apartment 

of Marlowe Hood, November 1985. A large abstraction on the right is by Zhang 

Wei, and the one the left is by Wan Luyan. A sculpture on the table is by 

Gu Dexin. Photo courtesy Zhang Wei.
ROCI East 185

could function as social critique.18

Engaging with abstraction meant 

constant negotiation with government censorship at the time. 

While single-story houses could 

easily be spied on, Zhang Wei 

lived in the corner room on the 

top floor of a five-story building, a location not conducive to 

constant surveillance. To further 

lessen the risk, he devised a special way of entry. In addition to 

a main entrance that was watched 

24 hours a day, he asked his fellows to use two emergency stairs 

on both sides of the building. 

Thus the guests would come in 

at different times of a day from 

different entrances, knock on the 

door as arranged, and then enjoy 

the private show and party.19

Even a decade after the end of Cultural Revolution, there was not much artistic freedom. In fact, when Zhang Wei and his fellow artists ventured to hold an exhibition 

in public in May 1985, it was banned before it opened. Since the situation was not 

much different half a year later, Hood suggested using his own apartment to show 

their work to Rauschenberg.

With Hood’s help, Zhang Wei organized Seven-Person Exhibition, including Gu Dexin, 

Wan Luyan, Qin Yufen, and Feng Guodong as well as the two painters mentioned earlier. 

Interested in the “unofficial” side of Chinese art, Rauschenberg paid a visit to Hood’s 

apartment and looked at the artists’ work attentively. Despite mutual interest, however, 

the evening took an unexpected turn. When Rauschenberg asked Zhang Wei if he had 

already seen the ROCI show, the Chinese artist emphatically answered, “Yes, almost 

every day.” Rauschenberg responded that he wanted to take Zhang Wei to the United 

States so that he could tell everyone how the Chinese people loved his show in Beijing. 

Immediately disgusted, Zhang Wei started criticizing the American artist’s work, saying 

that the more he saw it, the less impressed he was. A quarrel broke out between the two, 

and Chun-Wuei Su Chien refused to translate Zhang Wei beyond that point.20 Ma Kelu 

and Zhu Jinshi took sides with Zhang, whereas Gu Dexin and Wan Luyan found the 

6. Zhang Wei standing in front of his abstract paintings, Beijing, 

1982. Photo courtesy Li Shan.
186 East–West Interchanges in American Art

dispute unproductive.21 The truth be told, however, Zhang Wei did like Rauschenberg’s 

work and all the other artists appreciated his interest in their show. Why, then, did this 

confrontation happen at all?

This is where the issue of cultural time lag is pertinent. In the mid-1980s, the 

engagement with abstraction was at once extremely radical and political in China. 

Most likely, however, their paintings instead reminded Rauschenberg of Abstract Expressionism, whose influence he had struggled to overcome 30 years ago. Certainly, 

this cultural time lag, or “belatedness,” always exists between the putative centers 

of modernity and other peripheral regions to varying degrees. But in this case, the 

cultural distance was further complicated by the East–West division of the Cold 

War era. From the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 until 

the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s open-door policy in 1978, China was in a state of 

cultural isolation. In the meantime, the contemporary art scene of the so-called Free 

World saw numerous trends and transitions, which, on the whole, resulted in the commercialization of art. With the economic boom and the craze for Neo-Expressionist 

painting, indeed, oppositional avant-garde art was already history by the mid-1980s.

This cultural divide compounded communication difficulties between the American and the Chinese artists. Furthermore, there was a huge gap between their social 

standings. If Zhang Wei and others had to remain underground as long as they aspired 

to be avant-garde, Rauschenberg was highly visible, as an internationally celebrated 

artist as well as a self-appointed cultural ambassador. During his stay in China, he 

threw a large party for government officials, and Time magazine decided to commission from him a portrait of Deng Xiaoping, its 1985 “Man of the Year,” for its cover, 

a project that Chun-Wuei Su Chien proudly announced at Hood’s apartment. This 

did not please the young Chinese artists, who were obviously anti-government.

On the cover of 6 January 1986, issue of Time (Figure 7), Rauschenberg 

combined a few photographs of the Chinese leader with images of contemporary 

life in China, such as numerous bicycles in a factory and a construction site. In 

addition, a pair of scissors cutting a ribbon celebrates the new start for China. 

The artist told the magazine, “Today there is a new spirit, a new curiosity, that 

was missing three years ago. It is a great beginning.”22 Here the double character 

of Rauschenberg’s combine technique is clearly visible; because it is basically a 

neutral method, it can be used both to criticize a political situation and to praise 

and affirm it, depending on the circumstances. This double character echoes the 

double-sided nature of the ROCI project. While he was critical of the political 

systems of the hosting countries, Rauschenberg willingly cooperated with their 

governments to realize his exhibitions. This duality no doubt made Chinese artists both appreciative and skeptical of his presence.
ROCI East 187

Still, their encounter with the 

American artist had a fundamental 

impact on their subsequent careers. 

Zhu Jinshi recalls that the idea of 

meeting with Rauschenberg inspired him to propose an exhibition 

of soundscape installation, something those underground Chinese 

artists had never experimented with 

before and that was thus rejected. 

At the same time the inspiration 

from Rauschenberg encouraged Gu 

Dexin—who was thinking of quitting his artistic career at the time—

to continue making art.23 After 

Rauschenberg’s visit, four artists 

out of seven left China. In 1986 

Zhang Wei moved to the United 

States and Ma Kelu went to Germany before later settling in New York. In the same year, Zhu Jinshi and Qin Yufen 

left for Germany and became installation artists. Feng Guodong, Gu Dexin, and Wan 

Luyan stayed in China, but the last two remain internationally active after working as 

the Tactile Sensation Group and the New Analysts Group with Chen Shaoping. Today all the artists except for Feng Guodong, who passed away in 2005, live and work 

in Beijing, which has become a flourishing contemporary art center.

In lieu of a conclusion, I would like to return to a consideration of the ambiguous 

nature of ROCI’s legacy. While its significance in American art history is considered 

small, ROCI became a milestone in Chinese art history, offering a much-needed catalyst 

for Chinese artists to think beyond their given cultural and political conditions. This 

case study of ROCI China also points to the need to connect and compare it with the 

reception of ROCI in other host countries in the Eastern Bloc. The significance of the 

larger Rauschenberg international project clearly lies in world art history and in the 

possibility of studying it as a link to understanding seemingly disparate developments. 

Just as ROCI China coincided with Deng Xiaoping’s open-door policy in China, ROCI 

USSR coincided with Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika in the Soviet Union, and ROCI 

Berlin with the fall of the Berlin Wall. In a nutshell, it coincided with the breakdown 

7. Robert Rauschenberg, Portrait of Deng Xiaoping for 

Time’s “Man of the Year,” cover, 6 January 1986 © Estate of Robert 

Rauschenberg/Licensed by VAGA, New York.
188 East–West Interchanges in American Art

of the cultural blockade between the East and the West. As if to prove this point, the 

dismantling of the Berlin Wall contributed to the speedy realization of the ROCI Berlin

exhibition in 1990, and in the same year, following the success of ROCI USSR of 1989, 

Rauschenberg was even included in the USSR Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.24

Thus, one way to reconsider the ROCI project would be to use it as a vehicle 

to connect and compare various “non-conformist” and “dissident” art movements in 

the Eastern Bloc that have so far tended to be studied separately from one another.25

If Rauschenberg’s work and presence had a critical impact on the emerging Chinese 

avant-garde art scene, how did the dissident artists in East Germany and the Soviet 

Union respond to the ROCI exhibition, and how did the artists of the Eastern Bloc as 

a whole experience the breakdown of the cultural blockade? These questions ultimately 

go beyond the East–West division of the Cold War regime, as ROCI in Latin American 

countries such as Chile and Venezuela, where the cultural blockade existed for a different reason but with equal intensity, would unfold other contrasting stories.26 The varying cultural time lag is an important topic for global art studies. By going beyond the 

nation-based framework of art history and by talking across cultures, we can begin to 

assess ROCI’s legacy and revaluate it for a larger history of world art.

Notes

My thanks to all of the individuals who granted me interviews in Beijing in the summer of 2009, and to 

Bingyi Huang and Xiong Yan for their invaluable help as interpreters and coordinators. I am also indebted 

to Reiko Tomii and Ming Tiampo for their comments on the draft of this paper, and Gina Guy and Matt 

Magee at the Robert Rauschenberg Archives in New York for their generous research assistance.

1. Rauschenberg pronounced the name ROCI as “Rocky” to rhyme with the name of his pet turtle and 

used the turtle’s image as an icon for the project. The full itinerary was as follows: ROCI Mexico, Museo 

Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City (17 April–23 June 1985); ROCI Chile, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 

Santiago (17 July–18 August 1985); ROCI Venezuela, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas (12 

September–27 October 1985); ROCI China, National Art Museum of China, Beijing (15 November–5 

December 1985); ROCI Tibet, Tibet Revolutionary Hall, Lhasa (2–23 December 1985); ROCI Japan, 

Setagaya Museum of Art, Tokyo (22 November–28 December 1986); ROCI Cuba, Museo Nacional, Casa 

de Las Américas, and Castillo de la Fuerza, Havana (10 February–3 April 1988); ROCI USSR, Tretyakov 

Gallery, Central House of Culture, Moscow (2 February–5 March 1989); ROCI Berlin, Neue Berliner 

Gallerie im Alten Museum, Berlin (10 March–1 April 1990); ROCI Malaysia, National Art Gallery, Kuala 

Lumpur (21 May–24 June 1990); and ROCI USA, Washington, DC (12 May–2 September 1991).

2. See Mary Yakush, ed., ROCI: Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (Washington, DC: 

National Gallery of Art, 1991).

3. Robert Rauschenberg, “Tobago Statement,” written in October 1984. See Yakush, ROCI, 154.

4. Lee Fleming, “Rauschenberg Redux: The World Tour Comes Home,” Museums & Arts Washington

(May–June 1991), 54. Hank Burchard, “Rauschenberg Sinks ‘Overseas,’” Washington Post, 10 May 

1991. For another negative review, see Eric Gibson, “Rauschenberg’s Exhibit Has No Artistic Luster,” 

Washington Times, 10 May 1991, E8.

5. Paul Richard, “Silk Sheets and Neon Bicycles: At the National Gallery, the Extravagant 

‘Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange,’” Washington Post, 12 May 1991, G1.

6. For the significances of Rauschenberg’s international activities of the 1960s, see Hiroko Ikegami, The 

Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

7. Robert Rauschenberg and Donald Saff, “A Conversation about Art and ROCI,” in Yakush, ROCI, 162.
ROCI East 189

8. Donald Saff, telephone interview by author, 15 July 2009. As a print artist, Saff had been to China 

a number of times and was a director of Graphicstudio at the University of South Florida at the 

time. At Rauschenberg’s request, he accompanied Rauschenberg’s trip to China in 1982 and later 

acted as ROCI’s project manager.

9. See Kenworth Moffett, “American Abstract Painting after 1945,” in American Paintings from the Museum 

of Fine Arts, Boston (Beijing: National Art Museum of China, 1981), 30–33. This publication is in Chinese.

10. Fei Dawei, “The Twenty Years That Served as the Beginning: Chinese Contemporary Art of the 

Eighties and Nineties,” in Avant-Garde China: Twenty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art (Osaka: 

National Museum of Art, 2008), 25. There was also a Picasso exhibition in Beijing in 1983.

11. Chun-Wuei Su Chien, “Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange in China (Beijing and Lhasa),” 

unpublished memoir of ROCI China, dated 26 March 1986, Robert Rauschenberg Archives, New York.

12. Rauschenberg’s letter of commission, dated 25 October 1984, says: “I hereby appoint and 

authorize Mrs. Chun-Wuei Su Chien as the curator and the sole agent in charge of selecting and 

arrangements for the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange exhibition in China.” According 

to the budget drafted by Chien, she received $10,000 as a salary for 1984 and another $10,000 for 

1985; Rauschenberg Archives.

13. “An Agreement between the China Exhibition Agency and the Evergreen Cultural Exchange for the 

Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange Exhibition in China,” Rauschenberg Archives. Chien signed the 

agreement as a director of Evergreen Cultural Exchange, an organization she set up to do the ROCI work.

14. In a letter dated 22 July 1985, Chien wrote to Donald Saff and Terry van Brandt, “I brought over 

rollers, trays, and 2,000 RMB for CEA [Chinese Exhibition Agency], asking them to have the gallery 

painted before ROCI installation” [emphasis by Chien]; Rauschenberg Archives.

15. Xu Bing, interview by author, 27 July 2009, Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing.

16. See Gao Minglu, ed., The ’85 Movement: The Enlightenment of Chinese Avant-Garde (Guilin: 

Guangxi Normal University Press, 1988), and The ’85 Movement: An Anthology of Historical Sources

(Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2008). These publications are in Chinese.

17. Li Xianting, interview by author, 21 July 2009, Songzhuang.

18. Gao Minglu, “What is ‘Apartment Art’?” The Ecology of Post-Cultural Revolution Frontier Art: 

Apartment Art in China 1970s–1990s (Beijing: Shuimu Contemporary Art Space, 2008), 10.

19. Zhang Wei, interview by author, 23 July 2009, Beijing.

20. Ibid.

21. There was a generation gap involved in the conflict as well, because the young Chinese artists felt 

they had to show their independence to Rauschenberg, who was the age of their fathers. While Zhu 

Jinshi recalls that Rauschenberg said “Relax” more than 10 times during his visit, the American artist 

advised Ma Kelu to unburden himself from the heavy tradition of Chinese art—a piece of well-meant 

advice that was nonetheless resented by the Chinese artists as patronizing. Ma Kelu and Zhu Jinshi, 

interviews by author, conducted respectively on 23 and 24 July 2009, Beijing.

22. Robert Rauschenberg, quoted in Richard B. Thomas, “A Letter from the Publisher,” Time 127, no. 

1 (6 January 1986): 4.

23. Gu Dexin and Zhu Jinshi, interviews by author, conducted respectively on 23 and 24 July 2009, Beijing.

24. See Joan Young and Susan Davidson, “Chronology,” in Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, ed. 

Walter Hopps (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1997), 582–83. For ROCI USSR, see 

Pamela Kachurin, “The ROCI Road to Peace: Robert Rauschenberg, Perestroika, and the End of the 

Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 4, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 27–43.

25. For dissident artists in the Soviet Union, see Renee Baigell and Matthew Baigell, eds., Soviet 

Dissident Artists: Interviews after Perestroika, (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 

and Norton Dodge and Alla Rosenfeld, eds., From Gulag to Glasnost: Nonconformist Art from the 

Soviet Union (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995). For the art of East Germany, see Art of Two 

Germanys/Cold War Cultures (New York: Abrams, 2009). This exhibition was organized by the Los 

Angeles County Museum of Art and traveled to Nuremberg and Berlin.

26. For a detailed account of ROCI Chile, see Robert S. Mattison, Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking 

Boundaries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 220–59.
Artistic Tropes

Some Cases of Mutual Chinese–American Influence

Ding Ning
191

Knowledge studies others,

while wisdom is self-known.

 —Laotzu

That both Chinese and American artists benefit from each other’s cultural 

and artistic production is a fact obvious to all. Their exchange of ideas about 

visual communication goes beyond direct imitation and has become a valuable stimulus for artistic creation. But the scholarly study of the interactive 

influence between Chinese and American artists is just beginning, at least in 

current Chinese academic circles. Some American artists were certainly inspired by Chinese culture and art, yet little in-depth research has been done 

on this specific influence. When historical data has been compiled, further 

reflection or analysis has not generally followed. 

At the same time, art historians have given even less attention to the ways in 

which American art has influenced Chinese art—including contemporary Chinese art. We are accustomed to believe that only the art with the longer history 

could have an essential impact on the younger art, and not vice versa. The inclination to observe a one-way influence has been particularly powerful.

It is well known that there have been relatively straightforward imitations in 

the history of art. For instance, Botticelli’s Calumny (1494–95) was perhaps the 

loyal echo to the original of the same title by the ancient Greek painter Apelles. 

Respectful imitation of the work of old masters has played a subtle but profound 

role in the history of Chinese painting, particularly in the elite tradition of literati 

art (mainly expressive painting starting from the Song dynasty). In the eyes of 

painters of the Ming dynasty, for example, creative or free copying was completely 
192 East–West Interchanges in American Art

different from any literary imitation as they strived to seek the style of a specific 

master in the past. Similarities in compositional construction and, more importantly, spiritual encounters were in the minds of smart followers. Thus Zhao Zuo 

and Dong Qichang could have the same master, Li Cheng, to imitate, yet the results 

could be substantially different.1

 Tracing artistic influence across cultures can present us with a rich and still more complex perspective. As Michael Taussig argued in 

his classic cross-cultural analysis Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, 

imitation of other cultures can be an incredibly potent form of creativity, collective 

knowledge, and identity formation. The “sympathetic magic” of mimesis—of imitating something from beyond one’s own borders—not only enriches the imitator, 

but also allows the source of inspiration to see a new version of itself, to see itself 

through the eyes of another.2

In recent years, scholars have moved away from unidirectional notions of cultural 

influence. Yet even studies of cross-cultural interchange, such as explorations of the immigrant experience and the experience of Asian American artists, can leave the dynamics 

of mutual influence underdeveloped. Scholars have noted, for instance, how American 

Asian artists, including Isamu Noguchi or Dong Kingman, were either marginalized 

by the dominant society or felt an imposed stereotype of in-between-ness. But it is 

important to dig still deeper into the nature of their creative achievements as well as 

those of Euro-American artists such as Mark Tobey who came into contact with Asian 

art. The influence involved is not only partial and technical, but can be omnipresent and 

conceptual in ways that have not yet been fully explored. Norman Bryson, in his book 

Tradition and Desire (1984), used the term “tropes” to describe artistic manipulations or 

“turnings” of tradition that result in something new that falls between imitation and 

complete transformation—not so direct as the former but also not so dramatic as the 

latter. This idea may be helpful in considering the complex nature of artistic exchange 

here. As Bryson noted, tropes may also mask imitation as artists adopt different strategies for confronting the difficulties of visual innovation.3

Recent exhibitions, such as The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, organized 

by the Guggenheim Museum, have demonstrated the far-reaching influence of Asian 

aesthetic ideas on American art. Similarly, it is important to notice that within certain 

periods of time the influence of American art on contemporary Chinese art does not 

seem to have been purely an individual connection between an American artist and a 

Chinese counterpart, but rather a more profound and lasting process. This essay will 

look briefly at the influence of Chinese art on American abstractionists Mark Tobey, 

Isamu Noguchi, and Philip Guston, and then it will turn to the way an American realist, 

Andrew Wyeth, influenced a number of Chinese painters in the 1980s and 1990s. “Wyethiana” prompted these artists to create a large number of figurative works that have 
Artistic Tropes 193

become an important part of the history of contemporary Chinese art, and a unique 

record of transnational visual culture for an entire era.

Teng Baiye and Mark Tobey

First of all, let us deal with an example of the influence of Chinese art upon American art by looking at the relationship of Teng Baiye (1900–1980) and Mark Tobey 

(1890–1976). Tobey’s exposure to a wide range of West and East Asian influences 

is well-documented in the art-historical literature, although the most significant was 

undoubtedly Chinese art. Teng (also known as T’eng Kwei, Teng Kuei, or Kwei Dun) 

not only taught Tobey Chinese painting and calligraphy, but also influenced the latter in terms of artistic concept. Unfortunately, in the history of modern Chinese art, 

Teng is almost forgotten; one cannot find his name and works in any available survey 

or art history textbooks. Despite his prolific output, few scholars today understand 

his real contribution to both Chinese and American art history.

A close study shows that Tobey would not have been able to encounter a more ideal 

artistic partner. Teng (Figure 1) was well versed in English, which was somewhat rare 

among Chinese artists and students, as he had studied and obtained an MFA degree at the 

University of Washington and had conducted a special project at Yenching Institute, Harvard University, with the recommendation of John Leighton Stuart, president of Yenching University, Peiping. From 1927 to 1928, he was invited to teach at the University of 

Washington after acquiring his master’s degree; very possibly he was the first Chinese artist to teach in an American or European higher educational institution.4 Teng had studied 

western art, but greatly preferred traditional Chinese art and created a large number of 

excellent water-and-ink works and finger-paintings, some of which were exhibited by the 

Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in 1930. He also lectured and published 

in English, giving straight-to-the-point opinions on both Chinese and Western art.5

Teng was among only a few modern Chinese artists who were highly acclaimed in the 

West. By 1930, he had had solo painting shows in the Henry Art Gallery at Washington 

University (1928), in New York, and at the East West Fine Art Gallery, San Francisco. 

But his most important show was the one-person exhibition in November 1930 at the 

Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Since its founding in 1915, the society 

has been an important museum devoted to contemporary art. Directed by the artist Eva 

Watson-Schütze, it held an influential exhibition in 1934, in which Georges Braque, Jean 

(Hans) Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso participated. One-person shows there featured the work of such celebrated figures as Henri Matisse (1930), 

Alexander Calder (1934), and Fernand Léger (1936).6

 Berthold Laufer, curator of Asiatic ethnology and anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, 

introduced Teng to the Renaissance Society, and he may have prompted the exhibition, 
194 East–West Interchanges in American Art

which was co-sponsored by the American Friends of China..

 A Chinese context 

was provided: along with the exhibition 

of the artist’s paintings, examples of antique Chinese art were displayed. Chinese consul-general Koliang Yih was a 

guest of honor at the opening of the 

“Exhibition of the Paintings of Teng 

Kwei,” and Laufer offered remarks.7

Teng’s artistic talent was extremely farreaching; he also was a sculptor, and in 

1931 he designed the Chinese Nationality Room in the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh.8

The relationship between Teng 

Baiye and Mark Tobey was not in the 

category of ordinary friends. In 1923 

the two men met in Seattle, where Tobey had recently settled. Tobey became 

fascinated by Chinese painting and calligraphy, which helped the budding artist 

forge his distinct style. In 1934, after visits to Naples, Italy, and Hong Kong, Tobey made 

his way by boat to see Teng in Shanghai, and his old friend probably offered him a home 

stay in the French Concession there, where Tobey continued his studies of Chinese art under the instruction of his long-term tutor. He also visited Japan that year. By 1938, when 

Teng wrote to Tobey for the last time, China was suffering from the Japanese invasion. He 

had stopped painting and was devoting himself to the anti-Japanese war by participating 

in the refugee industrial movement in the camps of Guilin. One can feel rather touched by 

the unusual friendship conveyed between the lines of his only surviving letter to Tobey.9

Only in 1935 did Tobey start his so-called white writing, the innovative network of white lines against a dark background that cover the surface of his work. 

That happened after his discovery of traditional ink brushwork in China and in 

Japan, where he found himself freed from form by “the calligraphic impulse I had 

received in China.”10 How might Chinese art have influenced him to discover his 

own visual tropes and distinguish himself stylistically as an outstanding artist?

In his lectures and papers, Teng emphasized the expressive quality of line in 

Chinese art, and Tobey went further by getting rid of any mass with certain configurations of lines, reinforcing such expressiveness. Tobey wrote,

1. Portrait of T’eng K’uei with dedication to Mark Tobey, 

1926. University of Washington Libraries, Seattle, Special 

Collections, UW 23723z.
Artistic Tropes 195

All is in motion now. . . . [T]he tree in front of my studio in Seattle is all 

rhythm, lifting, springing upward! I have just had my first lesson in Chinese 

brush from my friend and artist Teng Kwei. The tree is no more a solid in the 

earth, breaking into lesser solids in the earth, breaking into lesser solids bathed 

in chiaroscuro. There is pressure and release. Each movement, like tracks in 

the snow, is recorded and often loved for itself. The Great Dragon is breathing 

sky, thunder and shadow; wisdom and spirit vitalized.11

According to this perception of nature, form is dematerialized and composed of qi, the ever-changing currents of cosmic energy. The French newspaper Le Monde, in reporting years 

later on the death of Mark Tobey, commented that it was owing to Teng Baiye’s instruction 

that the American painter acquired an insightful perspective on Far Eastern art and reached a 

completely new pattern in his own work.12 It can be said that his “white writing” style guided 

this very natural artist’s mind, or more exactly, universalist thinking, up to a freer level.

Tobey kept experimenting with lines and tried to pursue any possibly subtle variations in them. The spontaneity and vitality conveyed in his early white writing compositions was still evident in his much later works like Advance of History (Figure 2). 

Arguably, the wild impulses of line in the earlier Broadway Norm (1935) developed 

into the more delicate and intricate configuration of lines with dazzling widths, densities, directions, and colors.

Much has been made of Tobey’s use of all-over composition. 

This was one aspect that was not 

very common in traditional Chinese painting, however—particularly literati painting—as much 

more blank space is emphasized 

to give viewers room for imagination. Further, Tobey did not 

provide a kind of distinct figureand-ground relationship within 

his compositions; thus there was 

no visual focus or pivot, only the 

freedom of permitting viewers to 

have a wandering vision that could 

not easily pause and repeat.13

Tobey’s works in this mode, 

then, are indebted to but distinct 

2. Mark Tobey, Advance of History, 1964. Gouache and 

watercolor on paper, 25 5

⁄8 × 19 11⁄16 in. The Solomon R. Guggenheim 

Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice © 2011 Estate of 

Mark Tobey/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
196 East–West Interchanges in American Art

from the use of lines in the Chinese art that inspired them—both the Chinese art 

of the literati and the paintings of his mentor, Teng, himself deeply traditional. It is 

interesting to ask what influence Teng may have received from Tobey, a promising artist 10 years his senior. There is no doubt that Teng was good at absorbing Western 

art, and his later achievement in sculpture convincingly proved that. Is it because he 

learned so much about Western art that he then more firmly endorsed traditional Chinese art? Due to the lack of firsthand data, it is difficult to tackle this truly intriguing 

question. 

Noguchi and Guston

Not only does the case of Mark Tobey and Teng Baiye deserve more extensive 

and penetrating research, but other cases should also be more carefully examined. 

For example, the American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) 

seemed to have benefited from Chinese art as well as from Japanese art. No one 

knows why and how Noguchi visited Beijing in 1930. The artist himself was reluctant to dwell on his trip to China, and the whole issue became somehow mysterious. 

It is a little difficult to understand why he was so well received in Beijing, and what 

led to his being able to indulge in such a luxurious lifestyle. He employed a private cook who could speak French and cook French cuisine, a houseboy, and even a 

rickshaw boy. Unbelievably, despite being half Japanese, he became acquainted with 

General Zhang Xueliang and his men, who hated Japan. As for the arts, Noguchi 

quite willingly recalled 28 years later, in 1958, his eight-month stay in Beijing and 

two unforgettable things that happened to him.

The first striking experience for him concerned the magnificent monumental 

Temple of Heaven (Altar of Heaven), part of an imperial complex in Beijing. According to the scholar Dore Ashton, he deemed it to be a manifestation of the ancient 

Chinese worldview, which considered the earth to be an immense square in a universe 

moving in a circular orbit. As Ashton noted, the great marble square contains circular terraces leading to a final open terrace, which forms the Altar of Heaven proper: 

“These would be the first of many stone terraces in Noguchi’s wandering life whose 

symbolism engraved itself in his visual memory and emerged, eventually, in his own 

terrace inventions,” she commented. “The square and the circle—figures that had 

taken on aesthetic values specific to the modern movement in the Paris Noguchi had 

just left—were now perceived in their most ancient splendor.”14

The second important event was his learning experience with the Chinese painting 

master Qi Baishi, then 70 years old. It was said that Noguchi concentrated on flowerand-bird painting at a neophyte’s level. But he did more: he sensitively and successfully 

grasped the temporal sensibility of these works, by which I mean, for example, the qual-
Artistic Tropes 197

ity and rhythm of lines made with ink and water and the way they offer a strong sense 

of time; this aided his pursuit of abstract art in both sculpture and design.15

It should be said that China’s influence on Noguchi did not take the form of mimesis in his later works, but instead was synthesized and modified into something new that 

demonstrated the artist’s superb capacity for absorbing and transforming foreign art.

The emulation of Chinese painting and aesthetics by Philip Guston (1913–

1980) presents a similar case. As an Abstract Expressionist, Guston offered a pertinent and brilliant analysis of Chinese Song Dynasty painting, which makes one 

speculate that the artist must have had a long history of viewing the best Chinese 

paintings, or that there were some cognoscenti guiding him in secret in the appreciation of Song dynasty painting. He commented, for example:

I think in my studies and broodings about the art of the past my greatest 

ideal is Chinese painting, especially Sung painting dating from about 

the 10th or 11th century. Sung period training involves doing something 

thousands and thousands of times—bamboo shoots and birds—until 

someone else does it, not you, and the rhythm moves through you. I think 

that is what the Zen Buddhists called satori and I have had it happen to 

me. It is a double activity, when you know and don’t know.”16

It remains an intriguing question as to how Guston could have developed so refined 

and incisive a sensibility for Chinese painting. But, more significantly, no matter how he 

approached Chinese art, Guston aspired to express boundless and playful elaborations 

in his work based on his own understanding of the specific influence, rather than to take 

direct nourishment from Chinese culture such as Song painting and the poetry of Li 

Bai.17 In so doing, his abstract expressionist works became more bewitching.

Indeed, the influence of Chinese artists’ on their American counterparts is an 

intriguing arena of study.

Wyeth in China

Now let us turn to the influence of American art upon Chinese artists. Perhaps 

there is no more convincing case than the art of Andrew Wyeth.

On 31 January 2009, the sixth day of the Chinese Spring Festival, the most important and cheerful holiday of the year, the only art weekly in China, meishu bao, broke with 

convention and reported the sad news that Andrew Wyeth had passed away two weeks 

before. “His works,” the reporter noted, “can be said to have influenced our seventies 

to eighties of the last century and even today’s China.” Chinese oil painter Yang Feiyun 

put it this way: “I guess, many Chinese painters would feel much sadder than those in 

the West about the death of Wyeth.”18
198 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Indeed, the art of 

Andrew Wyeth (1917–

2009) resonated with 

Chinese artists after the 

Cultural Revolution and 

blew a kind of Wyethiana 

across China. During 

the 1980s and 1990s in 

China, Wyeth was considered one of the most 

famous foreign painters, 

akin to Courbet, Delacroix, and van Gogh. 

During this period, his work was often denigrated by American critics, who had come 

over recent decades to prefer abstract, pop, minimal, conceptual, and identity art.

The reasons why Wyeth became such an influential figure for a group of Chinese oil 

painters in the 1980s are not complicated to list. Obviously, the top reason was that after 

the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, a more and more powerful artistic trend 

emerged—sentimental realism—which led to the production of an important part of the 

so-called Trauma Art. The brave transition from the Cultural Revolution art to the realistic spirit with humanistic concerns resulted in some very touching artwork. Since the 

depressing, 10-year-long Cultural Revolution had recently concluded, however, the critical 

inclination in art had to be mild, indirect, and suggestive. As soon as some Chinese artists 

saw Andrew Wyeth’s work—certainly only photographic reproductions were available back 

then—they were overwhelmed. It resonated powerfully with their experiences and feelings. 

No doubt, the solemn but at the same time sentimental mood, the lonely figures and 

isolated scenes depicted in Wyeth’s works seemed the perfect models for Chinese artists 

to follow. In particular, Christina’s World (Figure 3) proved to be a fascinating example. The 

individual loneliness, sentiment, and hope emphasized in this painting looked strikingly 

real and moving to the eyes of Chinese painters, who had been confined so long to the false 

passion of the Cultural Revolution. To be closer to Andrew Wyeth’s world amounted to a 

rebellion against the Red-Bright-Shining style that had prevailed then.

Perhaps the most brilliant response was Spring Wind Has Been Awakened (Figure 4) created 

by He Duoling (b. 1948), then a young student at Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in Chongqing. The artist took three months to finish this work, not only bringing out his mature style 

for the first time but also contributing a landmark work to the history of Chinese oil painting after the Cultural Revolution. The painting looks like the typical Wyethian world: early 

spring, a young girl, shabbily clothed, sitting on the river bank with withered grass planted 

3. Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World, 1948. Tempera on gessoed panel, 

32 1

⁄4 × 47 3⁄4 in. Museum of Modern Art, New York, Purchase © Andrew Wyeth. 

Photo © Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.
Artistic Tropes 199

all over. She gazes into the far distance perplexedly but affectionately, and the spring breeze 

blows her black hair. There is also Wyethian pathos and promise: the severe winter is over and 

new life is coming, like the spring breeze blowing over wilderness and the plain now turning 

green. He Duoling talked about Wyeth’s influence on a few occasions, saying that he loved 

this sentimental American realist for the latter’s cool meditation and lonely but enchanting 

horizon. In a November 2001 interview with a journalist in Shanghai, he said:

Spring Wind Has Been Awakened was my MA graduation work. 

My supervisor . . . was not in favor of it, so I painted it in secret. Because 

within the painting there were no plot and narration. . . . I sneaked off 

to leave for Chengdu and painted secretly. I imitated the way that Wyeth 

painted, as blades of grass were painted one by one. This seemed a departure from the traditional realist techniques. They said my work was a 

marked failure. Later, I submitted it to an exhibition in Beijing and it was 

rejected as they said the mood embodied in the painting was rather subdued, 

and the girl’s facial expression looked rather melancholy.19 

Despite its initial rejection, however, the painting was soon published on the front 

cover of Fine Art, meishu, the leading art journal in China, and a year later was accepted into France’s Spring Salon. He Duoling said he felt that “[his] paintings 

4. He Duoling, Spring Wind Has Been Awakened, 1982. Oil on canvas, 37 2⁄5 × 50 4⁄5 in. National Art 

Museum of China, Beijing.
200 East–West Interchanges in American Art

were awakened after the 

painting, Spring Wind Has 

Been Awakened,” and he 

painted more lyrical and 

highly acclaimed works 

such as Youth (Figure 5), 

Snow Goose, and A House 

with a Loft.

20

He Duoling visited 

the United States in 1985. 

After viewing He Duoling’s exhibition in Boston, 

a visitor recommended to 

him a book of poetry by 

Robinson Jeffers that was illustrated with desolate and lonely scenes shot by Edward 

Weston and Ansel Adams.21 This book offered another angle for He Duoling to experience some of the sentiments he found in Wyeth’s paintings. He sighed: “[T]he best 

oil painters are still those foreigners and I think that so far there is no single master in 

China, not at all.”22 In 1997 in his preface to the Album of He Duolin, Contemporary Chinese 

Art Collection (volume 4), he also wrote quite suggestively: “[M]y canvas is almost always 

having (or keeping) no more than one figure”—a Wyethian parallel. But when he finally 

visited Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 

1985, examining Wyeth’s distinctive tempera strokes, He Duolin was able to see more 

clearly some of the differences between this American master and himself.23

Other talented Chinese painters such as Ai Xuan and Wang Yidong were also 

deeply interested in the poetic melancholy of Andrew Wyeth, and their painting 

depicted ordinary people of merit and dignity, contributing masterpieces to the 

evolving history of contemporary Chinese art. 

Ai Xuan (b. 1947), famous for portraying Tibetan people, learned of Andrew Wyeth 

from another painter, Chen Yifei, in 1981, and in 1988 had an opportunity to meet 

Wyeth. It seemed that the American artist had been impressed with a display of Ai’s 

paintings he saw at Hefner Galleries in New York. Wyeth’s son, James, also a painter, 

contacted Ai, then a one-year visiting scholar at Oklahoma City University, and invited 

him to visit his father at the Brandywine River Museum (Figure 6). At their meeting, 

Andrew Wyeth discussed Ai’s works with his Chinese admirer and other visitors. Ai 

was presented with two Wyeth exhibition catalogues, which Andrew and James Wyeth 

signed. Andrew Wyeth wrote: “To Ai Xuan: Warmest greeting from his American friend” 

on one and, more impressively, on the other: “To Ai Xuan: With highest regard to 

5. He Duoling, Youth, 1984. Oil on canvas, 59 1⁄16 × 73 1⁄4 in. 

National Art Museum of China, Beijing.
Artistic Tropes 201

your paintings.”24 As Ai recalled later 

after returning home in Beijing, Andrew Wyeth also encouraged him by 

telling him: “Now there are so many 

artists in America [who] rely on photographs when painting, but you are 

different from them, as you control 

photographs with your emotions.”25

Ai, even today, regards Wyeth as 

the greatest artist in the history of 

American art. He believes that Wyeth and his painter friends in China 

share many similar characteristics 

in terms of conveying human feelings, and that he was able to find 

much of what he wanted to say in 

Andrew Wyeth’s paintings. In the 

early 1980s, Ai, still very young, 

was inspired to paint works like the 

influential Shepherd, The Morning Mist 

over Marshes. Later, he combined Wyethian melancholy with his Tibetan 

subject matter and deliberately expressed a kind of poetic touch in Seasonal Wind in Zoige, Fence, Maybe the Sky 

still So Blue, and Cold Rain (Figure 7).

In 2008 the painter Wang 

Yidong (b. 1955) also visited New 

York and made his way to Pennsylvania to pay tribute to Andrew 

Wyeth’s hometown and to view 

his works in museums. In Wang 

Yidong’s oil paintings, Wyethian 

sentiment and scene are almost 

omnipresent.

The significance of the art of Andrew Wyeth lies not only in its realistic painting techniques but also in his aesthetic attitude. He offered Chinese painters artistic strategies for new forms of individual expression and contemplation. He helped 

6. Andrew Wyeth, left, meeting Ai Xuan, right, at Brandywine 

River Museum on 17 February 1988. Photo courtesy Ai Xuan.

7. Ai Xuan, Cold Rain, 1983. Oil on canvas, 

33 7

⁄16 × 23 5⁄8 in. Private collection.
202 East–West Interchanges in American Art

them to newly consider the essentiality of paying attention to one’s mental universe 

and the aesthetic power of conveying the pursuit of one’s soul—rather than secular 

reality. One can certainly say that Wyeth offered a generation of Chinese artists an 

inspiring way of looking at the world and life—something that transcended direct 

stylistic imitation. Those painters, inspired by Wyeth, presented a new vision to 

Chinese audiences, whose experience had been confined to Cultural Revolution art.

In our era, the exchange of artistic languages and the rise of transnational artistic achievements have become a more positive phenomenon, which reminds us 

that references to other cultures and art extend beyond direct imitation to larger 

concerns and should be considered on a global level. The great Indian sage Rabindranath Tagore said: “We must prepare the field for the cooperation of all the 

cultures of the world where all will give and take from others. This is the keynote 

of the coming age.”26 What foresight indeed!

Notes

For the epigraph, see Witter Bynner, The Way of Life: According to Laotzu, An American Version (New 

York: Capricorn Books, 1962), 46.

1. See James Cahill, The Distant Mountains: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Dynasty, 1570–1644

(New York: Weatherhill Inc., 1982), chapter 4.

2. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 

1993), esp. xii–xiv, 19.

3. See Dore Ashton, Noguchi: East and West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 16; and 

Gordon H. Chang, “Emerging from the Shadow: The Visual Arts and Asian American History,” Journal 

of Transnational American Studies 1, no. 1 (2009): ix–xv. Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From 

David to Delacroix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), xvii–xviii, 39, 41.

4. See Zheng Yimei, Yi tan bai ying [A Hundred Images of the Art Arena] (Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou 

Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House, 1982), and David Clarke, “Teng Baiye and Mark Tobey: 

Interactions between Chinese and American Art in Shanghai and Seattle,” Pacific Northwest 

Quarterly 93 (Fall 2002): 171.

5. On the 1930 exhibition, see www.renaissancesociety.org/site/Exhibitions/Works.267.html. The 

artist’s works displayed included Russian General, Landscape, Three Ducks, Lotos, Dragon Head, The 

Ball, Chinese Scholar, Crane, Figure Striding, Vine, and Willows. Teng Kwei, “Art in Modern China,” The 

Open Court (Chicago: December, 1933), reprinted in Bao Mingxin and Wang Ruihua, The Lost Pearl 

in Painting Arena: Teng Baiye Studies [huatan yizhu: tengbaiye yanjiu] (Shanghai: Donghua University 

Press, 2008), 73–104.

6. See Clarke, “Teng Baiye and Mark Tobey,” 171.

7. “Renaissance Society Sponsors Unique Chinese Exhibition,” Hyde Park Herald, 31 October 1930, 4. 

Teng Baiye also participated in the Group Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings by 

American and Foreign Artists, 1929, at the Brooklyn Museum; his lithograph Rocky Landscape

was accepted at the Second International Exhibition of Lithography and Wood Carving at the 

Art Institute of Chicago, from 4 December 1930 to 25 January 1931; and he was one of only 

two Chinese artists attending the exhibition. His Rain on the Yangtse, another lithograph, is in the 

collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

8. Teng Baiye majored in sculpture, though one can no longer view any of his original threedimensional works, as none have survived to the present day. Senior historian Zheng Yimei recalled 

that in 1935 there was a nationwide art competition for the best portrait sculpture of Sun Yat-sen. 

Teng Baiye was listed first among many rivals, including Li Jinfa, Jiang Xiaojian, Wang Linyi, Lang Lu 
Artistic Tropes 203

Sun, Liu Kaiqu, and Liang Zuting—the major Chinese sculptors of the time. See Chen Houcheng, 

Smile at the Lip of Death: Biography of Li Jinfa (Shanghai Literature and Arts Publishing House, 1996), 

150–51.

9. Teng Kwei’s letter addressed to Mark Tobey from Hankou, China, dated July 10, 1938, is in Wesley 

Wehr’s private collection. Its Chinese translation is available at Lion Art [xiongshi meishu], no. 11, 

1991, Taipei.

10. See William C. Seitz, Mark Tobey (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1962), 50–51.

11. Mark Tobey, “Reminiscence and Reverie,” Magazine of Art 44 (October 1951): 230.

12. See Le Monde, 27 April 1976.

13. See, for example, David Clarke, “The All-Over Image: Meaning in Abstract Art,” Journal of 

American Studies 27 (1993): 355–75, esp. 365–71. doi:10.1017/S0021875800032072.

14. Ashton, Noguchi: East and West, 29.

15. Ibid., 28–30, 37, 60, 98, and 234.

16. See Dore Ashton, A Critical Study of Philip Guston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 

185–86.

17. Ibid., 124.

18. “Andrew Wyeth Passed Away,” Art Weekly [meishu bao], 31 January 2009, 4. For Yang Feiyun’s 

quote, see http://art.china.cn/zixun/2009-01/23/content_2703017.htm.

19. See Hui Lan, “Realism in Chinese Oil Painting—Interview with Jin Shangyi, He Duoling, Ai Xuan, 

and Xu Mangyao,” Art Observation, no. 2, 2002.

20. See meishu, no. 12, 1981. Hui Lan, “Realism in Chinese Oil Painting.”

21. Presumably, it is Robinson Jeffers’s Not Man Apart: Photographs of the Big Sur Coast, Sierra Club, 

1965.

22. See Zhou Wenhan, He Duoling, “I Belong to the Misreading Generation,” Beijing News [xin jing 

bao], 3 January 2006.

23. Album of He Duolin, Contemporary Chinese Art Collection, vol. 4 (Mountain Art Museum, 

Gaoxiong, 1997), 7, 16.

24. The catalogues Andrew Wyeth presented, An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art,

(Boston: Little Brown, 1987) and The Art of Andrew Wyeth (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Art 

Society, 1973), are still carefully kept by Ai Xuan.

25. Ai Xuan, What Wyeth Said to Me, http://art.china.cn/mjda/2009-03/09/content_2777141.htm; 

and “Meeting Andrew Wyeth,” Fine Arts in China [zhongguo meishu bao], no. 3, 1989: 1.

26. Quoted in Paul Judson Braisted, Cultural Cooperation: Keynote of the Coming Age (New Haven, 

CT: The Edward W. Hazen Foundation, 1945), 5.
Cultural Translation and 

Creative Misunderstanding 

in the Art of Wenda Gu

David Cateforis
205

One of the major Chinese-born avant-garde artists of his generation, Wenda 

Gu (b. Shanghai, 1955) began his career as part of the ’85 Movement in 

China, relocated to the United States in 1987, and achieved international 

renown in the 1990s.1

 Since the late 1990s Gu has spent increasing amounts 

of time back in China participating in that country’s booming contemporary 

art scene; he now largely divides his time between Brooklyn and Shanghai. 

This transnational experience has led Gu to create numerous art works dealing 

with East–West interchange. This paper introduces and briefly analyzes two 

of his recent projects, Forest of Stone Steles—Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry

(1993–2005), and Cultural Transference—A Neon Calligraphy Series (2004–7), 

both of which explore creatively certain problems and paradoxes of attempts 

to translate between Chinese and English languages and cultures.

A full understanding of these projects requires some knowledge of 

the work that first gained Gu international recognition, his united nations

series of installations, begun in 1993.2

 The series consists of a sequence 

of what Gu calls “monuments,” made principally of human hair fashioned into such elements as bricks, carpets, and curtains, and combined to 

create large quasi-architectural installations. Comprising national monuments made from hair collected within a single country and installed 

there, and transnational or “universal” monuments made of hair collected 

from around the world, Gu’s series uses blended human hair to suggest 

the utopian possibility of human unification through biological merger. 

At the same time, many works in the series, such as the iconic united nations—babel of the millennium (Figure 1) feature unreadable scripts based on 

English, Hindi, Arabic, and ancient Chinese seal script, which symbolize 
206 East–West Interchanges in American Art

the reality of linguistic and other 

cultural differences that continue 

to divide humanity.3

The largest pseudo-characters 

in this united nations monument are 

synthesized from elements of ancient Chinese seal script and English letters; they are hybrid characters that evoke the cultural fusion 

brought about by globalization. 

Wenda Gu is fascinated by the ways 

in which globalization, with its emphasis on transnational exchange 

in every sphere of human activity, 

necessitates translation between 

different languages and cultures, 

often resulting in misunderstanding. The artist himself cultivates 

cross-cultural confusion by using both the names Wenda Gu (in the West) and Gu 

Wenda (in Asia), while his imperfect English leads him to commit frequent misspellings and grammatical mistakes. Turning this situation to his advantage, he sees such 

misunderstanding as a positive force, declaring: “Only through the misunderstanding 

can we create the new!”4

 On this basis Gu conceived of an ambitious long-term 

1. Wenda Gu, united nations—babel of the millennium, 

1999. Site-specific installation: human hair, glue, and twine, height: 

75 ft., diameter: 34 ft. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kent and 

Vicky Logan Family Gift. Photo courtesy Wenda Gu.

2. Wenda Gu, Forest of Stone Steles—Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry, 1993–2005. Installation view, OCT 

Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, China, November 2005. Photo by Ye Niu, courtesy Wenda Gu.
Cultural Translation and Creative Misunderstanding in the Art of Wenda Gu 207

project paralleling the united nations

series: Forest of Stone Steles—Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry (Figure 

2), which employs a process he calls 

“Complex Chinese-English Translation” to create new “post-Tang” poems in Chinese and English out of 

the Tang originals and their English 

translations.5

In contrast to the united nations

series, which seeks to transcend cultural specificity, and even the notion 

of biological difference as a marker 

of culture, as it aims at universal inclusiveness, the Forest of Stone Steles series is deeply rooted in Chinese cultural traditions, which it creatively 

transforms. Inspired by the famous 

Forest of Stone Steles Museum in 

Xi’an, which displays thousands of 

steles spanning Chinese history, 

Gu’s work comprises 50 handcarved and engraved slate steles, each weighing 1.3 tons, and 2,500 ink rubbings made 

from their surfaces. After several years of planning, a team of expert craftsmen under 

Gu’s employ in Xi’an produced the steles and rubbings through traditional methods 

beginning in 2000. The completed series was displayed in November 2005 in a grand 

installation at the OCT-Contemporary Art Terminal in Shenzhen.6

Whereas traditional steles stand upright, Gu’s are horizontal, evoking the toppling 

of tradition and referencing death through their resemblance to tomb slabs.7

 Historical 

steles typically bore engraved epitaphs, imperial or official inscriptions, historical records, 

philosophical or literary texts, or examples of the writing of famous calligraphers. Departing 

from such precedents to introduce an alternation between languages, each of Gu’s steles and 

rubbings presents a series of poetic texts in Chinese and English that switch between vertical 

and horizontal formats to signal the alternation between cultures. 

To help the reader follow the description of the stele layout, I reproduce here 

both the word-processed starting point (Figure 3), which presents all of the texts 

horizontally, and the rubbing of the corresponding finished stele (Figure 4), which 

presents the texts in alternating vertical and horizontal orientation. The first text is 

3. Wenda Gu, Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poem 

No. 2. Reproduced from Translating Visuality—Wenda Gu: Forest of 

Stone Steles, Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry (Shenzhen, 

China: OCT-Contemporary Art Terminal of He Xiangning Art 

Museum, 2005), 124. Photo by Ye Niu.
208 East–West Interchanges in American Art

a classic Tang dynasty poem in its original Chinese form, presented in a vertical 

column at the upper right, based on a 

viewing position from the bottom, short 

end of the stele. Characters in Gu’s own 

calligraphy introduce the poem, which is 

engraved in characters that emulate the 

printed Fang Song typeface. The second 

text, presented horizontally in engraved 

Times New Roman typeface, is an English translation of the Tang poem by the 

American poet Witter Bynner, from his 

1929 collection The Jade Mountain. The 

third text, presented vertically in large 

characters in Gu’s distinctive calligraphy in the stele’s center, is Gu’s retranslation of Bynner’s English back 

into Chinese on the basis of sound 

rather than meaning: it is a transliteration rendered through Chinese characters whose Mandarin pronunciation 

approximates the sounds of Bynner’s 

English.8

 The result is a bizarre surrealist text that Gu calls a “post-Tang” 

poem. The fourth text is Gu’s retranslation of the post-Tang Chinese poem into 

English on the basis of meaning, which makes the absurdity accessible to English 

readers. It is again presented horizontally and engraved in Times New Roman typeface. The fifth text, vertically engraved in the Fang Song typeface (found only on 

the stele and not in the word-processed version), is a Chinese “footnote” explaining 

Gu’s unique translation process.

The alternation in the steles between Chinese and English texts and between 

vertical and horizontal textual formats reflects the artist’s transnational experience 

of moving back and forth frequently between the United States and China. So too 

does Gu’s “Complex Chinese-English Translation” process, which uses the transliteration of English into Chinese to create new meanings. This method springs 

from the common transliteration of Western brand names into Mandarin through 

the use of characters whose pronunciation mimics the sounds of the Western language. Mandarin being rich in homophones, there exist numerous possibilities for 

4. Wenda Gu, Forest of Stone Steles—Retranslation 

and Rewriting of Tang Poetry, No. 2, ca. 2001. Ink rubbing on rice 

paper, 71 × 38 in. Reproduced from Translating Visuality—Wenda 

Gu: Forest of Stone Steles, Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang 

Poetry (Shenzhen, China: OCT-Contemporary Art Terminal of He 

Xiangning Art Museum, 2005), 125. Photo by Ye Niu.
Cultural Translation and Creative Misunderstanding in the Art of Wenda Gu 209

transliterating the same Western word through entirely different characters. This 

can produce a nonsensical string of characters used simply for their sound, as in 

麦当劳 mai dang lao for McDonald’s, which means “wheat should toil.” Careful 

transliteration can sometimes create a wonderfully appropriate new meaning in the 

target language, however; Coca Cola, for instance, is transliterated as 可口可乐 ke 

kou ke le, meaning “soothes the mouth and brings joy to the drinker.”9

Gu’s use of the process in the Forest of Stone Steles is closer to the first example in 

its creation of absurdity, essentially mocking serious attempts to translate poetry 

such as Bynner’s. This can be seen by following the sequence of texts devised by Gu 

for stele no. 2 (Figure 3). Following the original Chinese, the second text is Bynner’s translation of Li Bai’s poem “In the Quiet Night.” This is followed by Gu’s 

transliteration of Bynner’s words into Mandarin, here given in pinyin, the current 

standard romanization system for modern Chinese: 

sou bu lai tu, e ge li ling, ang ze fu de a fy mai bai de, ku de zei er, 

hai fu bing e,

fu luo si da re di. le fu ting mai se fu, tu lu ke ai fang de, za da wa shi 

meng lei ti,

xing ke yin bai ke e gan, ai shao sha, deng li ao fu hong.10

Read aloud in Mandarin, these sounds mimic those of Bynner’s English words but 

make little sense in Chinese. The final text is Gu’s free translation of the nonsensical Chinese “post-Tang” poem back into English.

The laughter provoked by the post-Tang poem is fitting: Gu’s work is basically a 

form of creative play. Philosophically, it seeks to demonstrate that while meaning can 

be translated, culture (such as a poem) cannot; the attempt to translate culture always 

results in misunderstanding, and often in absurdity, which is nevertheless creative in 

its own right. In other words, translation engenders creative transformation.

The steles also display Gu’s creativity as a calligrapher in their central columns of engraved characters, evoking the traditional carving of master calligraphy 

in stone to preserve it for posterity. Analysis of the distinctive features of Gu’s 

calligraphy is beyond the scope of this paper; I will simply note that his style incorporates elements of ancient script styles (seal and clerical script) which give it 

a bold, archaic flavor. The use of the steles to produce ink rubbings, traditionally 

meant to reproduce and disseminate prized calligraphy, reinforces the connection 

of Gu’s writing to that of honored calligraphers of the past.11 Through these references Gu presents his own calligraphy as worthy of preservation, admiration, and 

perhaps even induction into the canon of great Chinese calligraphy. But the absurd 
210 East–West Interchanges in American Art

content of the writing itself defends Gu against charges of hubris; he can claim that 

he is only kidding and that the impressive historicizing presentation of his writing 

is only meant to throw its literary lightness into relief.

Around the time he was completing his Forest of Stone Steles, Gu embarked on a 

complementary project that he came to call Cultural Transference—A Neon Calligraphy 

Series. Reproduced here are two of the five works in that series, subtitled University 

of Pittsburgh (Figure 5) and Sotheby’s (Figure 6).12 In both of them, Gu employs the 

same creative process of “Complex English-Chinese Translation” he developed for 

the steles, now taking as verbal starting points the names of a Western institution 

(University of Pittsburgh) and of a corporation (Sotheby’s), written in small yellow 

roman neon letters in the top register. Both signs present in their center register large 

outlined red neon characters in Gu’s own calligraphy that transliterate the sounds of 

the Western names into Mandarin Chinese. In the bottom register, we find new English poems that Gu created by translating the Chinese back into English. “University 

of Pittsburgh” becomes “shinny [sic] neon flows on colourful silk green china treasure 

pavilion” and “Sotheby’s” becomes “simple thoughts green temple.”

These neons take a very different verbal starting point than do the steles—a modern institutional or commercial name rather than a classic Tang poem, which through 

Gu’s translation process yields much shorter new Chinese and English texts that can 

be consumed quickly. And these texts are rendered in a very different medium: colorful 

glowing neon rather than somber engraved steles and ink rubbings. These features connect the Neon Calligraphy series to the modern urban commercial environment rather than 

the classical Chinese past—to the bustling street with its punchy advertising language 

rather than the hushed museum or library.13 Gu intends his neons to translate “the 

5. Wenda Gu, Cultural Transference—A Neon Calligraphy Series: University of Pittsburgh (The Poem of the 

University of Pittsburgh), 2004. Neon, plexiglass, transformers, 2 ft. × 13 ft. 6 in. University Art Gallery, University of 

Pittsburgh. Photo courtesy Main Art Gallery, California State University, Fullerton.

6. Wenda Gu, Cultural Transference—A Neon Calligraphy Series: Sotheby’s, 2005. Neon, 

plexiglass, transformers, 5 ft. × 16 ft. 5 in. Collection of the artist. Photo courtesy Wenda Gu.
Cultural Translation and Creative Misunderstanding in the Art of Wenda Gu 211

ancient treasure of calligraphy” into a glamorous contemporary medium.14 He seeks 

thus to rejuvenate an art long central to Chinese culture that in Gu’s view has lost much 

of its popularity, especially among the young. Appropriating a commercial medium for a 

cultural purpose, Gu’s neons advertise calligraphy (his own calligraphy) as an art form, 

investing it with a level of importance similar to that claimed for it in different terms by 

the engraved steles and ink rubbings.

Gu exercised considerable ingenuity in creating the Sotheby’s neon, which he made 

independent of any commission, during the buildup to Sotheby’s first-ever New York 

auction of contemporary Chinese art in March 2006.15 He broke the company’s name 

down into the fragments presented on four separate plexiglass-backed panels: so/the/

by’/s; transliterated these as 素思碧寺 su si bi si; and then translated the characters as 

“simple thoughts green temple.”16 The neon presents these elements in horizontal rows, 

while a fifth panel at the right bears a vertical line of characters and a seal serving as Gu’s 

signature.17 In its medium and format, Gu’s neon strongly resembles a commercial sign 

of the sort commonly seen in a Chinese street—a sign including English alongside Chinese as a way of attracting English-speaking customers. The concluding large character 

(寺) of Gu’s neon highlights the similarity of its layout to a Buddhist temple sign.18

Consistent with the commercial connotations of its medium, Gu’s neon also resembles 

a shop sign, or the four-character signs posted on the lintels of Chinese homes to invoke 

such benefits as happiness, longevity, or prosperity.19

Gu’s English translation of the central Chinese is straightforward save for its rendition of bi as “green” rather than its standard definition as “green jade.” Significantly, 

unlike the nonsensical “post-Tang” poetry in the Forest of Stone Steles, the English verse at 

the base of the neon demonstrates genuine poetic accomplishment. “Simple thoughts 

green temple” features a pleasingly simple grammatical structure—adjective, noun, adjective, noun—with a symmetrical arrangement of syllables in its four words (two, one, 

one, two) and approximate rhyme between the opening and closing ones (“simple,” 

“temple”), creating an overall effect of symmetry, harmony, and enclosure. All of this 

is aptly associated with the idea of a temple (Chinese and Western temples often being 

symmetrical in design). “Simple thoughts” suggests a meditative mental state, appropriate for a temple, while “green” generates associations with spring, new life, environmentalism, and the color’s supposed calming psychological effect, resonant with the 

idea of a temple. But Gu says he chose green for its American association with cash.20

He may even have used the character bi for green because it is a Mandarin homophone of 

币 bi, meaning “money.”21 For Gu, “green temple” means “money temple,” which skews 

“simple thoughts” toward a simple focus on profit, which is the raison d’être of Sotheby’s. 

Yet the placid and contemplative quality of Gu’s verse is antithetical to the financial 

frenzy of the overheated mid-decade art market stoked by Sotheby’s auctions, allowing 
212 East–West Interchanges in American Art

us to read an ironic divergence between the values of Sotheby’s and the new Chinese and 

English poems Gu discovers in its name through cultural transference.

These complementary projects by Wenda Gu, Forest of Stone Steles—Retranslation and 

Rewriting of Tang Poetry, and Cultural Transference—A Neon Calligraphy Series, offer rich aesthetic 

and intellectual rewards. The first strongly references and playfully reworks classical 

Chinese cultural elements (poetry, steles, calligraphy) in dark and weighty engraved 

stone slabs and austerely beautiful black-and-white ink rubbings. The second, while also 

glorifying the Chinese tradition of calligraphy, draws its inspiration from contemporary 

advertising and commercial signage, its electrified neon tubes glowing with alluring light 

and color. Uniting the projects is their shared conceptual basis and use of the Complex 

Chinese–English Translation process to harness East–West “misunderstanding” as a force 

for new creation with its own cultural value and resonance—Wenda Gu’s signature artistic 

contribution to the long and tumultuous relationship this book addresses.

Notes

1. The essential literature on Wenda Gu includes Mark H. C. Bessire, ed., Wenda Gu: Art from Middle Kingdom 

to Biological Millennium (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Yan Zhou, “The Centrality of Culture in Art: 

The Contemporary Challenge to Chinese Artists, Particularly Wenda Gu” (Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State 

University, 2005); and Wenda Gu at Dartmouth: The Art of Installation (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 

Dartmouth College in association with University Press of New England, 2008).

2. For a survey and analysis of the united nations series, see David Cateforis, “‘The Work Is Not 

Finished’: Wenda Gu’s united nations Series and the Dartmouth Monuments,” in Wenda Gu at 

Dartmouth, 63–85. See also Gu’s “thesis” on the united nations project, “face the new millennium: 

the divine comedy of our times,” in Bessire, Wenda Gu, 30–41.

3. Gu also sees these unreadable scripts in philosophical terms inspired by his reading of Ludwig 

Wittgenstein. “In general,” he writes, “the miswritten language symbolizes ‘misunderstanding’ as the 

essence of our knowledge concerning the universe and the material world. Yet, the pseudo-scripts 

help us reach infinity and eternity by imagining the universe which is out of the reach of human 

knowledge (language).” Gu, “face the new millennium,” 39.

4. Wenda Gu, “Forest of Stone Steles—Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry, 1993–2005,” in 

Translating Visuality—Wenda Gu: Forest of Stone Steles, Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry

(Shenzhen, China: OCT-Contemporary Art Terminal of He Xiangning Art Museum, 2005), 288.

5. On this series, see the various essays in Translating Visuality, including Gu’s essay on 286–92, 

and my essay, “Translation as Transformation: Wenda Gu’s Forest of Stone Steles: Retranslation and 

Rewriting of Tang Poetry,” 311–21.

6. Before the 2005 exhibition of the completed series, smaller groupings of steles and rubbings 

were displayed at other venues in Australia and the United States between 2001 and 2004. 

After the Shenzhen showing, 12 steles and corresponding rubbings were shown at the Herbert F. 

Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, in early 2007. For reviews of the Shenzhen and Cornell 

exhibitions, respectively, see Richard Vine, “Lost in Translation,” Art in America 94, no. 5 (May 2006): 

166–70, 200; and William V. Ganis, “Ithaca, New York: Wenda Gu, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of 

Art,” Sculpture 27, no. 5 (June 2008): 73–74.

7. For an illustration of ancient Chinese tomb slabs bearing epitaphs, see Translating Visuality, fig. 9, 43.

8. I specify Mandarin because while all literate Chinese read the same language (hanyu, meaning 

the languages of the Han Chinese, all of which use hanzi as the written script), they speak it in 

several different dialects, of which Mandarin, the official language of the People’s Republic of China, 

is the dominant one. Speakers of different dialects will typically pronounce the same character 

differently even though its written form is the same.
Cultural Translation and Creative Misunderstanding in the Art of Wenda Gu 213

9. This translation, one of several possible ones, is from Raymond Chang and Margaret Scrogin 

Chang, Speaking of Chinese: A Cultural History of the Chinese Language, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. 

Norton, 2001), 39.

10. I am grateful to Janet Chen for this translation of Gu’s Chinese characters into pinyin.

11. So, too, does Gu’s recent modification and gathering together of his rubbings into exquisitely 

crafted books, based on the tradition of the model book, commissioned by emperors from the 

Northern Song dynasty forward to preserve and disseminate historic inscriptions and artistically 

significant calligraphy; see Allen Hockley, “Past and Present in Wenda Gu’s Forest of Stone Steles: 

Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Dynasty Poetry,” in Wenda Gu at Dartmouth, 87–95.

12. For a detailed analysis of the entire series, see David Cateforis, “Calligraphy, Poetry, and Paradoxical 

Power in Wenda Gu’s Neon Calligraphy Series,” Word & Image 26, no. 1 (January-March 2010): 1–20.

13. While Gu’s neon works were inspired by Chinese urban street signs, they may also be 

considered within the context of avant-garde neon art that emerged in the West in the 1960s, 

when artists such as Chryssa, Keith Sonnier, and Stephen Antonakos adopted the medium for 

linear geometric and minimalist abstractions, while others such as Joseph Kosuth, Bruce Nauman, 

and Mario Merz employed neon-lettered words and numbers in the arena of conceptual art. More 

recently, younger Western avant-garde artists have embraced neon as a medium for writing, among 

them Tracey Emin, who has replicated in neon her own handwritten pronouncements (e.g., I Kiss 

You, 2006), paralleling Gu’s use of neon to translate his own calligraphy.

14. Gu quoted in Josienne N. Piller, “A Conversation with Wenda Gu,” in Josienne N. Piller, ed., Out 

of Time, Out of Place, Out of China: Reinventing Chinese Tradition in a New Century (Pittsburgh: 

University Art Gallery, University of Pittsburgh, 2004), 9. Elsewhere, Gu says calligraphy is “just 

like Chinese opera. A lot of young people cannot really appreciate it and are not interested in it. 

My work kind of elevates scholarly calligraphy into a modern society, and it becomes a popular 

medium.” Gu, statement in Han Zi Reinvented: The Rhythm of Chinese Script (Fullerton: Main Art 

Gallery, California State University, 2006), 21.

15. On this auction, see Carol Vogel, “Sotheby’s Bets a Windfall for Today’s Chinese Art,” New York 

Times, 29 March 2006, and Carol Vogel, “China: The New Contemporary-Art Frontier,” New York 

Times, 1 April 2006. See also Allen T. Cheng, “Art Rush Gains Steam in China: New Money Chases 

Contemporary Works in Booming Market,” International Herald Tribune, 18 June 2006.

16. Because Gu has broken down the name Sotheby’s into fragments that comprise actual English 

words (“so,” “the,” and “by”) and because of the relationship of these words to those below them on 

each panel, it is possible to read the English in this neon vertically, panel by panel (essentially ignoring 

the Chinese characters in the middle), to yield “so simple the thoughts by greens temple.” This is a 

result Gu did not intend, demonstrating the degree to which his verbal art, like all poetry—and any 

cultural text for that matter—opens itself up to creative response by the reader. I am grateful to 

Elizabeth Schultz for pointing out to me this possible reading of Gu’s work.

17. The Chinese characters (谷氏楷典) may be translated as “Mr. Gu’s canon of regular script”—a 

reference to Gu’s distinctive style of calligraphy, which the artwork advertises (as do all of Gu’s neons). 

Readers of Chinese will note that the third neon character in the column, 楷 kai, meaning “regular or 

model (script),” has been creatively refashioned by moving the left, “tree,” radical to the top according 

to a process Gu developed for the Forest of Stone Steles, briefly explained in his essay, “Forest of Stone 

Steles,” 291. For further analysis see Cateforis, “Calligraphy, Poetry, and Paradoxical Power.”

18. I thank Rachel Voorhies for this observation.

19. For examples see Shi Bo, Between Heaven and Earth: A History of Chinese Writing, trans. Sherab 

Chödzin Kohn (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2003), 98–99. 

20. Wenda Gu, personal communication with the author, Ithaca, NY, 3 March 2007. Gu intended 

the same reference through his use of the word in the title of his recent installation at Dartmouth 

College, united nations—the green house (2007), meant to highlight the cost of higher education in 

the United States and the connections between elite colleges and universities and big business. See 

Cateforis, “‘The Work Is Not Finished,’” 79.

21. I am grateful to John James Kennedy and Hong Chun Zhang for this observation.

Curating Asia / America
Stories of the Beautiful

Narratives of East–West Interchange at the Freer Gallery 

of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

Lee Glazer
217

Complex networks of East–West interchange and cross-cultural encounters—what Cynthia Mills, in her introduction to this volume, describes as 

“dynamic international relationships”—have played a defining role in the 

formation and development of the Smithsonian Institution’s art museums 

generally, but perhaps most especially at the Freer Gallery of Art where, as 

the marketing department once proclaimed, “America meets Asia.”1

When the Freer, the first art museum of the Smithsonian, opened to the 

public in 1923, it was also one of the first American museums to exhibit 

Asian objects in an aesthetic rather than ethnographic context, juxtaposing them with a select group of contemporary American paintings. As the 

historian Steven Conn has noted, the Freer posited “a fundamental aesthetic connection” between past and present, East and West that was based 

on a cosmopolitan ideal of “sameness, commonality, and especially cultural 

cross-fertilization.”2

Indeed, when the museum’s founder, Detroit industrialist Charles 

Lang Freer, offered his collection of Asian antiquities and American 

art of the Aesthetic Movement to the nation in 1904, he explained to 

Smithsonian Secretary Samuel P. Langley that in spite of their diversity, 

his artistic holdings were part of an interconnected series constituting a 

harmonious aesthetic totality. Like James McNeill Whistler, the expatriate American who encouraged Freer’s interest in the arts of Asia, Freer 

believed that the aesthetic harmonies he discerned among the objects 

in his collection were evidence of a transcendent, timeless, and universally valid “story of the beautiful.” Riffing on Whistler’s conclusion to 

the “Ten O’Clock” lecture that “the story of the beautiful is already 
218 East–West Interchanges in American Art

complete—hewn in the marbles of the Parthenon—and broidered, with the 

birds, upon the fan of Hokusai,” Freer told Langley, “My great desire has been 

to unite modern work with masterpieces of certain periods of high civilization 

harmonious in spiritual suggestion, having the power to broaden aesthetic culture and the grace to elevate the human mind.”3

Because he thought his collection was best understood and appreciated as a 

totality, Freer placed a number of restrictions on his bequest, including prohibiting 

future additions to his American holdings. Recognizing that many new discoveries 

were still to be made in the field of Asian art and archaeology, however, Freer added 

a codicil to his will allowing for the occasional acquisition of “very fine examples 

of Oriental, Egyptian and Near Eastern fine arts.”4

 As a result of the tremendous 

growth of the Freer’s Asian collections over the years and with the opening of the 

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in 1987 (to which the Freer is joined architecturally, 

through an underground gallery space, and administratively, through a shared staff), 

the Freer’s focus has shifted away from its founder’s emphasis on transhistorical 

aesthetic commonalities. Despite some significant differences between the Freer 

Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in terms of their respective collections 

and visitor experiences, the two museums are now known, in the shorthand of institutional branding, as “the Smithsonian’s museums of Asian art.” Collections and 

staff are mostly organized around geographical and cultural areas—China, Japan, 

Korea, India and the Himalayas, Southeast Asia, the Islamic world, the ancient Near 

East, America—underscoring cultural differences as well as aesthetic distinctions. 

Successive generations of curators have contributed to richly documented accounts 

of the Freer’s masterpieces and the institution’s history and have organized important exhibitions encompassing a wide range of Asian geography and art history. A 

survey of those accomplishments is beyond the scope of this essay; the interested 

reader can consult the museum website at www.asia.si.edu to search collections online, learn about past exhibitions and publications, and explore the finding aids for 

archival and bibliographic materials. 

Rather than attempting a comprehensive consideration of resources at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, then, this essay will describe and 

comment on a small selection of materials related to the idea of cosmopolitanism 

on which the Freer Gallery of Art was founded. The intention is to situate Freer’s 

collecting narrative within a more specific context of cross-cultural import-export. 

These more complicated narratives are not necessarily linear and certainly not teleological; they are meant to be understood as sketches, cross-cultural vignettes 

that might be useful and thought-provoking to teachers, students, and scholars on 

both sides of the Pacific.
Stories of the Beautiful 219

“Mr. Whistler Does Unite the Art”

Freer’s transformation from capitalist to connoisseur can be dated to 1887, 

the year he bought a set of Whistler etchings—his first works by the artist—from 

Frederick Keppel in New York City. That same year he purchased a small Japanese fan from Takayangi To-zo-, a Japanese art dealer with a shop on Fifth Avenue. 

In 1892 he returned to To-zo-’s establishment and bought his first Asian ceramic, 

an Edo-period Satsuma water jar whose underglaze design, inspired by Chinese 

ink painting, reminded Freer of a Whistlerian landscape.5

 “Collecting comes to 

mean collecting precisely when a series of haphazard purchases or gifts suddenly 

become a meaningful sequence,” Mieke Bal has noted.6 Freer established a master 

narrative—one based on East–West correspondences—early in his collecting career, and Whistler was clearly destined to be the hero of the story. Following their 

first meeting in London in 1890, the two men developed a close relationship based 

on mutual esteem and benefit. Whistler not only facilitated Freer’s acquisition of “a 

fine collection of Whistlers!!—perhaps The collection,” as he promised his patron 

in 1899, he also encouraged Freer’s burgeoning interest in comparative collecting, 

urging him to travel East and seek out rare specimens of Asian art to complement 

his own work. Writing in 1904 to fellow collector John Gellatly (whose contributions to the Smithsonian are discussed by Amelia Goerlitz in this book), Freer 

noted, “Throughout the entire range of Whistler’s art . . . one feels the exercise 

of spiritual influences similar to those of the masters of Chinese and Japanese. Of 

course,” Freer concluded, “Mr. Whistler does unite the art of the Occident with 

that of the Orient.”7

Both in terms of his stylistic influences and subsequent relationship with a prominent collector of Asian art, Whistler is perhaps more closely associated with Asia—or, 

more accurately, with China and Japan—than any other nineteenth-century Western 

painter. Because of the close connection between artist and patron, the Freer’s Whistler holdings are the most comprehensive of any collection in the world: 130 paintings, 946 prints, 174 drawings, and the Peacock Room, as well as a wealth of archival 

and bibliographic materials, including the Paul Marks book collection, which was 

donated to the museum library in 2003.8 Whistler’s artistic debt to Asian sources has 

been thoroughly documented in scholarly literature and museum exhibitions, which 

have established the ways in which the artist first appropriated, and then more fully 

synthesized, motifs and pictorial structures from a variety of Chinese and Japanese 

sources, including porcelain, prints, lacquer, and textiles. This aspect of Whistler’s 

career is well represented in the Freer, most famously, perhaps, in the Peacock Room, 

which Whistler compared to a Japanese lacquer box. It was designed to display Kangxi 

blue-and-white porcelain and Whistler’s own homage to East Asian decorative arts, 
220 East–West Interchanges in American Art

La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine, which features the Anglo-Greek beauty Christina 

Spartali in Japanese robes in an eclectically oriental setting (Figure 1).9

After purchasing the room in 1904 and reassembling it in his Detroit home, 

Freer, who didn’t care for the slick surfaces or bright colors of Kangxi blue-andwhite porcelain, filled its shelves with more than 200 examples of his own collection of Asian ceramics whose textured, tonally subtle glazes harmonized with his 

collection of American tonalist painting. Some of these vessels, from China, Japan, 

Korea, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere, were purchased during Freer’s Asian travels, while 

others were acquired from dealers in New York and Europe. In 1908 he commissioned a photographer to document the room, and those images demonstrate the 

way in which he freely mixed objects from various cultures and cultural epochs, 

more concerned with their chromatic relationship to one another and the decoration of the Peacock Room than with their historical origins (which, in any event, 

were often inaccurately understood, as subsequent reattributions attest). Freer assiduously documented all of his purchases, and his personal papers, particularly 

letters to and from dealers and collectors of Asian and American art, provide a fascinating record of the international art market at the turn of the last century. Later, 

when the Peacock Room was removed from Detroit and reinstalled in the museum 

in Washington, it was located at the southeast corner of the building, creating a 

literal link between the Whistler galleries and those rooms dedicated to the arts of 

1. James McNeill Whistler, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, showing La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine 

(1863–65), 1876–77. Oil paint and gold leaf on canvas, leather, and wood, overall: 166 × 241 1

⁄2 × 404 in. Freer Gallery of Art, 

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of Charles Lang Freer.
Stories of the Beautiful 221

China. Registrarial records, gallery plans, photographs, and diaries document the 

changing array of Asian and American ceramics presided over by Whistler’s Princess 

since 1923. Of special interest are diary entries dated to 7 and 8 December 1941:

Dec. 7. Honolulu attacked by the Japanese. Japan declared war on the 

United States. 

Dec. 8. All Japanese objects removed from Galleries 5, 6, 7, alcove and 

West corridor, and Japanese pottery from Peacock Room.

The entry continues, noting, laconically, that six pieces of Pewabic pottery, made in 

Detroit, and three pieces of Chinese replaced the Japanese ceramics.10 The overt intrusion of political realities has been extraordinarily rare in the documented history 

of the Freer, but these entries certainly suggest that a closer look at the intersection 

of policy, diplomacy, and art may yield new insights and narratives.

In addition to La Princesse, the Freer owns several other oriental costume pictures 

that occupied Whistler in the mid-1860s, among them the very first oil painting by the 

artist that Freer purchased, Arrangement in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony. Described by 

Theodore Child, who saw the work in Paris in 1889, as “a Japanese fancy realized on 

the banks of the gray Thames,” The Balcony borrows freely from Japanese prints, which 

Whistler, who never visited Asia, had begun collecting in Paris, possibly as early as 1856. 

Not coincidentally, Freer began to buy Japanese prints the same year that he acquired 

The Balcony, prompting him to observe “points of contact” between the two.11 Paintings by other Americans in the collection have elicited similar cross-cultural comparisons, both by contemporaries and by subsequent generations of scholars and critics.12

Thomas Dewing compared Before Sunrise, a decorative painting that he created for Freer’s 

parlor, to the work of ukiyo-e artist Kitagawa Utamaro; Freer subsequently displayed 

Japanese prints in the same room, where they could be easily compared with Dewing’s 

work. The Four Sylvan Sounds, a pair of bi-fold screens that may have been used by Freer 

in the Japanese manner, as a room divider, combines a Japanese format, classical figures, 

and synaesthetic theme.13 Dewing himself was also quite literally a point of contact for 

Freer and Japanese art. During the time that he was painting The Four Sylvan Sounds he 

was also acting as his patron’s buying agent for Japanese art at the New York branch 

of Yamanaka: in addition to purchasing a number of woodblock prints for his patron, 

Dewing also helped Freer acquire more than a dozen screens from the dealer.14

Two-Way Correspondences

In spite of the longstanding interest in studying the ways in which nineteenth-century 

Western artists and collectors were influenced by Japanese art, relatively little attention 
222 East–West Interchanges in American Art

has been paid to the two-way flow 

between Whistler and the generation of Japanese artists, critics, and 

collectors who looked west in the 

early years of the twentieth century. 

Japanese scholar Ayako Ono has 

begun to mine the correspondence 

contained in the Freer Papers to 

map the complex networks of exchange that operated among such 

notable figures as Freer, Whistler, 

Ernest Fenollosa, Siegfried Bing, 

Théodore Duret, and Hayashi Tadamasa.15 She has also suggested 

connections between Whistler and 

the modern print movement in 

Japan, a topic that could be supported by a survey of the Sackler’s 

Muller Collection, which contains 

nearly 4,000 modern prints, chiefly 

by Japanese artists but also by Westerners such as Bertha Lum, Helen Hyde, and Charles 

Bartlett, that illuminate artistic and commercial cross-pollination among American, European, and Japanese artists, designers, dealers, and collectors.16

Clearly, this environment of cosmopolitan interchange, mediated by changing economic, technological, and social circumstances as well as aesthetics, was complex and 

constituted not one but many overlapping and interconnected narratives. That kind of 

complexity, however, was generally edited out of the “story of the beautiful” that Freer 

constructed around his collections. Building records and a “Book of Suggestions” compiled by Freer and his assistant Katherine Rhoades (and now in the museum archives) 

provide a literal map for understanding the way in which Freer’s appreciation of Whistler influenced the physical organization of the museum as a monument to cosmopolitan aestheticism. When the Freer first opened, the entire south side of the building was 

devoted to Whistler’s works, with Chinese and Japanese art occupying adjacent galleries 

along the east and west corridors. Less interested in cultural and historical context than 

in aesthetic correspondence, Freer asserted to his friend Charles Moore, “All great works 

of art go together, whatever their period.”17

A pair of photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn, commissioned by Freer in 

1909 and now part of the Freer Papers, represents this idea in concrete visual terms. 

2. Alvin Langdon Coburn, portrait of Charles Lang Freer with 

Whistler’s Venus Rising from the Sea and a Syrian glazed pot, 1909. 

Albumen print. Charles Lang Freer Papers, Freer Gallery of Art and 

Arthur M. Sackler Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
Stories of the Beautiful 223

In the first, Freer crouches on 

the floor, comparing the iridescent glazes of a Rakka pot to the 

subtle tonalities of a Whistler 

nude (Figure 2). In the second, 

he gazes out at the viewer, posing beside two ancient Egyptian 

statuettes and a tiny Whistler 

pastel, a draped figure inspired 

by ancient Greek Tanagra figurines. These images, their multiple cultural references contained 

and unified by the collector’s 

discerning eye, function as a 

form of autobiography and as 

rehearsal for the kind of looking 

that Freer hoped to encourage at 

the Freer Gallery. In the context 

of Freer’s aestheticism, a tonalist seascape by Dwight Tryon, 

for instance, could be understood not only alongside similar works by contemporaries such as Whistler and Thomas Dewing, but in relationship to masterpieces of 

the Kano- school of fifteenth-century Japan and Song dynasty ink painting.18

Other images in the museum archives, however, such as photographs of Freer 

with his international associates—fellow collectors, art dealers, servants—complicate the private narrative of aesthetic vision embodied in Coburn’s work (and 

memorialized in the museum itself) and suggest other ways of understanding the 

collection that Freer developed. Take, for instance, a photograph made in 1907 during Freer’s second trip to Japan (Figure 3). Standing in the first row with Freer are 

his Japanese counterpart Hara Tomitaro- (like Freer a successful businessman and 

noted collector of Japanese art), and Hara’s wife and daughter. The women’s dress 

is as purely Japanese as Freer’s is American. Hara, however, holds a Western hat, 

which was typically the first article of Western clothing adopted by Japanese men 

in the Meiji era. In the second row on the left is Margaret Watson, Freer’s friend 

from Detroit whose collecting interests were shaped, in part, by Freer’s counsel and 

assistance; next to her is the art dealer Nomura Yo-zo-, who had arranged for Freer 

to visit Hara at Sannotani, his country estate near Yokohama. (The photograph 

was taken in front of an ancient temple on the estate grounds).19 Unlike Hara and 

3. Charles Lang Freer in Japan, 1907. Charles Lang Freer 

Papers, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Archives, Smithsonian 

Institution, Washington, DC.
224 East–West Interchanges in American Art

his family, Nomura, who was fluent in English and French, wears Western clothing, 

a form of cross-dressing that visually conveys his ability to move comfortably in 

Western circles.20

Not shown in the picture, but an important Freer connection all the same, 

is Nomura’s wife, Michi. Educated at a Japanese school established by Canadian 

Methodist missionaries and a future officer of the Yokohama YWCA, Michi would 

travel to America the year after Freer’s Japanese tour, spending several days at his 

Detroit mansion as part of a publicity tour around the world organized by the Asahi 

Newspaper Company. A Diary of a Journey around the World, her privately published 

account of the 1908 trip, included a photograph of the Peacock Room, which later 

inspired her husband to commission Yoshida Hiroshi, an artist trained in Western 

techniques, to create a “Crane Room” on the second floor of his art gallery and 

shop in Yokohama. Although the 1908 trip was the subject of a 2008 exhibition in 

Japan, Michi’s journal has never been translated into English.21

Although he had not met Hara before traveling to his estate, Freer explained in 

letters home that the Yokohama collector had invited him for an extended visit “because of my love for and care of Japanese art.”22 As Christine Guth has pointed out, 

Hara was well aware of Freer’s recent bequest to the Smithsonian, and his interest 

in establishing a connection to Freer was prompted not only by common aesthetic 

interests but by diplomatic ones as well: the display of Japanese art in a public museum in Washington might enhance cultural and political relations between the two 

countries.23 The two men could, therefore, approach each other on more or less equal 

terms. With that in mind, it is interesting to return to the archival photograph. On 

the far right, in traditional worker’s clothing, is one of Freer’s jinrikisha drivers. This 

man, alone among the group in remaining unidentified, gazes off to the side, somewhat detached from the others, who, in spite of their differences, are part of an elite 

world community enjoying the privileges of wealth, taste, and mobility.24

Travels to Asia

Indeed, the theme of mobility and travel is another way of probing cosmopolitanism at the turn of the century. Among the most intriguing documents related to 

Freer’s travel in Japan, which he visited four times, are three letters from his first 

visit in 1895 that were written in the traditional Japanese manner, in a scroll format 

with a brush dipped in ink. Based on the content of the letters, Freer seems to have 

adopted the format to evoke the “life of old Japan,” an idealized realm that was also 

already an object of nostalgic desire. “The more closely I follow Japanese customs,” 

he wrote to his business partner Frank Hecker, “. . . the greater my pleasure.” The 

letter continues:
Stories of the Beautiful 225

When a real Jap—(not the half Europeanized cuss.) wants to have a 

good time . . . he hies himself to the country, and the great temples, and 

picturesque little spots in the mountains and along the seashore where he 

always manages to have a gigantic hurrah—Ample opportunities exist 

and everything goes—no not every thing!! seriousness, care for the next 

days [sic] head or the bank acct. are always barred—And this was the 

life of old Japan and this explains their love for the butterfly in their ancient art—Butterflies they themselves would now be if free from foreign 

influence, foreign imitation—a simple, light-hearted, and tremendously 

artistic people—I wonder what they will be a century hence?25 

Writing to Dwight Tryon around the same time, Freer enunciated a similar 

idea, again utilizing the ink, brush, and scroll format. Acknowledging that “the two 

months I have passed in this country have sufficed to shatter some of my old time 

idols,” he nevertheless emphasized that during his time in a “beautiful little house” 

at Ama-no Hashdate, “here is rest—and real Japanese life.” That idyllic experience, 

or at least a memory of it, would ultimately join other “shadowy recollections of 

unknown places, glimpses of faraway coasts and strange horizons” in that “mysterious something which . . . we call the imagination.”26

A letter from Freer’s second trip to Japan in 1907, written in a conventional 

Western format and roughly contemporaneous with the group photograph discussed above, finds him exclaiming over encroaching modernity: “What changes! I 

could not believe my eyes—huge warehouses, immense chimneys, shipyards, iron 

foundries, a mammoth hotel half finished.” Contrasting the present reality to the 

now “shadowy recollections” of the 1895 trip, the letter continues, “Then pure air, 

birds and gentle courteous Japanese. Now, smoke, the roar of machinery and . . . 

crowd. . . . The change sickened me.”27

Freer’s ideas about Asia generally and Japan particularly, are clearly related, as 

Thomas Tweed has noted, to a particular type of spiritual questing, undertaken by 

many privileged Americans at the turn of the century. It is also, more generally, related to strains of antimodernism in American culture that often expressed itself in a 

strangely eclectic mélange of cultural and historical references that were reified in the 

iconography of Orientalist painting as well as in the ostensibly more objective medium of photography. If imperialism and colonialism dominated Western—and especially British—images of South Asia, tourism—and a coextensive desire for escape 

from more pressing realities at home—was the driving force behind much early photographic imagery of East Asia, especially Japan. The museum’s archives are especially 

strong in this area, housing over over 125,000 photographic objects, mostly by Western 
226 East–West Interchanges in American Art

photographers, related to travel, collecting, and studying Asia. It is instructive to see 

them in the context of Freer’s collecting practices and philosophies.

For many wealthy Americans, travel to Asia was the late-nineteenth-century 

equivalent of the Grand Tour, and photography studios became a thriving industry, making and marketing extraordinarily high-quality souvenir prints and albums. 

Albums were especially popular among visitors, both authenticating and mediating 

their actual experiences. Like contemporary painters influenced by Orientalism and 

Japonisme, photographers working in Japan for a Western market were typically 

interested in Asian subjects for their romantic or scientific value. Many of the photographs of Japan from the Henry and Nancy Rosin Collection and the Mrs. Harry 

C. Norcross Collection fall into the former category. The beautifully hand-tinted 

albumen prints, especially images of traditionally dressed young women, capture 

ideal notions of femininity that resurface in countless American paintings of the 

period, including many works in the Freer collection (Figure 4).28

Much of the material discussed here relates mostly to Americans looking east 

and creating narratives about Asian lands and peoples that were useful to their own 

spiritual, intellectual, or economic needs. Yet identity formation through East–West 

interchange was not always controlled by Western expectations and markets. Official 

4. Women Enjoying Tea on a Balcony, ca. 1890–1900. Hand-tinted albumen print. Mrs. Henry C. Norcross Collection of 

Early Photography of Japan, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, 

Washington, DC, Gift of Jean Leslie Norcross.
Stories of the Beautiful 227

portraiture, for instance, is an area represented in the museum archives in which Asian 

subjects seem to have exerted a fair amount of control over their own image. In 1873 

the photographer Uchida Kuichi produced a portrait of the Meiji emperor in the 

uniform, hairstyle, and pose of a Western military leader or aristocrat. The image embodies the Meiji equation of modernity with Western style, presenting the Emperor 

as part of a cosmopolitan array of colonial rulers.

Perhaps the most famous example in the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of photography as a form of self-fashioning is a sequence of glass-plate 

negatives of the Chinese empress dowager, Cixi, by photographer Xuling. Taken around 

1903, in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion, the photographs depict Cixi arrayed in all the 

trappings of imperial power. Borrowing and revising the conventions of Qing portraiture, these images were, as Virginia Anderson demonstrates in her essay, part of a larger 

campaign by the empress dowager to enhance her public image at home and abroad. As 

with the portrait by Hubert Vos, the photographs represent a vibrant collaboration between Cixi and the photographer, who, interestingly, was trained in Western conventions 

of portraiture. The photographs circulated as gifts among the Empress’s own ministers 

and as presentations to foreign dignitaries as part of a personalized campaign in international diplomacy, which spawned yet another intriguing East–West interchange. As David 

5. Xuling, The Empress Dowager Cixi with Foreign Envoys’ Wives in Leshoutang, Summer Palace, Beijing, 1903–1905. 

Glass plate negative. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, 

Washington, DC, Purchase.
228 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Hogge has suggested, one of Cixi’s most willing accomplices in this enterprise was 

Sarah Pike Conger, the wife of an American envoy, whose involvement with the empress 

is recorded in a group photograph (Figure 5). Several years afterward, in 1905, William 

Howard Taft, then serving as secretary of war, embarked on a three-month diplomatic 

tour of Asia, visiting Japan, the Philippines, and China, where Cixi once again forged a 

tie to an American woman. Alice Roosevelt, the flamboyant and lovely daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, was part of the delegation, and her presence insured that the 

trip received significant publicity in America. While in China, Alice was presented with 

a brilliantly tinted photographic portrait of Cixi, delivered to her residence in a eunuchborne litter. A collection of photographs from the Taft mission, including the image of 

Cixi, were recently donated to the museum, where they augmented a 2011 exhibition 

exploring the photographic images of the dowager empress.29

Craig Calhoun has observed that in the wake of neoliberal policies of globalization and the rise of internet-based connectivity, cosmopolitanism is, once again, 

“in fashion.” Indeed, exploring connections across vast distances of time, space, and 

cultural difference can, as Partha Mitter suggests, create dynamic intellectual and 

artistic contact zones in which traditional power relationships and hierarchies are interrogated and, perhaps, creatively subverted. Yet as Mitter and others have cautioned, 

cosmopolitanism is also a privileged position: it carries with it the danger of confusing particular experiences of diversity, mobility, and access with essential truths about 

the world as a whole.30 The talks at the 2009 conference and the essays included here 

attempt to circumvent this kind of totalizing thinking and acknowledge that the 

investigation of East–West interchange is necessarily open-ended and ongoing, with 

continuously shifting parameters and competing visual narratives. Much as Charles 

Lang Freer may have wanted to create a narrative of cosmopolitan beauty that was 

“already complete,” the museum that he founded remains an open book, its resources 

a rich mine of material for subsequent chapters of East–West interchange.

Notes

I acknowledge David Hogge and Rachael Woody, who contributed to this essay with their 

research, analysis, and expert organization of the materials in the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur 

M. Sackler Gallery Archives. All archival material discussed is from the Freer Gallery of Art and 

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, unless otherwise 

noted.

1. This slogan dates to the reopening of the Freer in 1993 following a five-year renovation and 

expansion that connected the museum, via subterranean exhibition space, to the Arthur M. Sackler 

Gallery, which had opened in 1987. 

2. Steven Conn, “Where Is the East?: Asian Objects in American Museums, from Nathan Dunn 

to Charles Freer,” Winterthur Portfolio 35:2/3 (Summer-Autumn 2000): 157–73, at 171, 170, 

doi:10.1086/496822; see also Andrew McClellan, “A Brief History of the Art Museum Public,” in 

Art and Its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium, ed. Andrew McClellan (Oxford: Blackwell 

Publishing, 2003), 1–49, for a broader account of the shift toward cosmopolitan aestheticism in 

American art museums in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Stories of the Beautiful 229

3. James McNeill Whistler, “Ten O’Clock” lecture, in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 1892, (New 

York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1967), 159; Charles Lang Freer to Samuel P. Langley, December 27, 1904, 

Charles Lang Freer Papers. 

4. Material Papers Relating to the Freer Gift and Bequest, “The First Codicil” (Washington, DC: 

Smithsonian Institution, 1928), 14.

5. See Thomas Lawton, “The Asian Tours,” in Lawton and Linda Merrill, Freer: A Legacy of Art

(Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 1993), 59–60.

6. Mieke Bal, “Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, 

ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 97–115, at 101.

7. James McNeill Whistler to Charles Lang Freer, July 29, 1899, in With Kindest Regards: The Correspondence 

of Charles Lang Freer and James McNeill Whistler, 1890–1903, ed. Linda Merrill (Washington, DC: Freer 

Gallery of Art, 1995), 123; Freer to John Gellatly, April 5, 1904, Freer Papers, Letterpress Book 9:13.

8. The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery library has been collecting works by and 

about Whistler since 1923, adding to an already substantial collection amassed by Freer himself. 

For a summary of the Marks Collection, see Reiko Yoshimura’s blog entry, “Paul Marks Collection on 

Whistler,” at http://smithsonianlibraries.si.edu/smithsonianlibraries/2010/08/paul-marks-collectionon-whistler.html.

9. See, for instance, John Sandberg, “’Japonisme’ and Whistler,” Burlington Magazine 106 (November 

1964): 500–507; Toshio Watanabe, High Victorian Japonisme, Swiss Asian Studies, vol. 10 (New York and 

Bern: P. Lang, 1991); Linda Merrill, “Whistler and the ‘Lange Lijzen,’” Burlington Magazine 136 (October 

1996): 683–90; and Ayako Ono, Japonisme in Britain: Whistler, Menpes, Henry, Hornel and NineteenthCentury Japan (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). The definitive history of the Peacock Room is Linda 

Merrill, The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

10. Entries for 7 and 8 December 1941, Freer Gallery of Art Diaries. Thanks to Blythe McCarthy for calling 

these entries to my attention.

11. Theodore Child, “American Artists at the Paris Exhibition” Harper’s Magazine 79 (September 

1889): 492; Royal Cortissoz, “Freer Museum Soon to Be Built in Washington,” New York Tribune, 

15 December 1915.

12. See Mary Ellen Haywood, “The Influence of the Classical Oriental Tradition on American 

Painting,” Winterthur Portfolio 14 (Summer 1979): 107–42; Linda Merrill, “Composing the 

Collection,” in Lawton and Merrill, 191–97; and Vivien Greene, “Aestheticism and Japan: The Cult 

of the Orient,” in Alexandra Munroe, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 

(New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2009): 59–71. 

13. For an account of these screens, see Mitsutoshi Oba, “Eclectic Symbolism: The Interplay of 

Japonisme and Classicism in the Folding Screens by Thomas Wilmer Dewing, 1896–1900,” Ph.D. 

dissertation (City University of New York, 2004), 69–90.

14. See Linda Merrill, “The American Renaissance,” in Lawton and Merrill, 174, and “Art Inventories 

(American, European, Asian and Eastern Art), 1896–1921,” and “Catalogue of Paintings on Screens 

and Panels by Japanese and Chinese Artists,” Freer Papers. 

15. A more general account of Whistler’s importance to Japan is in Ayako Ono, “Whistler’s Japanese 

Connections,” in James McNeill Whistler in Context: Essays from the Whistler Centenary Symposium, 

University of Glasgow, 2003, ed. Lee Glazer et al., Freer Gallery of Art Occasional Papers, New Series 

2 (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 2008), 95–104.

16. See Joan B Mirviss et al., Printed to Perfection: Twentieth-century Japanese Prints from the 

Robert O. Muller Collection (Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 2004) for an overview 

of the collection and its history. On the complex visual narratives related to East Asia and 

modernity in Japan, see Visualizing Cultures: Image Driven Scholarship at http://ocw.mit.edu/

ans7870/21f/21f.027/home/index.html.

17. Charles Moore, “Memoirs,” 280, Charles Moore Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, 

Washington, DC. 

18. See, for instance, Freer to Dwight William Tryon, 3 August 1907, Freer Papers, where he compares 

Tryon’s painting The Sea: Evening to “the great Masters of the early Kano-school—Sesshu, Sesson and 

Masunobu . . . [and to] an ink drawing of a huge waterfall by a Sung painter called Okamatsu [sic].”
230 East–West Interchanges in American Art

19. See Thomas Lawton, “Nomura Yo-zo-: A Bridge Across the Pacific,” Orientations 36:3 (April 2005): 

51–62.

20. My reading of this photograph is indebted to Christine Guth, “Charles Longfellow and Okakura 

Kakuzo-: Cultural Cross-Dressing in the Colonial Context,” positions 8:3 (Winter 2000): 605–36. 

doi:10.1215/10679847-8-3-605.

21. See Nomura Michi, Sekai isshu nikki [Diary of a Journey around the World] (Tokyo: Asahi 

Newspaper Co., 1908). I am grateful to Takako Sarai for translating this text and researching its 

author’s biography. 

22. Freer to Tryon, 7 July 1907, Freer Papers.

23. See Christine Guth, “A Tale of Two Collectors: Hara Tomitaro- and Charles Lang Freer,” Asian Art 

and Culture 4:4 (Fall 1991): 29–49.

24. My understanding of cosmopolitanism is deeply influenced by Craig Calhoun, especially “The 

Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Toward a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” 

South Atlantic Quarterly 101: 4 (2003): 869–97, and “Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Social 

Imaginary,” Daedalus (Summer 2008): 105–14. doi:10.1162/daed.2008.137.3.105. 

25. Freer to Frank J. Hecker, June 26,1895. Freer Papers.

26. Freer to Tryon, June 17, 1895, Tryon Papers.

27. Freer to Dwight William Tryon, April 15, 1907, Freer Papers.

28. On the intersection Japanese imagery and ideals of femininity, see Eunyoung Cho, “The 

Selling of Japan: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics in the American Art World, 1876–1915” (Ph.D. 

dissertation, University of Delaware, 1998), and Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women 

and American Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

29. See the Alice Roosevelt Longworth Collection of the Taft Mission. I rely here on conversations 

with Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery archivist David Hogge, whose considerable 

research on the topic was showcased in the 2011 exhibition.

30. On the resurgence of cosmopolitanism in the twenty-first century, see Calhoun, 

“Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Social Imaginary,” especially 106–10, and Anthony Appiah, 

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006), especially 

xi–xiii.

From La Farge to Paik

Research Resources at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Amelia A. Goerlitz
233

A wealth of materials related to artistic interchange between the United 

States and Asia await scholarly attention at the Smithsonian Institution.1

The Smithsonian American Art Museum in particular owns a remarkable 

number of artworks that speak to the continuous exchange between East 

and West. Many of these demonstrate U.S. fascination with Asia and its 

cultures: prints and paintings of America’s Chinatowns; late-nineteenthcentury examples of Orientalism and Japonisme; Asian decorative arts and 

artifacts donated by an American collector; works by Anglo artists who traveled to Asia and India to depict their landscapes and peoples or to study 

traditional printmaking techniques; and post-war paintings that engage 

with Asian spirituality and calligraphic traditions. The museum also owns 

hundreds of works by artists of Asian descent, some well known, but many 

whose careers are just now being rediscovered. This essay offers a selected 

overview of related objects in the collection.

West Looks East

American artists have long looked eastward—not only to Europe but also 

to Asia and India—for subject matter and aesthetic inspiration. They did not always have to look far. In fact, the earliest of such works in the American Art Museum’s collection consider with curiosity, and sometimes animosity, the presence 

of Asians in the United States. An example is Winslow Homer’s engraving entitled The Chinese in New York—Scene in a Baxter Street Club-House, which was produced 

for Harper’s Weekly in 1874. Here Homer examines the seamy underside of immigrant culture, depicting a group of Chinese immigrants gambling and smoking 

opium. His image reveals the reigning Anglo-American anxiety about the arrival 
234 East–West Interchanges in American Art

of large numbers of Chinese 

immigrants at mid-century, 

an anxiety that manifested 

itself in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.Almost concurrent to the Exclusion Act is 

Theodore Wores’s The Chinese 

Fishmonger (see Mills, Figure 

1), depicting San Francisco’s Chinatown. Completed 

just after Wores’s return to 

San Francisco from training 

in Munich, this deep-hued 

and richly textured painting 

opened the door for further 

picturesque depictions of 

the exotic ethnic quarter.2

These two early images are 

complemented by works on 

paper by subsequent generations of artists active in San Francisco: several prints by Helen Hyde, such as Alley in 

Chinatown (1898); three etchings of Chinatown vendors by Austrian-born John Winkler 

(1912–73); and a market scene by Loren Barton (ca. 1924).3

A small number of American artists traveled to Asia in the late nineteenth century. As 

Virginia Anderson describes in her essay in this volume, artist Katherine Carl was invited 

to the imperial palace in 1903 to paint the first portrait of the controversial empress 

dowager of China, Cixi. Carl spent nine months in China and produced several portraits 

of the empress, including one exhibited at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis 

in 1904. Following the exposition, Carl’s portrait was presented by China to the U.S. 

government with much fanfare, and it entered the American Art Museum’s collection 

in 1960. Carl’s unusual painting, recently transferred to the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. 

Sackler Gallery, reflects traditional Chinese portrait conventions and is surrounded by an 

intricately carved, camphor wood frame designed by the Empress herself.4

The core of the American Art Museum’s collection was formed in the late nineteenth century when Orientalism was a prevalent trend. Originally named the National Gallery of Art, the museum received its inaugural gift of 34 objects from Harriet 

Lane Johnston in 1906, and another 150 works from William T. Evans beginning 

in 1907.5

 Johnston’s collection includes the striking Street Scene in India (Figure 1), 

1. Edwin Lord Weeks, Street Scene in India, ca. 1884–88. Oil on canvas, 

28 7

⁄8 × 23 3⁄4 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, Bequest 

of Harriet Lane Johnston.
From La Farge to Paik 235

painted by Edwin Lord Weeks in the 1880s during one of his many extended travels 

throughout the Near East. Among Evans’s gifts to the museum are two additional 

works that reveal the Gilded Age fascination with the “exotic” East and an appreciation for its decorative arts: Irving R. Wiles’s Brown Kimono (Portrait of Kathryn Beta la 

Forque) (1908), and H. Siddons Mowbray’s Idle Hours (1895), both of which depict 

Western women clothed in kimonos and surrounded by Asian objects and decor.

The nineteenth-century taste for Asian decorative wares, textiles, and prints 

is perhaps most visible in the collection of John Gellatly, whose 1929 gift was 

an early and significant boon to the museum. Gellatly, a New York City collector, donated 1,640 works including more than 140 contemporary American 

paintings—most by Abbott Handerson Thayer, Childe Hassam, Albert Pinkham 

Ryder, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, and John Henry Twachtman—along with European paintings and nearly 1,500 other decorative art objects. This jewel box of objets d’art contained English and French enamels, Italian majolica, Roman glass, and 

close to 150 Asian art objects. The cultural origins of many of the Asian works 

in the Gellatly collection remain unidentified or unconfirmed, but they consist of 

fragments of Buddhist wall paintings as well as jewelry, ornaments, figurines, and 

vessels made of jade, glass, stone, and precious metals. As the museum’s identity 

evolved over the years to focus exclusively on American art, these Asian decorative 

works were relegated to study collections and eventually placed on long-term loan 

to the Smithsonian’s Freer Study Collection. Yet Gellatly’s collection of Asian 

objects remains an under-utilized source for scholars investigating early American collecting practices.6

American paintings collected by Gellatly reflect his contemporaries’ similar taste for Oriental objects, such as celadon ware, folding screens, and Japanese 

prints. Paintings such as Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s The Necklace (ca. 1907) and Lady 

in White (No. 2) (ca. 1910); Robert Reid’s The Violet Kimono (ca. 1910); Childe Hassam’s Tanagra (The Builders, New York) (1918); Henry Golden Dearth’s Bronze Buddha 

(n.d); and Ruth Payne Burgess’s Green Chinese Jar (see Mills, Figure 3) all feature 

such decorative wares in domestic interiors.7

 Among the paintings donated by Gellatly 

is a watercolor entitled Water Lily in Sunlight (ca. 1883) by John La Farge. Even more 

so than his contemporaries, La Farge shared Gellatly’s early interest in the art of 

Asia, specifically Japan. He owned Chinese and Japanese ceramics and ukiyo-e prints, 

lectured and wrote about Japan, and traveled around the country with the historian 

Henry Adams in 1886, recording his impressions in An Artist’s Letters from Japan

(1897). The American Art Museum owns a number of La Farge’s stained glass 

windows, such as Peonies in the Wind with Kakemono Borders (ca. 1893), which evoke the 

bird and flower motifs of Chinese and Japanese screens.
236 East–West Interchanges in American Art

In 1935, not long after the Gellatly donation, the museum received nearly 700 

works from the Chicago Society of Etchers, including two prints by Mukul Dey 

that are an early indication of cultural interchange between the U.S. and India. 

Mukul Dey (1895–1989) was a student of Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan 

School. In 1916 he accompanied his teacher on a yearlong visit to the United 

States, where he met Bertha Jacques, founder of the Chicago Society of Etchers, 

and took a course in drypoint etching from James Blanding Sloan. He was elected 

to the Society, which exhibited and eventually donated to the museum his portrait 

of Tagore and a traditional image he made of the Tree of Life. On his return to 

India, Dey became known as the pioneer of drypoint etching, recognized for his 

portraits of national and world celebrities.8

A fascination with Japanese prints and a desire to learn Eastern techniques propelled artists such as Helen Hyde and Bertha Lum to venture to Japan and China at 

the turn of the century. While the museum has just three woodcuts by Lum, it holds 

126 works by Hyde (mostly color etchings and woodcuts), the majority of which 

depict women and children in Japan, where the artist spent more than a decade. While 

Hyde’s images (Figure 2) often reflect American stereotypes and fantasies about Japan and its people, they are a rich resource for anyone researching the early Japanese 

influence on American artists and the role of women in this development.9

In post-war decades American abstract artists engaged with Asian spiritual and 

design traditions in new and fruitful ways. As scholar Ding Ning discusses in his 

2. Helen Hyde, The Sauce-Pan Shop, 1908. Color woodcut on paper, 12 1⁄2 × 17 7⁄8 in. Smithsonian 

American Art Museum, Washington, DC, Gift of Hyde Gillette in memory of Mabel Hyde Gillette and Edwin Fraser Gillette.
From La Farge to Paik 237

essay in this book, Mark Tobey, a practicing Baha’i, studied brushwork in a Zen 

Buddhist monastery in Japan and learned Chinese calligraphy and painting from 

his close friend, Chinese artist Teng Baiye. The museum owns several works, such 

as Canticle (1954), that demonstrate Tobey’s use of light-colored calligraphic symbols over a colored ground, a style that came to be called “white writing.” Also in 

the museum’s collection are works by Morris Graves, a friend of Tobey and practitioner of Zen. Graves’s Folded Wings—Memory—& the Moon Weeping (ca. 1942–43) 

demonstrate both his appreciation of Tobey’s white writing and his incorporation 

of nature imagery, especially the bird, as vehicle for expressing his inner state.10

William T. Wiley studied the work of Tobey and Graves as an art student, and 

became independently acquainted with Zen philosophy, parables, and poetry. Throughout his career, Wiley borrowed ideas and symbols from Zen, incorporating them into 

works like Body Dharma (1995) and There is no Buddha Out There (1999). The museum’s 

in-depth collection of Wiley’s work (more than 90 objects) and the catalogue of his 

recent retrospective, What’s It All Mean, organized by senior curator Joann Moser, reveal 

one example of Zen’s reverberations in late-twentieth-century American art.11

Asian American Artists

While the 2009 conference focused specifically on artistic interactions between 

East and West, it is important to also consider art made by Americans of Asian descent. The American Art Museum has rich holdings in this subfield, although these 

objects have not heretofore been considered as a group in its collection guides, catalogues, or survey exhibitions. Most American museums do not publish guides to 

their Asian Pacific American holdings and may not even classify works as such, and 

while numerous institutions have curators of Asian art, only the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles has a full-time curator, Karin Higa, working 

on art of the Asian diaspora. University departments in Asian American studies 

(UCLA being a prime example) are doing much to develop this neglected field of 

art history, but still a large percentage of artists of Asian descent remain unknown, 

under researched, and excluded from the American art canon and, consequently, 

from museum displays.12

A major contribution to the documentation effort has been the California Asian 

American Artists Biographical Survey 1850–1965 (CAAABS). Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and published as part of the important 2008 

survey book, Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970, this initiative has documented 

more than 1,000 artists, with an emphasis on those active on the West Coast. Also 

now underway is a newer initiative to document artists, archives, and art collections 

based on the East Coast. Co-organized by Alexandra Chang and Margo Machida and 
238 East–West Interchanges in American Art

sponsored by New York University Asian/Pacific/American Institute, the East Coast 

Asian American Art Project (ECAAAP) will produce a volume of new scholarship 

documenting collections and artists in this region. While it will initially focus on 

New York City, research is also planned for Washington, DC, Boston, and Chicago. 

Another key resource is the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, which holds 

extensive correspondence, oral history interviews, and other documents related to 

Asian American artists.13

A review of the Asian American holdings at the American Art Museum shows a 

surprisingly far-reaching collection. Over the past 50 years, works have entered the 

collection in a variety of ways: they were transferred from other government agencies, given by foundations or collectors as part of larger collections of twentiethcentury art, occasionally purchased, and in a few instances donated by artists or 

their estates. Despite never having set out to systematically establish a collection of 

Asian American art, the museum now owns more than 450 works by 100 artists of 

Asian descent. Some of these artists were not born in the United States and some 

were not U.S. citizens, but they are included in the collection because they lived 

in America for a number of years and contributed to the nation’s artistic heritage 

in some meaningful way. The collection is almost exclusively modern and contemporary; only two works predate 1920. Japanese American and Chinese American 

artists predominate; however, the collection includes works by a number of artists 

of Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Indian descent. The majority of the museum’s 

holdings of Asian American art are graphic arts, but it also has a significant collection of studio craft and sculptural objects. This distribution is not surprising 

considering limited acquisition budgets, but it also reflects a strong Asian tradition 

of craft, printmaking, and brush painting.

The museum owns 16 works by one of the most acclaimed Japanese American 

artists of his generation, Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1893–1953). Born in Okayama, Japan, 

Kuniyoshi immigrated to the United States as a young man in 1906, eventually 

becoming a prominent figure in the New York avant-garde. The museum’s works 

span nearly the length of his career and include paintings, lithographs, and drawings of his best-known subjects: landscapes with cows done in a folk art style, 

sensuous female figures, and carnival performers. A recent acquisition, the inkand-brush drawing Remains of Lunch (Figure 3) shows not only the artist’s skill as a 

draftsman but also his subtle humor. Complementing the collection is a portrait 

of Kuniyoshi in his studio painted in 1930 by his lifelong friend, Japanese-born 

Woodstock painter Bumpei Usui.

Chiura Obata (1885–1975) also came to the United States from Japan at the 

beginning of the twentieth century, moving to San Francisco in 1903. In 1927 
From La Farge to Paik 239

Obata first visited Yosemite 

National Park and the Sierra 

Nevada, where he sketched 

dramatic landscapes in pencil, ink, and watercolor. These 

studies served as the basis 

for a limited-edition portfolio of 35 color woodblock 

prints that Obata created in 

Tokyo over a period of two 

years. In 2000 the American 

Art Museum acquired 26 of 

the full set from the artist’s 

family, and in 2005 the family gave three of the watercolor studies and a set of 

125 progressive proofs that 

illustrate the artist’s laborintensive working methods. 

While Obata has been largely 

unknown to U.S. audiences, 

the museum’s 2008 exhibition, Obata’s Yosemite, and a segment in Ken Burns’s 2009 documentary on the 

national parks may help to increase awareness of his work.14

A number of artists of Asian ancestry who were active in the 1930s and 

1940s are represented among the American Art Museum’s extensive holdings of 

New Deal art. Chinese American watercolorist Dong Kingman (1911–2000) received popular and critical attention in his day, exhibiting in group shows at major San Francisco museums and working for the Works Progress Administration. 

The museum owns five of his California landscapes including Bridge Over River 

painted in 1936 under the auspices of the WPA, while the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden owns a dynamic streetscape, Station Platform 

(1946), painted after the artist’s move to New York City. Other works by Asian 

American artists completed under New Deal art programs were transferred to the 

American Art Museum from various federal agencies starting in the 1960s. These 

include a wood engraving by Hawaiian-born Japanese American artist Isami Doi 

entitled Near Coney Island (ca. 1937), two watercolors by Fugi Nakamizo, Sakari Suzuki’s New York landscape Merrick Road (1934), Hideo Date’s White Gardenias (n.d.), 

3. Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Remains of Lunch, 1922. Pen and ink, brush 

and ink on paper, 13 7

⁄8 × 10 1⁄2 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, 

Washington, DC, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. 

Denghausen Endowment.
240 East–West Interchanges in American Art

nine lithographs by Chuzo Tamotzu, and Kenjiro Nomura’s oddly desolate The Farm 

(1934), painted before the Seattle artist’s internment.15

An interesting if minor collection of works by several noted mid-century Asian 

American artists came to the museum as part of a 1984 gift from the Container Corporation of America. Under the direction of design consultant Herbert Bayer, a major Bauhaus figure, the corporation undertook some of the first fine-art advertising campaigns, 

commissioning artists to create original works in various media that were then reproduced as full-page ads in mainstream magazines. An early series entitled United Nations

was undertaken during World War II as a tribute to allied nations. Chinese American 

artists Yun Gee and Mai-mai Sze were chosen to represent China and Indo-China, while 

Filipino artist Venancio Igarta created Freedom! (1945) in reference to the four-year Japanese occupation of his homeland.16 The corporation also donated 161 original works of 

art created for the Great Ideas of Western Man series, launched in 1950, and its smaller and 

largely forgotten counterpart, Great Ideas of Eastern Man. For the Great Ideas campaigns, 

artists were asked to create a work in response to a preselected quote by a great thinker; 

Eastern reflections were culled from Buddha, Gandhi, Issa, Confucius, Rabindranath 

Tagore, Lao Tzu, and the Bhagavad-Gita. The museum’s holdings include ten works 

from the Eastern Man Series, eight of them by artists of Asian and Indian descent: 

Chi-kwan Chen, Wing Gig Fong, Shiro Ikegawa, Genichiro Inokuma, Yusaku Kamekura, 

Matazo Kayama, Shiko Munakata, and Mohan B. Samant.17

Jeffrey Wechsler’s 1997 landmark exhibition Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions and 

its accompanying catalogue drew attention to many mid-century Asian American abstractionists whose work was informed by Asian philosophy or technique.18 Of the 

58 artists featured in the catalogue, 15 are represented in the American Art Museum’s 

collection: Leo Amino, Chen Chi, Fay Chong, Isami Doi, Genichiro Inokuma, Matsumi 

Kanemitsu, Seong Moy, Win Ng, Isamu Noguchi, Kenzo Okada, Arthur Okamura, Toshiko Takaezu, Walasse Ting, Ansei Uchima, and Wang Ming. Frequently on view is 

Noguchi’s monumental marble sculpture Grey Sun (1967), but the museum also owns 

three works by the lesser-known Japanese American sculptor Leo Amino (1911–1989). 

These sculptures demonstrate Amino’s range of media and styles: from a Henry Mooreinspired wooden carving entitled Seedling (1953) to Family (1948), an example of his 

pioneering work in polyester resin. Okada (1902–1982), a Japanese-born painter who 

moved to New York in 1950, is singled out by Wechsler as most closely aligned with the 

New York Abstract Expressionist school.19 Two of his oil paintings—To Point (1962) 

and Grey (1970)—are owned by the museum; the former was part of an important gift 

of post-war artworks from S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc. This donation also included Okamura’s expressionist landscape Stray Cur, Eucalyptus Grove (1961), Ng’s ceramic sculpture 

Two Sides of Three Blocks #3 (1967), Gwen-Lin Goo’s Semblance (n.d.), and the abstract 
From La Farge to Paik 241

landscape The Shores of Light

(1960) by Hawaiianborn Chinese American 

painter Reuben Tam.20

Researchers interested in 

Tam should also consult 

the Archives of American 

Art for his papers: nine 

boxes of material from 

1938 to 1997 including 

correspondence, sketchbooks, photographs, and 

color slides.

The American Art 

Museum owns a number of works by postwar Asian American artists celebrated for their 

printmaking. The most 

thoroughly represented 

is Seong Moy, who was born in China in 1921 and came to Minnesota as a child. 

Moy studied art in Minnesota and later in New York at Hans Hofmann’s school 

and the Art Students League. A painter and printmaker, he began in the 1940s 

to create woodcuts that overtly refer to his cultural heritage, such as Kuang Kung 

(Figure 4), a woodcut abstraction of the Chinese god of war. The museum has an 

extensive collection of 36 drawings, woodcuts, and etchings by Moy; all but three 

were donated by the artist in 1969.21

Matsumi (Mike) Kanemitsu (1922–1992)—discussed in this volume by Bert 

Winther-Tamaki—was born in the United States but spent his childhood in Japan. 

He worked in New York in a variety of media including watercolor and sumi (Japanese ink drawing) before arriving in Los Angeles in the 1960s to learn lithography 

at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. The museum owns 13 of his lithographs, 

which reproduce the wet look of his sumi paintings. Santa Anita Yesterday & Today, one 

of the 1970 series Illustrations of Southern California, alludes to the wartime use of the 

Los Angeles track to temporarily house Japanese Americans before they were relocated to internment camps.22

Contemporary with such abstract prints but more traditional in style are the works 

of Japanese-born master woodcutter Un-ichi Hiratsuka (1895–1997). Hiratsuka was 

4. Seong Moy, Kuang Kung, 1952. Color woodcut on paper, 14 1⁄8 × 12 in. 

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, Gift of the artist.
242 East–West Interchanges in American Art

one of Japan’s most accomplished printmakers before moving to Washington, DC, 

in 1962. He lived in the capital with his daughter for more than 30 years—working 

and teaching—before returning to Japan near the end of his life. The museum 

mounted a small exhibition of his work in 1999 and owns three woodcuts, including two local scenes, Washington Monument (n.d.) and Key Bridge in Winter (1966).23

The museum’s Renwick Gallery of American craft has actively acquired and 

exhibited objects made by Asian Americans since its opening in 1972. The 2005 

exhibit High Fiber featured Japanese American fiber artists Kiyomi Iwata and Kay Sekimachi; Staged Stories: Renwick Craft Invitational 2009 highlighted Korean-born sculptor Sun Koo Yuh; and the 2011 Renwick Invitational includes works by ceramicist 

Cliff Lee, who was born in Taiwan. The gallery’s 2010–2011 exhibition The Art of 

Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942–1946, organized by guest curator Delphine Hirasuna, showcased the creativity and resilience 

of Japanese American internees (few of them trained craftsmen) who fashioned exquisite domestic objects for their surroundings out of scraps and found materials.

The Renwick’s collection of objects by Asian American artists includes, 

among others: fiber works by Kiyomi Iwata and Kay Sekimachi; wood vessels by 

Binh Pho; metalwork by Chunghi Choo and Miye Matsukata; ceramic pieces by 

Jun Kaneko, Mineo Mizuno, Chun Wen Wang, Patti Warashina, and Shige Yamada; 

and furniture by celebrated woodworker George Nakashima.24 Represented in 

depth is the ceramic art of Toshiko Takaezu (1922–2011), who worked in clay 

for more than six decades. Born in Hawaii to Japanese parents, Takaezu studied 

at the University of Hawaii with Claude Horan and later at Cranbrook Academy 

with Maija Grotell. In 1955 she left for eight months in Japan, where she visited 

traditional pottery studios and Zen Buddhist temples in an effort to reconnect 

with her cultural heritage. The Renwick owns 19 of Takaezu’s works, from the 

1950s through 2002, including many of her signature closed vertical vessels with 

their painterly brush decoration.

The American Art Museum’s contemporary painting collection includes significant works by Asian American artists that deal with issues of memory and cultural 

identity.25 Roger Shimomura’s (b. 1939) painting Diary: December 12, 1941 (1980) 

refers to his family’s history of internment during World War II. Combining elements of traditional Japanese art with a hard-edged pop style, Diary is from a series 

of paintings based on his grandmother’s diary entries. On this date in 1941, his 

grandmother wrote of “America’s large-heartedness” in allowing “we who are enemy 

to them” to withdraw $100 from the bank following the bombing of Pearl Harbor 

(the accounts of issei were frozen immediately after the attack). Shimomura ironically considers America’s reputation as a defender of liberty and justice by depict-
From La Farge to Paik 243

ing the shadow of Superman 

looming across a shoji screen 

behind his grandmother.26

Masami Teraoka creates 

politically charged art in a 

style that imitates ukiyo-e, or 

floating world, nineteenthcentury block prints. Born in 

Japan in 1936, Teraoka came 

to California in his twenties 

to attend art school, arriving 

in the midst of the 1960s 

counterculture movement. 

Eventually, he decided to address contemporary issues in 

his painting by means of a 

style that could reflect his own 

hybrid identity. Paintings such 

as Tale of 1000 Condoms/Geisha 

and Skeleton (1989) and Oiran 

and Mirror, from the AIDS Series (1988) reflect the artist’s concern with the AIDS 

crisis of the 1980s, while MacDonald’s Hamburgers Invading Japan/Tokyo Ginza Shuffle 

(1982) is a tongue-in-cheek critique of American consumerism and globalization.

Hung Liu (b. 1948) came of age in China during the Cultural Revolution and 

witnessed the government’s attempt to sever the country’s ties to its past through 

the widespread destruction of historical artifacts and cultural sites. Her paintings are 

often inspired by once-forgotten archival photographs. Painted nearly a century later 

than Katherine Carl’s life portrait of the empress dowager, The Ocean is the Dragon’s 

World (Figure 5) echoes the composition of a formal royal portrait. Whereas Carl 

was restricted by the desires of her sitter and conventions of Chinese portraiture, 

Liu’s painting is based on a photograph now in the collection of the Palace Museum, 

Beijing, and reveals her contrasting creative freedom. Here, Cixi’s face is left nearly 

featureless, so the artist can focus instead on her opulent costume and surroundings. 

She holds a birdcage—a real object that emerges from the surface of the canvas—

which might hint at the cloistered life of Chinese royalty.27 Liu’s paintings were featured in the museum’s 1996–97 exhibition American Kaleidoscope: Themes and Perspectives 

in Recent Art and related catalogue, and senior curator Joann Moser interviewed her in 

2010 for the Archives of American Art’s oral history repository.

5. Hung Liu, The Ocean is the Dragon’s World, 1995. Oil on canvas, 

painted wood panel, metal support rod, and metal bird cage with wood 

and ceramic appendages, 97 × 82 1

⁄2 × 17 5⁄8 in. Smithsonian American 

Art Museum, Washington, DC, Museum purchase in part through the 

Lichtenberg Family Foundation.
244 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Recent acquisitions by the museum’s contemporary curators have enriched our 

collection of installation and new media artworks by Asian Americans. In 2009 Joanna Marsh organized Jean Shin: Common Threads, a solo show featuring eight of the 

Korean-born artist’s colossal installation pieces that reflect upon aspects of contemporary American culture. Among the works on view was the recent acquisition 

Chemical Balance III (2009), an assemblage of prescription pill bottles in the shape 

of stalactites and stalagmites that addresses Americans’ addiction to prescription 

medication. With the assistance of John Hanhardt, senior curator for media arts, 

the museum recently acquired a work by Japanese-German artist Kota Ezawa (b. 

1969), who became famous for his 2002 animated sequence of the reading of the 

O.J. Simpson verdict. Ezawa’s four-minute digitally animated film LYAM 3D takes 

as its source various scenes from the 1961 French film Last Year at Marienbad in which 

the actors stand motionless.28

Ezawa’s predecessor, the international video artist Nam June Paik (1932–

2006), who was born in South Korea, had a long relationship with the American 

Art Museum. Among the Paik works in our collection are the early Zen for TV 

(1963, 1976 version) and two later video walls: Electronic Superhighway: Continental 

U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (1995) and Megatron/Matrix (1995), on view in the museum’s 

contemporary galleries. In 2009 the museum also acquired the artist’s complete 

estate archive, which consists of research material, documentation, correspondence, 

sculptural robots, and video and television technology. The Nam June Paik Archive 

provides unprecedented insight into the artist’s creative process, his sources of inspiration, and the artistic communities on three continents with whom he worked 

for more than five decades. While the collection is not yet catalogued and available 

to researchers, it should prove an extraordinary resource in the future for those 

studying Paik and the history of the moving image.

Scholars interested in Asian American art should further consult the resources 

available at the American Art Museum’s Research and Scholars Center (www.americanart.si.edu/research/). The center maintains the searchable online databases of 

the Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture, including records documenting artworks by nearly 150 Asian American artists in public and private collections 

worldwide. The inventories are supplemented by the center’s photographic collection, which holds images of artworks by more than 40 Asian, Asian American, and 

Pacific Islander artists.

Notes

I thank Elizabeth Anderson, Robin Dettre, and Shannon Perry at the American Art Museum and 

Aimee Soubier at the Hirshhorn for their assistance in accessing information about each museum’s 

collections. My gratitude also goes to Margo Machida and Joann Moser, who provided valuable 

insight into the museums’ Asian American holdings.
From La Farge to Paik 245

1. Works of art can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the 

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler 

Gallery; historical collections reside at the National Museum of American History; vertical files 

are available through the Smithsonian Libraries; and oral history interviews and artists’ papers are 

largely centralized in the Archives of American Art, although other archives, image collections, and 

research databases are maintained by the American Art Museum’s Research and Scholars Center. 

2. Anthony W. Lee’s Picturing Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) discusses 

this painting alongside other picturesque depictions of Chinatown, see especially 85–88.

3. The museum also owns 25 photographic diptychs by Eve Sonneman of New York’s Chinatown 

(1970–72).

4. For a description of her work on this particular portrait, see Katherine A. Carl, With the Empress 

Dowager (New York: The Century Co., 1905), 237–38, 287–88, and 294–99.

5. For my discussion of the Johnston, Evans, and Gellatly donations, I rely on Lois M. Fink, A History of 

the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 54–67.

6. Little is known about Gellatly and his collection. Xiomara Murray’s dissertation in progress at 

New York University on the origins of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collections includes 

a chapter on the Gellatly donation, focusing on the American and European paintings. Melody 

Deusner’s dissertation, “A Network of Associations: Aesthetic Painting and its Patrons, 1870–1914” 

(University of Delaware, 2010) discusses Gellatly in relation to other patrons of aesthetic art such 

as Charles Lang Freer. The museum also owns a number of nineteenth-century Chinese export fans 

(mostly from a 1939 bequest by Alfred Duane Pell), which were shown in the Renwick Gallery’s 

1985 exhibition Fanfare. 

7. Other fine examples from this era not in the Gellatly collection include Robert Reid’s The Mirror 

(ca. 1910), which depicts a woman standing in front of a blue and gold folding screen, and William 

M. Paxton’s The Figurine (1921), which shows a housekeeper dusting the vitrine of an Asian figurine.

8. See the Mukul Dey archives and the artist’s reminiscences at www.chitralekha.org/profile.htm. 

His work was included in the Society’s 1917 and 1918 exhibitions; Chicago Society of Etchers, 

Catalogue of an Exhibition of Etchings under the Management of the Chicago Society of Etchers

(Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1917; 1918).

9. For more on Hyde and Lum, see Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American 

Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 58–73.

10. The museum owns 16 works by Tobey and seven by Graves. On the Northwest School, see 

Kathleen Pyne and D. Scott Atkinson, “Landscapes of the Mind: New Conceptions of Nature” in 

Alexandra Munroe, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, (New York: 

Guggenheim Museum, 2009), 94–96.

11. Joann Moser, John Yau, and John G. Hanhardt, What’s It All Mean: William T. Wiley in Retrospect 

(Berkeley: University of California Press and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2009).

12. One obvious exception is the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York. Significant 

holdings of Asian American art can also be found at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, 

the Honolulu Academy of Art, and the Contemporary Art Museum in Honolulu. While at one 

time many U.S. art museums owned works by Asian Americans, “intervening years have seen the 

deaccessioning of important works, as the result of changing interests of curators and collectors”; 

Sharon Spain, “Introduction to Biographies of California Asian American Artists, 1850–1965” in 

Gordon H. Chang, Mark Dean Johnson, and Paul J. Karlstrom, eds., Asian American Art: A History, 

1850–1970 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 287.

13. See www.aaa.si.edu/guides/site-asianamerican/. Noted artists represented in the Archives’ 

collection include Dong Kingman, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Miye Matsukata, Seong Moy, Isamu Noguchi, 

Norie Sato, Toshiko Takaezu, Reuben Tam, and Patti Warashina.

14. “Chiura Obata, a Painter of Yosemite” (04:53) aired as part of Ken Burns’s six-episode 

series “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” in 2009, and can be viewed at www.pbs.org/

nationalparks/. See also Obata’s Yosemite: The Art and Letters of Chiura Obata from His Trip to the 

High Sierra in 1927 (Yosemite National Park, California: Yosemite Association, 1993). 
246 East–West Interchanges in American Art

15. The museum’s New Deal holdings include about 3,000 works, making it one of the largest such 

collections in the world. See foreword by Elizabeth Broun in Ann Prentice Wagner, 1934: A New 

Deal for Artists (Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2009), 6–9. Isami Doi is also 

represented by a complete set of wood engravings from the portfolio The Wayward Muse, given to 

the museum in 1971.

16. While the only works by Yun Gee in the American Art Museum’s collection are two versions of 

Indo-China from the United Nations Series, the Hirshhorn owns five of his paintings from 1926–27.

17. An additional work by an Asian American artist in the Container Corporation collection is 

Keichi Kimura’s Hawaii (1946–49) from the United States Series. On the corporation’s advertising 

campaigns, see Herbert Bayer’s introduction to Great Ideas, ed. John Massey (Chicago: Container 

Corporation of America, 1976), xi. 

18. Jeffrey Wechsler, ed., Asian Traditions, Modern Expressions: Asian American Artists and Abstraction, 

1945–1970 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art 

Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 1997).

19. Okada showed at Betty Parsons Gallery for many years and was included in the Walker Art 

Center’s exhibition 60 American Painters: Abstract Expressionist Painting of the Fifties in 1960. See 

Wechsler, Asian Traditions, Modern Expressions, 170. 

20. The Hirshhorn owns an additional five works by Okamura from 1960–61 and four by Tam from 

the mid-1950s.

21. The Archives of American Art offers further resources in the form of the Seong Moy Papers, 

1946–1970, and a 1971 oral history interview of the artist.

22. The Archives of American Art holds Kanemitsu’s papers.

23. The exhibit Woodcuts by Hiratsuka: A Master in Our Midst ran from 14 May to 12 September 1999.

24. The American Art Museum also owns three works on paper and a recently acquired oil painting, 

Sanctuary at Western Sunset (1992), by Tom Nakashima, George Nakashima’s nephew.

25. Several renowned contemporary artists of Asian descent who are not represented in the 

American Art Museum’s collection are included in the Hirshhorn’s collection, including Nikki S. Lee, 

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Yoko Ono, and Yayoi Kusama.

26. Jacquelyn Days Serwer, American Kaleidoscope: Themes and Perspectives in Recent Art 

(Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1996), 92–98, quote 

at 101 n. 6.

27. See Jonathan P. Binstock, “Hung Liu” in Serwer, American Kaleidoscope, 120–31; and an interview 

of Hung Liu by Han Qing, translated by Luisetta Mudie, “The Many Faces of Hung Liu,” Radio Free Asia, 

at www.rfa.org/english/news/arts/china_artist-20051018.html [accessed 9 August 2010].

28. Ezawa’s slide projection History of Photography Remix (2004–2006) is in the Hirshhorn’s 

collection.

Reflections on The Third Mind

Alexandra Munroe
249

The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 was a largescale exhibition accompanied by a scholarly book of the same name, a 

series of live performances, a website, audio guide, and public programs 

organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and presented there 

in winter 2009. Many years in the making, it explored a set of ideas 

around the vast, unruly, and often problematic concept of “Asian influence” on visual art of the United States. Europe has long been recognized as the font of mainstream American art movements, but the show 

explored an alternative lineage aligned with America’s Pacific aspect. 

Asia’s “influence” on such influential artists and writers as James McNeill Whistler, John La Farge, Arthur Wesley Dow, Ezra Pound, Mark 

Tobey, Morris Graves, John Cage, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Ad 

Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, and Adrian Piper has been well-documented 

and treated in previous studies. The Third Mind (Figures 1–3) made the 

case that this influence was not occasional or eccentric, but was rather 

a continuous and complex undercurrent that courses through the development of early modern to post-war to neo-avant-garde art. That the 

nature of artists’ work with these forces varied widely and that “Asia” 

meant different things to different artists at different periods should 

not discourage our critical and historical analyses of this profound lineage of ideas, events, and people, it concluded.

We fully expected The Third Mind to raise debate, even controversy, and 

we welcome signs that, although the exhibition has closed, this ambitious 

project and the substantial exhibition catalogue are continuing to stir important questions across disciplines and area studies. By its nature (a finite 
250 East–West Interchanges in American Art

physical space, among other things) an exhibition, like a textbook, requires a curator to make difficult decisions about what to highlight and what to leave out. 

Thus many of the questions we wrestled with and even some of the criticisms later 

directed at the show can illuminate key areas ripe for further scholarly inquiry.

Literature

Working together, colleagues inside and outside the Guggenheim helped me to 

shape the story of American artists’ exposure to Asian images and themes as a cultural, intellectual, and political history of how select ideas were mediated, interpreted, and used.1

 Without question, The Third Mind built its narrative around the role 

that literature played in this mediation, and the art-historical narrative throughout 

elucidated the key texts and writers artists learned the most from. Throughout 

our period of study, translations, commentaries, and adaptations of Asian philosophy, metaphysics, poetry, and aesthetics composed by such towering figures as 

Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, Arthur Wesley Dow, Ernest Fenollosa, Carl Jung, 

Thomas Merton, Ezra Pound, Nancy Wilson Ross, Gary Snyder, D. T. Suzuki, 

Thoreau, and Arthur Waley were widely used by visual artists. Artists’ encounters 

with these key figures, either through friendship, a master-disciple relationship, or 

their writings, were a centerpiece of the exhibition’s narrative. The patterns of this 

intellectual history are suggested in Ikuyo Nakagawa’s chronology and bibliography compiled for the book accompanying the show, and The Third Mind used such 

1. Entrance to The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New 

York, 2009, with view of James Lee Byars’s The Death of James Lee Byars, 1982/1994, made of gold leaf, crystal, and Plexiglas. 

Photo by David Heald, courtesy The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
Reflections on The Third Mind 251

texts as the primary point of 

encounter with Asia. Asian 

readings also provided artists with a logic of political 

resistance to counter what 

was perceived as the West’s 

moral and spiritual decline. 

Thomas Merton, writing 

on the Bhagavad Gita more 

than a 100 years after Thoreau, claimed: “It brings to 

the West a salutary reminder 

that our highly activistic and 

one-sided culture is faced 

with a crisis that may end in 

self-destruction because it 

lacks an authentic metaphysical consciousness. Without 

such depth, our moral and 

political protestations are 

just so much verbiage.”2

2. Paul Kos, Sound of Ice Melting, 1970. Two 25-pound blocks of 

ice, eight boom microphone stands, eight microphones, mixer, amplifier, two 

large speakers, and cables, dimensions variable. Installation view, Solomon 

R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009. Collection of The Solomon R. 

Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo by David Heald, courtesy 

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

3. Tehching Hsieh, Punching the Time Clock on the Hour, One Year Performance, April 11, 1980–April 11, 1981. 

Installation of documentary photographs and original performance relics, including poster, documents, 366 time cards, 366 24-

hour images, 16 mm film, time clock, 16 mm movie camera, uniform, shoes, and footprints, dimensions variable. Collection of 

the artist. Photo by David Heald, courtesy The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
252 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Consequently, this project was not about Asia per se. Rather, it sought foremost 

to illuminate the range of approaches that artists and writers used to collect ideas 

for their creative strategies, and to interrogate and critique their own conditioned 

worldviews. This last point offers a threshold for deeper examination: to elaborate on 

how artists used the East as critique of the West, and in a subversive alliance with the 

objects of American imperialism in the Pacific and, more widely, across Asia.

Orientalist Tropes

Throughout our planning, execution, and presentation of The Third Mind, our 

challenge was to remain critical of the process of constructing the East as a reductive suit of aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural concepts. Skeptics were quick 

to assume that we would be guilty of perpetuating Orientalist tropes. In fact, we 

inverted them. As I stated in the catalogue’s introduction, while the significance of 

Edward Said’s (1978) theory is far-reaching, its pejorative cast over the entire enterprise of Western studies, commentaries, and creative interpretations of Oriental 

subjects has become problematic.3 Said’s focus on the Middle East (a reflection of 

his Palestinian origin) is only partially relevant to South Asia and, in one important 

regard, fundamentally inapplicable to East Asia and Southeast Asia, where colonial 

and imperial dominion was most brutally exercised by Japan, not the West. Further, 

as J. J. Clarke argued, Said’s critique of Western representations of the East, wherein Western knowledge of the Orient “has generally proceeded . . . from cultural 

antipathy,” does not encompass romantic or positive attitudes toward the Orient 

and what they produced. Clarke proposed an “affirmative orientalism, seeking to 

show that the West endeavored to integrate Eastern thought into its own intellectual concerns in a manner which, on the face of it, cannot be fully understood in 

terms of ‘power’ and ‘domination.’”4

 For our appreciation of the rich applications 

of Asian art and thought in modern American art, Clarke’s argument resonated.

Furthermore, those recent works that apply Said’s critique to India or China 

overwhelmingly emphasize nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature, philosophy, and religious studies. The subject of Orientalism and modern Western art, 

and in particular modern American art, has been largely ignored. Finally, his thesis 

does not engage the influence of Orientalism upon the self-awareness of the very 

Asians it purports to describe. Okakura Kakuzo- (also known as Tenshin), author of 

The Ideals of the East (1903) and The Book of Tea (1906), and his contemporary Swami 

Vivekananda, the leading disciple of Sri Ramakrishna and founder of Vedanta societies in Europe and America, are cases in point. As Richard King and Harry Harootunian describe in their essays in The Third Mind, these influential thinkers promoted 

the particular spirituality of Japanese and Indian culture, respectively, in terms that 
Reflections on The Third Mind 253

were formulated by Western Orientalists as a curative for the nihilism and materialism of encroaching modernization and westernization. This history is what Bernard 

Faure calls “secondary Orientalism.”5

Of course, arguments in this vein of intellectual history could not be “displayed” in the show itself; they were developed in the publication which grew to be 

more of a book than a conventional exhibition catalogue. My hope is that the book 

will become a lasting source of discussion among those whose lives are dedicated to 

the history of ideas, and that Orientalism, affirmative Orientalism, and secondary 

Orientalism inspire keen revisionist studies both in the academy and museums.

Goals and Limits

No one faulted The Third Mind for its lack of ambition. Featuring some 270 

works by more than 100 artists, it explored how American art evolved through a 

process of appropriation and integration of Asian sources that developed from the 

1860s through the 1980s, when globalization came to eclipse earlier, more deliberate modes of cultural transmission and reception.

The title we chose, The Third Mind, refers to a “cut-ups” work by the Beat 

writers William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, whose cult of spontaneity in art 

and life drew inspiration from Asian attitudes, or perceived attitudes. This manuscript, which was on display, is composed of random texts and images that evoke 

the eclectic yet purposeful method by which American artists often appropriated 

material from Asia to create new forms, structures, and meanings in their work. 

Misreadings, mediations, denials, and imaginary projections emerge as important 

iterations of this creative process. Some artists identified with non-Western art 

and thought precisely to subvert and critique what they saw as the spiritually 

bankrupt capitalist West. Others culled alternative, East–West identities from 

Transcendentalism, Theosophy, Jung’s aspirations of the collective unconscious, 

and New Age movements preaching the perennial vitality of Asia’s spiritual psychology in a global age. Still others simply extracted and freely enlisted what 

served their particular artistic impulses. Grounded in documentary evidence of 

the artists’ encounters with Asia (through travel, literature, artifacts, friendships, 

and/or spiritual practice), the exhibition showed how artists working in America 

adapted Eastern ideas and art forms to create not only new styles of art, but more 

importantly, a new theoretical definition of the contemplative experience and 

self-transformative role of art itself.

Critics were unanimous that the show was “long overdue”; they were less convinced by its “sprawling” and “unwieldy” scale. (The public was undaunted; an unprecedented number of visitors returned two or three times.) Although it spanned 
254 East–West Interchanges in American Art

120 years and was installed across 35,000 square feet, The Third Mind was not comprehensive, exhaustive, or definitive. Exhibitions are defined by the spaces they occupy, and decisions for what to include are subject to a variety of variable conditions. 

Hundreds more artists could have been included and weren’t, because we knew that 

encyclopedias don’t make good shows. Early on, we thus decided that architecture, 

design, ceramics, fashion, and popular art were beyond this project’s scope.

Opening with the late-nineteenth-century Aesthetic movement, The Third Mind

illuminated the Asian influences shaping such major movements as abstract art, 

conceptual art, minimalism, and the neo-avant-garde as they unfolded in New York 

and on the West Coast. It also presented select developments in modern poetry, 

music, and dance-theater. Organized chronologically and thematically, each of the 

show’s seven sections explored interconnected collectives of artists who shared specific aesthetic strategies and rhetoric derived from Asian sources, which shaped 

their conceptual approach to art-making.6

Pacific Sound

Critics noted the importance of West Coast artists and avant-garde centers 

in The Third Mind. This was no coincidence, as the Pacific coast was a focus of my 

research from the start. One such center was Berkeley in the late 1950s, where La 

Monte Young emerged as an originator of Minimal music with compositions based 

on a series of long sustained tones set in a unique harmonic language. As early as 

1958, Young analyzed the slow-tempo structures of classical Japanese gagaku orchestration and drone harmonics found in Hindustani (North Indian) raga vocal 

styles and tamboura tuning and applied them to his investigations of the tuning 

system called just intonation. Classical Indian musical concepts of svara (the entire 

dimension of pitch and its potential effect on the listener) and tala (the organization of cyclic structures that facilitate improvisation) reinforced Young’s concern 

for pure intonation, an expanded unfolding of time, and organically evolving improvisational techniques.

In 1962, Young formed a group later called The Theatre of Eternal Music whose 

first members included Terry Riley and Marian Zazeela. They later became disciples 

of and collaborated with the master Hindustani raga vocalist Pandit Pran Nath from 

1970 until his death in 1996. Pran Nath taught, “You are the sound: the sound is in 

you.” The concept of a work that was eternal led Young and Zazeela to evolve Dream 

House, a continuous electronic sound environment in luminous fields of colored light 

(Figure 4). Working closely with the artists and their sound and light engineers, the 

Guggenheim constructed a Dream House environment that occupied an entire annex 

gallery space of some 4,000 square feet. Zazeela’s work uses intense light focused 
Reflections on The Third Mind 255

through dichroic filters projected onto sculptural forms to create optical effects that 

alternatively dissolve and substantiate the contours and shadows. These effects are 

harmonically integrated with Young’s musical environment of periodic sound waveforms to create an all-encompassing immersion in the material of sound. The Dream 

House is a full-sensory light and sound environment that can transform the listener’s 

psychic state into what Young calls “the drone-state-of-mind.” Visitors were asked to 

take off their shoes and invited to enter the space; some stayed for hours. Three live 

performances of Young and Zazeela’s Just Alap Raga Ensemble were staged there during the course of the show (featuring Jung Hee Choi, Da’ud Constant, voices; Charles 

Curtis, cello; Jon Catler, electric sustainer guitar; and Naren Budhkar, tabla).

Some critics pointed to a lack of Indian influence in the show, perhaps unaware of 

the equivalent importance we placed on the arts of sound and poetry—as central to our 

thesis as the “visual art” of painting. From Thoreau onward, India’s hold over the American imagination came through its metaphysical poetry (the Vedic texts) and sacred music (raga); the catalogue also examines the influence of Vivekenanda and Coomeraswamy 

in some depth. Yet, the imagination of India in American art and culture—and the 

reasons for its perceived marginalization—definitely calls for greater research. 

Critics and the public alike noted the predominance of East Asian influences 

in the history of American art. This should come as no surprise for anyone with 

a basic knowledge of U.S. history. My catalogue introduction frames America’s 

4. La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Dream House, 1962–present. Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim 

Museum, New York, 2009. Photo by David Heald, courtesy The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
256 East–West Interchanges in American Art

encounter with Asia squarely within its geopolitical history as a Pacific power.7

Japanese art and Zen Buddhism dominate in part because America’s political and 

economic ties with Japan were historically stronger than those with China or India, 

the other prime source nations. Also, Protestant ethics resonated with Japanese 

disembodied “minimalist” aesthetics for the same reasons they clashed with fleshy 

manifestations of India’s Hindu pantheon. Asian immigration, especially on the 

West Coast, also characterizes America’s experience. For much of the nineteenth 

and early twentieth century, the primary waves of immigrants came from southern 

China and Japan to labor in the mining, railroad, and agricultural developments of 

the Western frontier. These migrations changed the fabric of American society and 

nurtured artists’ encounters with Asia. South Asian immigration is more recent 

phenomenon, and would have played a greater role if our scope had extended into 

the 1990s and early 2000s.

Travel and Globalization

This brings us to the question of periodization. We chose to make the year 1989, 

when the Berlin Wall fell, the end date for our historical survey. All the exhibition 

artists were born before 1960. For the generations covered in this exhibition and catalogue, foreign travel was a self-transformative experience. Their process of research 

was intentionally and deeply internalized. Travel was part escape, part enlightenment, 

and grounded in an Orientalist tradition that sought self-betterment through the 

5. Installation view of The Third Mind, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009. Photo by David Heald, 

courtesy The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
Reflections on The Third Mind 257

selective appropriation of ideas, practices, relationships, and material artifacts that 

represented an alternative and superior Other. After 1990, artists traveled less for 

personal research and far more as participants in the biennales and other international 

shows that have proliferated around the globe over the last two decades. This development has paralleled globalization and the consequent shift in the nature of how 

knowledge is transmitted. Another factor in this shift, which supports why the exhibition (Figure 5) ends when it does, is the rise of post-colonial theory and the Orientalist discourse. The introduction of critique, which defined the process of Orientalism, 

served to historicize the phenomenon, and thereby to effect its end. That said, there 

is an enormous amount of important work to be done in sorting out manifestations 

of Asian art and culture, including identity politics among Asian Americans, in the 

context of globalization. These issues were squarely beyond the scope of this show 

but offer rich directions for future research and analyses.

Response and Challenges

Some raised concern about how the exhibition contributed (or not) to the general public’s understanding of “American art” and “Asia.” Were we “essentializing” 

the subject, or was Asia too absent? In fact, the Guggenheim hired an expert museum 

evaluation team, Randi Korn & Associates, to review visitor experiences. (The show’s 

total attendance was 208,995, or 3,029 per day, over 11 weeks.) This report, funded 

by the National Endowment for the Humanities, revealed that the majority of visitors 

were persuaded by how “the exhibition demonstrated Asian influences on American 

artists” and “understood that this is a new idea or new paradigm in art history.”8

 According to Randi Korn, these findings are extraordinary: most visitors to most shows 

don’t come away as changed by what they saw. The report states:

These visitors explained that the theme of the exhibition is Asian influences on American art, and most were able to elaborate, talking about 

Eastern philosophy and religion, minimalism, loss of ego, contemplation, 

beauty, etc. These visitors were very enthusiastic about the exhibition, and 

many of them were surprised by a new discovery or new way of looking at 

American art; for example, quite a few said they had never thought about 

the influence of calligraphy on abstract expressionism or were amazed at 

the connections among all the artists and Asia. Many of them believed they 

would look at American art through a slightly different lens as a result of 

seeing the exhibition. A few even said they developed a new appreciation 

for contemporary art as a result of thinking about Asian influences and 

ideas. All except one said they would now think about American art with 

a heightened awareness of artists’ intentions.9
258 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Much remains to be done, but I am pleased with what the Guggenheim show 

accomplished. The project aimed high: to trace how the art, literature, and philosophy of Asia were transmitted, received, and transformed within American cultural 

and intellectual currents, influencing the articulation of new visual and conceptual 

languages. In addressing these challenges, I believe that it revealed some critical 

fault lines for further investigation. I hope that the information and the arguments raised in the exhibition will live on, not only through the book, website, and 

memories of curatorial and visitor experiences, but in a vigorous inter-disciplinary 

dialogue, across the fields of art history, literature, music, and area studies, about 

American art’s Asian lineage and its meanings.

Notes

1. The realization of all these components of The Third Mind would not have been possible without 

the support and collaboration of many colleagues. I especially acknowledge the contributions of 

Vivien Greene, curator of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art at the Guggenheim, who 

curated the opening section, Aestheticism and Japan; research associate Ikuyo Nakagawa; and 

members of our academic advisory committee.

2. Thomas Merton, “The Significance of the Bhagavad-gita” (1968), in Merton, The Asian Journal of 

Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1973), 349.

3. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1991), 3. Said’s work 

expands upon earlier works that critique the Western construction and imaginary of Asian culture and 

its people such as Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Discovery of India and the East, 

1680–1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (1950; New York: Columbia University Press, 

1984) and John M. Steadman, The Myth of Asia (London: Macmillan, 1970).

4. Said (1978) is quoted in J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and 

Western Thought (London: Routledge, 1997), 8. Clarke also explained his position there: “Where Said, 

drawing upon Michel Foucault’s work concerning the relationship between knowledge and power, 

saw Orientalism as a ‘master narrative’ of Western Imperialism which constructs and controls its 

subjugated other, I shall portray it as tending to confront the structures of Western knowledge and 

power and to engage with Eastern ideas in ways which are more creative, more open-textured, and 

more reciprocal than are allowed for in Said’s critique.”

5. See Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights: An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition 

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 5–9. 

6. The accompanying book follows this chronological structure with chapters that correspond to 

the show’s section titles. These are: Aestheticism and Japan: The Cult of the Orient; Landscapes of 

the Mind: New Conceptions of Nature; Ezra Pound, Modern Poetry, and Dance Theater; The Asian 

Dimensions of Postwar Abstract Art: Calligraphy and Metaphysics; Buddhism and the Neo-AvantGarde: Cage Zen, Beat Zen, and Zen; Art of Perceptual Experience: Pure Abstraction and Ecstatic 

Minimalism; and Performance Art and the Experiential Present. See Alexandra Munroe, The Third Mind: 

American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 

2009), appendices by Ikuyo Nakagawa.

7. The United States colonized the Philippine islands in 1898, had important interests in the 

outcome of Sino-Japanese War of 1895 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, and sided with 

Chiang Kai-shek in the Guomindang’s resistance to the Japanese invasion of China and occupation 

of Manchukuo in the 1930s. Asia’s Pacific War escalated with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 

December 1941. This strike against the U.S. Pacific fleet pulled the United States into World War II. 

Four years later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan’s 

surrender secured American hegemony once again in the region. While the Cold War is often cast as 

a conflict between Soviet spheres of influence and Western Europe and North America, the majority 

of military action took place on the Asian front. The U.S. occupation of Japan (1945–52) and 
Reflections on The Third Mind 259

post-war security pacts with Japan, its central role in the Korean War (1950–53) and subsequent 

long-term military presence in South Korea, and its disastrous engagement in the Vietnam War (ca. 

1961–75) all attest to the enormity of Asia in the history and psyche of the American people.

8. Summative Evaluation: The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989. Prepared 

for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum by Randi Korn & Associates, Alexandria, VA (April 2009). 

Unpublished report.

9. Ibid.
Teaching American Art in East Asia

Eunyoung Cho
261

Teaching American art in East Asia presents an array of challenges for a nonU.S. based art historian, including a daunting lack of resources and the need 

to invent new approaches that inspire the interests of students. I was trained 

for a dozen years in the United States as a historian of American art and 

have been teaching Korean, Chinese, and Japanese students in East Asia ever 

since. For more than nine years, I have been teaching American and modern 

art at Wonkwang University in South Korea, which has a total of 25,000 

students (Figure 1). During the academic year of 2008–09, I had an opportunity to teach American art history as a visiting professor in the Graduate 

School of American Studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. Before 

my teaching in Japan, I was also appointed as honorary visiting professor at 

Yanbian University in Yanji, China, in 2006 and 2007, where I gave lectures 

on American interactions with East Asian art and culture. My students in 

Korea are mostly Koreans, with some Chinese students and college professors enrolled in the master’s and doctoral program. In China, students were 

almost evenly split between Chinese and Korean. In Japan, about two-thirds 

of the graduate students enrolled in my classes were Japanese with the rest 

being mostly Chinese, thus making me known as “the Korean professor 

teaching American art to Japanese and Chinese students in English.”

Globalization has made American popular culture widely available to 

many of my students, but has had little impact on their access to basic information about the history of American art. Challenges in teaching have included responding to their varying understandings or degrees of knowledge 

about American visual culture, meeting student interests that are mostly 

different from those of their American counterparts, exploring themes and 
262 East–West Interchanges in American Art

critical issues that resonate with the students’ goals, and developing alternative 

methodologies to meet their specific needs, as well as fitting this subject into the 

curriculum of each undergraduate and graduate school and dealing with the lack of 

interest on the part of other art historians.

The most immediate challenge concerns textbooks, or the lack of them. Several decades have passed since Western art history courses were first included in 

college curricula in Korea and Japan, and more recently in China. In most courses, 

“Western” means “European,” and almost all of the Western art texts being used 

in classrooms represent European art, with American art usually appearing on the 

scene in the twentieth century, particularly post-World War II.

The majority of students do not feel comfortable reading English texts. While 

a good number of books on modern and contemporary American art now exist 

in translation, there are very few texts available covering American art of the premodern era in Korea and China, and only a few more in Japan. One survey book of 

American art translated in Korean, for instance, was first published in 1958 at the 

behest of the United States Information Service, an overseas branch of the United 

States Information Agency (USIA). James T. Flexner’s The Pocket History of American 

Painting was published by the Korean Ministry of Education and distributed to many 

academic institutions. My search for library holdings shows that the Japanese and 

Chinese translations of Flexner’s book were also published in Tokyo in 1955 and in 

1. Professor Eunyoung Cho teaching an undergraduate class on American art in September 2009 at Wonkwang 

University, Iksan, South Korea.
Teaching American Art in East Asia 263

Taiwan in 1959.1 The U.S. government launched a series of projects to promote the 

distribution of knowledge about American art and culture in East Asia. In Korea, 

between the Korean War and 1966, the U.S. Information Service commissioned the 

translation of 412 books on American politics, society, and culture, but American 

art was not its priority.2 Since then, no Korean-language survey books of American 

art covering the pre-modern era have appeared, whereas a couple of Japanese editions have been published. In Japan, after Flexner’s book, a translation of Abraham 

Davidson’s The Story of American Painting (1974) became available in 1976 along with 

several books on American art and antiques written by Japanese authors.3

Even if they could be translated, the challenge concerning existing texts of 

American art is that they were written mainly from Western/American-centered perspectives, paying little attention to the readers in the “other” world who may have 

differing viewpoints and little knowledge of American history and culture. Thus, 

teaching American art to non-English-speaking Asian students using instructors’ 

direct translations of American texts does not necessarily meet the interests of 

students. I prefer a combination of lecture notes, selected readings, and visual images over any particular American art textbook. This methodology has some merit; 

however, many students, both undergraduate and graduate, do express difficulty in 

approaching American art without texts and internet resources in their own languages. American art survey textbooks suitable for non-Western students with little 

or very basic knowledge of U.S. history and culture need to be developed.

In addition to the difficulties encountered in teaching American art without suitable textbooks, instructors confront the lack of visual and textual resources. Thanks 

to the digitization of archival materials and availability of online databases, the situation is improving. However, access to electronic journals and resources is limited at 

many academic institutions in East Asia, and their library holdings for American art 

are dismal in comparison with those in the United States. I personally purchase almost all of the books on American art necessary for my research and teaching and lend 

them to students who are willing to read English. I may be the only academic in Korea 

who subscribes to the journal American Art, and the only university to do likewise has a 

library supported by the U.S. Embassy in Korea. As for visual resources, the majority 

of students in Northeast Asia have not had an opportunity to “pay their respects” 

in person to an Eakins or a Copley, Bierstadt, Homer, or Ryder. Traveling exhibition 

programs supported by American museums, including the Smithsonian art museums, 

with their well-advertised policy—“if you do not visit us, we will visit you”—seem to 

be aimed mainly at the domestic audience.

We did have and still do have traveling shows of American art in East Asia. Just 

recently, in 2007, the exhibition Art in America: 300 Years of Innovation, launched by 
264 East–West Interchanges in American Art

the Guggenheim Museum and the Terra Foundation for American Art, introduced 

a large number of Chinese people to the history and themes of American art. Art 

exhibitions have proven to be excellent means not only for cross-cultural communications and mutual understanding among nations, but also for furthering political, 

diplomatic, and economic gains in an international society. In the past in East Asia, 

the USIA played a significant role in encouraging artistic and scholarly exchanges 

to bridge gaps between cultures as part of American foreign policy. During the 

post-war and Cold War years between 1952–65, the International Council of the 

Museum of Modern Art in New York, with collaboration from USIA, organized 

or supported more than 150 traveling exhibitions with venues covering five continents. More than half of these tours were organized for Europe as well as Central 

and South America, and 21 exhibitions were aimed at East Asia.4

 A good portion of 

them were sent to Japan, which was undergoing a rapid transformation from being 

America’s enemy to an indispensable ally after the war.

One of the first exhibitions organized for an East Asian tour was Eight American Artists (1957), which included four of the so-called Northwest Coast artists, 

known for their keen interest in and appropriation of Asian art and ideas. About 30 

works by Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson were 

represented in this show, which toured first in South Korea and Japan and then in 

the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand.5

 It is interesting that the USIA did 

not select America’s great landscapes or Westward Ho! expansion images illustrating manifest destiny, or the new “heroic and masculine” “American type” paintings 

of Abstract Expressionists, suitable for representing America’s power in the new 

world order as well as endorsing the “exceptional” characteristics of American art. 

Instead, it chose these Pacific Coast/Seattle-area artists, who were, more or less, 

shunned by the mainstream New York art world owing to their multicultural tastes 

and “unmasculine,” “mystical,” “meditative,” and Japanesque or Asianesque characteristics. Commenting on the purpose of this exhibition, Time magazine predicted 

that the artists would be welcomed in the “Far East” because of their Orientalism, 

mysticism, and calligraphic style—listing, ironically, the very elements for which 

they were undervalued in the United States.6

The United States was not the only country that employed art exhibitions to 

foster communications between cultures and support its foreign policy goals after 

World War II. Japan also attempted to replace its jingoistic image with an aesthetic 

one through its art exhibitions in the United States, often in tandem with American 

endeavors to create and circulate in various areas a new, agreeable image of Japan, 

which was becoming a valuable partner in the Cold War.7

 After the San Francisco 

Peace Treaty of 1951, the Japanese government, in collaboration with the United 
Teaching American Art in East Asia 265

States, organized The Exhibition of Japanese Paintings and Sculpture in 1953, with venues 

in Washington, DC, New York, Seattle, Chicago, and Boston. In the following 

year, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, a traditional Japanese house and 

garden show entitled House in the Garden, as well as a Japanese calligraphy exhibition, 

were great successes, instrumental in the “Japan boom” in the United States that 

developed by the mid-1950s, remarkably soon after the war. In a similar context, 

after the Korean War, the Korean government, with U.S. support, sent the exhibition Masterpieces of Korean Art to eight American cities from New York to Honolulu 

in 1957–58 in an effort to convey the impression of a culture possessing strong 

artistic traditions stretching back thousands of years. Major Chinese exhibitions 

in the United States included a traditional Chinese painting show at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1954 and a series of exhibitions launched after President 

Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China and Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 trip to America.8

Interestingly, in contrast to the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean exhibitions, which 

stressed their long-standing tradition and history, U.S. art exhibitions in East Asia, 

with few exceptions, invariably dealt with post-1940 art demonstrating American 

freedom and diversity, thus unintentionally causing Asian students to conceptualize the art of the United States as having a shorter history than it actually has.

The intrinsic merit of American visual culture established on American soil is 

often questioned once it crosses native borders. Most students show great interest 

in American art beginning in the 1940s, but considerably less in art prior to early 

American modernism and even less in anything before the Hudson River School. 

Before my study in a master’s program in the United States in the late 1980s, I had 

received another master’s degree in the field of modern art in Seoul, where I studied 

under Korean professors who were Sorbonne graduates specializing in French art. 

Such painters as John Singleton Copley, Thomas Cole, or Winslow Homer were 

never mentioned in classes. Art history students had spent U.S. dollar bills with 

George Washington’s portrait but were unfamiliar with Gilbert Stuart. The situation has seen little change in Korea over the past 20 years. A couple of instructors 

might include Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt in their teaching of modern art, 

and a few more professors might discuss Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, and 

Edward Hopper. In my experience, having discussions on pre-1940 American art 

occurs more often while conversing with those in the field of American studies than 

in histories of Western art.

The Association of Historians of Western Art in Korea, of which I am a member, is composed of three divisions: art theory and criticism; art up to the eighteenth century; and modern and contemporary art (for which I have been serving as 

the chair from 2007 to 2011). We hold nationwide conferences and international 
266 East–West Interchanges in American Art

symposiums three times a year, but proposals for pre-1940 American art are rare. 

This situation is largely due to the fact that Korean scholars trained in France, 

Germany, and Italy constitute the majority in the field who are studying art history up to the 1930s, while those trained in the United States focus mainly on 

contemporary art. The lack of American art texts published in Korean, of course, is 

another contributing factor. But the door is open, and scholars and students have 

been encouraged to present and publish papers on American art in the context of 

art history, visual culture, and transcultural studies. Moving beyond academia, I try 

to accommodate invitations for public lectures on American art and to cover preWorld War II American art. For most of those in an audience, it is their first time 

ever hearing details about the subject.

As for the students, they tend to approach American art more as a means to 

understanding the United States and its people and culture than for its aesthetic 

aspects. They find subject matter raising issues of race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, cultural encounters, and identity to be most appealing. During my school years 

in South Korea in the 1980s, seminar discussions about American art concentrated 

on several selected issues and began with Ben Shahn and Social Realism, in which 

we found parallels to Korea’s political turmoil and social predicaments at that time. 

Such an approach and correspondences still hold appeal. Asian students’ responses 

to American art may differ to a varying degree depending on their own interests and 

goals as well as mirror their respective countries’ shifting relations with the United 

States. The needs of students of each Asian country determine how U.S. art is 

perceived and defined. I have been tailoring my teaching to the specific demands of 

Korean, Japanese, and Chinese students by skimming through art of the antebellum 

period to elaborate on late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and by engaging 

them with artists, themes, and issues reflecting the multiracial and multicultural 

facets of America.

For my undergraduate courses at Wonkwang University, I incorporate American 

art history from the colonial period to the present into the six-semester histories of 

Western art courses. I also teach completely different classes for the M.A. program, 

the Ph.D. program, and the teachers college graduate program. I have been offering 

courses to discuss subject matter and issues that resonate with their interests. In 

Japan, at Doshisha University, I adopted a similar, yet broader approach and methodology as the graduate student body was a mix of students of differing nationalities who were majoring in American studies (Figure 2).9

 Few had ever taken an art 

history course, but these students had a solid background in American and cultural 

studies consisting of classes, international conferences, and lecture programs. 

In order to elaborate on the kind of themes generally covered in art history 
Teaching American Art in East Asia 267

classes, I will outline here the contents of two of my syllabi for Doshisha University. Written in English, these syllabi were developed in 2007 for the 2008 academic 

year because the university printed them in advance for students. As the students 

had practically no background in American art, I offered several kinds of courses.

The first was a twentieth-century American art course. I divided it into one part 

covering the 1880s to 1930s, and another from the 1940s to the present. This 

class was essentially an introduction to the history of American modern art with 

references to its European counterparts. I took a general chronological and thematic approach, focusing on historical, social, and cultural developments in a global 

context through a discussion of key artists, major movements, and critical issues 

such as the making of a national identity and style; the construction of “American 

type” paintings and canon; the tensions of class, gender, and race in American art 

scenes; and the issues of globalization, localization, and glocalization.

The two other courses I offered in Japan received a more enthusiastic response 

from the student body. “American Interactions with Japanese Art and Culture,” a version of which I still offer in Korea, covers American interchanges with East Asian art 

and ideas in a broader context. This class deals with American interest in Asian art 

as well as America’s conflicting attitudes toward Asia as manifested in U.S. popular 

culture and various fields of the arts between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth 

centuries. Developed from the topics of my papers published in Korean over the last 

2. American art class at Doshisha University during a field trip in May 2008 to Ho-o-do Temple in Uji, near Kyoto, on 

which the Japanese building, Ho-o-den, at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago was modeled.
268 East–West Interchanges in American Art

10 years, the course traces the various aspects of the reception and appropriation of 

Asian art and culture in American production, including American Japonisme, early 

American modernism, the Pacific Coast artists, Abstract Expressionism, and Fluxus. 

It discusses these subjects in the light of race and gender issues, cultural politics, 

critical perception, and reception of Japanese/Chinese art as well as Japan’s nationalistic philosophical and religious ideas, anti-Asian sentiments, and American nationalist 

tendencies during and after the war. The tentative schedule printed in the 2007 syllabi booklet of Doshisha University shows:10

Week 1. Introduction 

Week 2. The American Encounter with Japan 

Week 3. Japanese Participation in Creating Japonisme 

Week 4. Imaging Cultural and Racial Others: American Perceptions of 

Japan and East Asia 

Week 5. Myth-makers 

Week 6. American Japonisme in Visual Arts and Popular Culture 

Week 7. Images of Japanese Women in High Art and Low Art 

Week 8. Japanizing the American Feminine Ideal

Week 9. Interpreting the Use of Japanese Fashion by American Women 

as Portrayed in American Paintings

Week 10. Early American Modernist Perceptions and Use of Japanese 

Art and Ideas

Week 11, Institutional Zen Buddhism in American Art and Culture

Week 12. Marginalizing Mark Tobey and the so-called “Northwest 

School” 

Week 13 Anti-Japanese/Asian Sentiments in American Modernism

Week 14. After the 1950s

The other course I offered in Japan is “Asian American Art,” an introduction to 

the diverse themes, aspects, and issues of Asian American visual art, artists, and artistic production, in particular, of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Americans. Various 

forms of visual arts made by and about Asian Americans are discussed within the 

context of transnational Asian American histories, cultures, and identities. Some of 

the topics include: Orientalist prejudices and stereotypes of Asians in Hollywood 

and the mass media; the re/creation of history and memory; the politics of Asian 

American production and reception; the impact of Asian American art on the canon 

of American modernism; and the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality.11

The tentative schedule of lectures for this course, as printed in the 2007 Doshisha 

University pamphlet, follows:
Teaching American Art in East Asia 269

Week 1. Introduction

Week 2. Picturing Chinatown 

Week 3. Picturing Asian Women: Geishas and Dragon Ladies 

Week 4. Madame Butterfly versus M. Butterfly 

Week 5. Asians at the World’s Fairs of the Turn of the 20th Century 

Week 6. Representing the “Yellow Peril” 

Week 7. Stereotypes of Asian American Men: American Media Images 

Week 8. Performing the Asian Stereotypes in American Popular Culture 

Week 9. Documenting Japanese American Internment Camps 

Week 10. Visual Art: Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Isamu Noguchi 

Week 11. Visual Art: Minorities in American Mainstream Art Scenes

Week 12. Issues of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity: Yoko Ono and 

Hung Liu

Week 13. Issues of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity II: Theresa Hak 

Kyung Cha, Yong Soon Min, Tomie Arai, Hanh Thi Pham

Week 14. Contemporary Asian American Artists

In my experience, teaching American art on the other side of the globe requires 

reframing American art in order to underline its universality and its applicability to 

all cultures. At the same time, we must also balance that with its Americanness and 

try to avoid either an American or Asian-centered point of view. 

This effort to maintain equilibrium between universality and Americanness, however, is at times questioned: as we locate American art in a global context, should we 

also reexamine it in the context of “glocalization”? By glocalization, I mean a copresence of “globalization” and “localization,” a historical process whereby each locality or indigenous culture bridges the global and local, and thus develops a cultural 

relationship to the global system against the global onslaught of global capitalism, 

ideology, media, and network identities. For a Korean professor teaching American art 

histories to Korean, Japanese, and Chinese students in East Asia in either the mother 

tongue or English, is it effective to adopt wholesale the methodologies and curricula 

of an Americanist in the United States? Should an Asian historian of American art 

teaching in Asia “Asianize” American art or, more specifically, “Koreanize,” “Japanize,” 

or “Chinize” the subject, tailoring it to the sensibilities of the students located in 

their respective cultures and societies? For instance, discussions on Asian-American 

art within the context of transnational Asian-American histories, cultures, and identities, as done in universities in the United States, may not work in individual Asian 

countries that do not support a pan-Asian concept. For many Asian students, Asian 

Americans do not exist; instead, there are only Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, and so forth.
270 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Teaching American art in East Asia invites some significant revisions in the canon 

of American art history and reallocations of “major” and “minor” artists currently engraved in and out of the mainstream. Most Asian students show little interest in the 

American construction of the histories of American art, but demonstrate much more 

interest in a reinterpretation of American art that caters to modern Asian experiences 

and issues. These questions have caused me to reflect on and understand the reasons 

why American organizations, including Christian missions, have changed their strategies over the recent years concerning Asia and have been increasing their efforts to cultivate native emissaries in tandem with sending American counterparts trained in each 

society’s language and culture. Is it not due time for us to develop alternative methodologies for approaching American art in this era of globalization and glocalization?

Notes

1. Flexner’s text was published by Pocket Books, New York, in English in 1950 and printed 

simultaneously by Houghton Mifflin Company under the title A Short History of American Painting. 

A book covering modern American art, John I. H. Baur’s Revolution and Tradition in Modern American 

Art (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1951) was translated and published in Japan in 1954 

and in Korea in 1958 at the commission of the U.S. Information Service.

2. See Young-Na Kim, Korean Art of the Twentieth Century (in Korean) (Seoul: Yekyong, 2001), 

217–19.

3. Flexner’s A Short History of American Painting was translated by Kiyomi Morimoto and printed 

by Arechi Syuppansha in Tokyo in 1955 (175 pages). Davidson’s book was co-translated by Sumio 

Kuwabara and Michiyo Kuwabara and published by PARCO Syuppankyoku in 1976 (166 pages). 

Japanese university library holdings show four American art survey books written by Japanese 

authors: Ryohei Nakamura, Amerika no Bijyutsu [American Art] (Tokyo: Toa Syuppansha, 1947), 

206 pages with 12 illustrations; Koji Ichida, Amerika no Bijyutsu, Kotto [American Art and Antiques] 

(Tokyo: Yuhosha, 1975), 243 pages with 17 illustrations; and Amerika Bijyutsu Hatten shi [The History 

of Development of American Art] (Tokyo: Ichimai no e, 1982), 253 pages with 19 illustrations. 

Sumio Kuwabara, one year after his translation of Davidson’s book, published his own book, Amerika 

Kaiga no Keifu [Genealogy of American Paintings] (Tokyo: Bijyutsu Syuppansha, 1977), 176 pages 

with 24 illustrations.

4. The Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad

(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995), 143. Seven of the 21 shows were organized during the 

period between 1952 and 1960, and the other 14 shows between 1961 and 1965.

5. Ten sculptures by Rhys Caparn, David Hare, Seymour Lipton, and Ezio Martinelli were also 

included.

6. “Contemporaries Abroad,” Time 70 (22 July 1957): 56.

7. See Naoko Shibusawa, American’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, MA: 

Harvard University Press, 2006).

8. Chinese shows in the United States included, for instance, the touring exhibition of Taiwan’s 

National Museum collection in 1962; Beyond the Great Wall of China (1973); New Visions of Classical 

China (1974); and an exhibition of Chin dynasty art and artifacts (1979).

9. The students were all master’s students. There is no general coursework requirement for doctoral 

students at Doshisha University as it has adopted a European system.

10. I later revised some of the content for the actual classes I taught at Doshiha, but followed 

the main frame of the syllabi I had prepared. Graduate School of American Studies 2008 Bulletin, 

Doshisha University, 32–33.

11. Ibid., 36–37.

About the Authors
273

Virginia Anderson received her Ph.D. from Boston University in 2011. From 

2005 to 2010, she was the Diane and Michael Maher Assistant Curator of 

American Art at the Harvard Art Museums. She was co-editor of American 

Paintings at Harvard: Paintings, Watercolors, Pastels, and Stained Glass by Artists Born 

1826–1856 (2008) and has organized the exhibitions The Last Ruskinians: 

Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Herbert Moore, and Their Circle and American Watercolors 

and Pastels, 1875–1950.

Jacquelynn Baas is director emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive and an independent scholar. She is 

the author of Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to 

Today (2004), and co-editor with Mary Jane Jacob of Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (2004) and Learning Mind: Experience into Art (2009). 

John P. Bowles is assistant professor of African American art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of Adrian Piper: Race, 

Gender and Embodiment (2011), and his articles have appeared in American Art, 

Signs, The Art Journal, and elsewhere.

David Cateforis teaches art history at the University of Kansas. His writings on Wenda Gu have appeared in several scholarly journals and in the 

books Wenda Gu: Art From Middle Kingdom to Biological Millennium, Translating 

Visuality—Wenda Gu: Forest of Stone Steles, Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry, 

and Wenda Gu at Dartmouth: The Art of Installation.
274 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Gordon H. Chang is professor of history at Stanford University, specializing in the 

history of American foreign relations and American ethnic history. He was the 

senior editor for the recently published volume Asian American Art: A History, 1850–

1970 (2008).

Eunyoung Cho is associate professor of art history at Wonkwang University in 

South Korea. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Delaware, writing a 

dissertation entitled “The Selling of Japan: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics in 

the American Art World, 1876–1915.” 

Nicole Fabricand-Person is Japanese art specialist at the Marquand Library of Art 

and Archaeology at Princeton University. She is the author of “Demonic Female 

Guardians of the Faith: The Fugen Jurasetsunyo Iconography in Japanese Buddhist 

Art” in Engendering Faith: Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan (2002), and a 2009 

article in The Record (Princeton University Art Museum) entitled: “From the Wild 

West to the Far East: The Imagining of America in a Nineteenth Century Japanese 

Woodblock Print.”

Lee Glazer is associate curator of American art at the Freer Gallery of Art and the 

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, a partner institution in organizing the Smithsonian’s 

2009 East–West Interchanges in American Art symposium.

Amelia A. Goerlitz is fellowship and academic programs coordinator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She was one of the organizers of the Smithsonian’s 

2009 East–West Interchanges in American Art symposium as well as the earlier 

conference American Art in a Global Context (2006).

Hiroko Ikegami is an art historian who specializes in post–1945 American art and its 

global impact. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2007 and is the author 

of The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (2010). 

Patricia Johnston is professor of art history at Salem State University, author of the 

award-winning book Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography, and editor of Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture. Her current research 

examines the influence of global trade on visual arts during the Early Republic.
About the Authors 275

J. M. Mancini teaches at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Her book 

Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory 

Show (Princeton University Press, 2005) won the 2008 Charles C. Eldredge Prize. 

Her current research includes a book to be entitled “Asian Objects: Visual Culture, 

Imperial Relations, and the Pacific World” and a collection, co-edited with Terence 

Dooley, on “The Politics of Architectural Destruction.”

Cynthia Mills is historian emeritus at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where 

she edited the academic journal American Art and served as academic programs advisor. She was one of the organizers of the Smithsonian’s 2009 East–West Interchanges in American Art symposium as well as a 2006 conference, American Art in 

a Global Context.

Partha Mitter is emeritus professor, University of Sussex. His recent publications include The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde—1922–1947 (2007) 

and “Interventions: Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art 

from the Periphery” in Art Bulletin (December 2008).

Alexandra Munroe is senior curator of Asian art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim 

Museum, New York, where she organized The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate 

Asia, 1860–1989 (2009) and co-organized Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe (2008). 

Ding Ning is professor of art history and theory at Peking University and author 

of the award-winning books Dimension of Reception, Psychology of Fine Arts, Dimension 

of Duration: Toward a Philosophy of Art History, Fifteen Lectures on Western Art History, and 

Spectrum of Images: Toward a Cultural Dimension of Visual Art. 

Jennifer Way is associate professor of art history in the College of Visual Arts and 

Design, University of North Texas. Her research has been published in Collections: A 

Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, Sage Encyclopedia of Identity, FATE in Review,

InterCulture, Third Text, Review of Radical Economics, and Journal of Material Culture.

Bert Winther-Tamaki is associate professor of art history at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American 

Artists in the Early Postwar Years (2001), co-author of Isamu Noguchi: A Close Embrace 

of the Earth (2003), and contributor to The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate 

Asia (2009). 
Index
277

abstract art in China, 184–86, 184, 185

Abstract Expressionist painters, 122–24, 180–81

Adams, Ansel, 200

Africa, 29–30

African Americans. See blacks/African Americans

Ai Xuan, 200–201, 201, 203n24

Cold Rain, 201, 201

Fence, 201

Maybe the Sky still So Blue, 201

The Morning Mist over Marshes, 201

Seasonal Wind in Zoige, 201

Shepherd, 201

Alexander, Ramy, 161

all-over composition, 194, 195–96

Altar of Heaven (Temple of Heaven), 196

American Kaleidoscope exhibition, 243

American Philosophical Society, 72–73, 79n13, 129

“The American Way” (Wright), 161

Amino, Leo, 240

Family, 240

Seedling, 240

Anderson, Benedict, 25

Anderson, Guy, 264

Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 25, 230n30

Archer, William

The Green Goddess, 32

architecture

California architectural styles, 41, 45–46, 45

Indo-US relationships and, 33–35, 34

intertwining of Asian and American visual 

productions and, 21, 22

Philippine Islands reconstruction, 39–46, 42, 

45, 46, 47, 50n4–5,10

Arellano, Juan, 40, 49

Aristotelian universalism, 25

Arp, Jean (Hans), 55, 56, 194

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (Smithsonian Institution)

collections and resources, 229n8, 245n1

connection to Freer Gallery, 218, 228n1

A Long and Tumultuous Relationship: 

East–West Interchanges in American Art 

conference, role in, 4

opening of, 218, 228n1

organization of collections, 218

Art in America exhibition, 263–65

The Art of Gaman exhibition, 242

Asian American, coining of term, 16n2

Asian American art

Asian interest in, 269–70

Asian-ness of artwork, 11

Asian referentiality, categories of, 114–15, 124

“Asian tradition” component of, 113–14, 124

collections and resources for study of, 237–44, 

245n12

pan-Asian concept of, 269

post-war enthusiasm for Japanese culture 

and, 122–24

Asian American artists

Abstract Expressionist painters, 122–24

familial and generational demand and artwork by, 11

projects to recover achievements of, 16n2, 

237–238

transnational experience of, 192

World War II and treatment of, 115–22, 124, 

242

The Asian American Century (Cohen), 3, 15, 16n5

Asian American population

attitudes of blacks toward, 151

globalization and Asian American identity 

politics, 257

influence of, 6

in US, 3, 6, 16n5

Asian art

cultural tendencies and expectations and 

selective interests in, 12–14

decorative and graphic arts, 6–7, 8, 8, 235

discovery and use of by the West, 22−23, 

171−73, 193−97, 219−21, 233−37, 

249−50

Numbers in italic indicate pages with illustrations.
278 East–West Interchanges in American Art

export market, art made for, 74, 104, 171–173

influences of on Western art, 130, 192–97, 

233–37

interest in by US audiences, 7, 14, 129–30

methods and techniques, 133−37, 148

narratives and patterns of, 8–9

Western artistic traditions and evaluation of 

qualities of, 23

Asian artists

interchanges between, 10

Western art techniques, training in, 130, 131

Wyeth, impact of work by on, 11, 192, 197–202

Asian cultures

Americanization of, 3

diversity of, 24

interest in, historic and contemporary, 6–7

references to Asia by non-Asian artists, 114–15, 

193–96, 197, 233–37

selective acculturation process, 29

Asian nations

cultural tendencies and expectations and travel 

to, 12–13

ethnographic project by Vos and travel to, 

99–100, 107n6

globalization, technology, and the closeness of, 

5–6

immigrants from, 256

language barriers in, 13

travel to, study of, 12–13,17n9, 161, 225–28, 226, 

227, 234–37, 256–57

US, relationships with, 3, 7, 38–49, 81–82

US history and, 258–59n7

Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions (Wechsler), 240

Aso, Taro, 6

Baishe (White Society) and white in paintings, 133, 

141n13

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 26

Bankoku ezu, 83–84, 84, 92n8

Barrows, David Prescott, 49

Barton, Loren, 234

Bayer, Herbert, 240

Bender, Albert, 151, 157n28

Bentley, William, 69–70, 71–74

Bhagavad Gita, 29–30, 31, 33, 240, 251

blacks/African Americans

attitudes of toward Asian neighbors, 151

civilized, semi-civilized, and uncivilized people, 

86, 91–92, 91

derogatory images of and Japanese selfconceptualization, 11, 81, 92

images and representation of, 89–92, 89, 91

Japanese attitudes toward, 90

Japanese exposure to images of, 81, 83, 92n5

multicultural practices of black artists, 11, 

143−50, 154

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 31

Book of Documents, 57

books and printed materials

print culture, circulation of knowledge, and cosmopolitanism, 25–27

textbooks for teaching art, 262–63, 266

translation of Asian texts, 26

Bowditch, Nathaniel, 71

Brancusi, Constantin, 194

Braque, Georges, 194

Bright, Jonathan, 77

Buck, Pearl, 133

Buddhism

articles of faith, questioning of, 30

DABU/TABU, 55–57, 64n12

Dada as American aspect of, 55

Daoism, blending of with, 54

Head of a Boy sculpture and iconography of 

(Johnson), 150–51

increase in Buddhists in US, 16n5

interest in by US, 30–31

Pearl sculpture and Buddhist deities and royalties 

(Johnson), 143, 144, 145–46, 150, 151

spiritual perspectives of, 63n5

Zen Buddhism, development of, 55

Zen Buddhism, economic and political ties to 

Japan and exposure to, 256

Zen Buddhism, interest in and influence of, 53, 

237, 242

Bufano, Beniamino, 150–54, 157n33–34

Peace, 152–53, 157n31,34

Sun Yat Sen, 151–54, 152, 157n33−34

Burgess, Ruth Payne, 235

Green Chinese Jar, 8, 235

Burnham, David, 39, 43–45, 50n10, 51n12

Burroughs, William S., 253

BUTA, 64n12

Bynner, Walter, 208, 209

Cage, John, 53, 249

Calder, Alexander, 194

Calhoun, Craig, 25, 36n14, 228, 230n24

California

architectural styles from, 41, 45–46, 45

Bay Area as gateway to Pacific Rim, 144–45, 154

increasing focus on in American art studies, 8

Chinese artists in, 127

gazebo and park landscapes from, 42–43

transnational modernist movement, 143–44

Zhang’s paintings of landscapes of, 134, 135, 

141n14

“California artists,” 144

California Asian American Artists Biographical Survey 

1850–1965 (CAAABS), 237

Callahan, Kenneth, 264

calligraphy

Forest of Stone Steles (Gu), 207−8, 208, 209–10, 

212, 213n11

Kanemitsu’s interest in and use of, 123–25

Neon Calligraphy series (Gu), 205, 210–12, 210, 

213n13–14,16–17, 20

Okubo’s study of, 118

post-war interest in, 122

steles, examples of on, 207

white ink for, 132

“Cambodia” upholstery line, 173
Index 279

Caparn, Rhys, 270n5

Carl, Katherine, 102, 105, 107–108n15–16, 234, 243

Carnes, Jonathan, 71, 78n8

Carter, Clara, 48

Carus, Paul, 29

Cassatt, Mary, 265

Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, 194

Central Academy of Graphic Art in Beijing, 180

Chang, Alexandra, 237

Chang, Gordon H., 5, 11, 14, 15, 16n2, 113, 115, 

125n2,4, 126–141, 155n7, 174n10, 202n3, 

245n12

Chang, Shu-chi, 140n2

See also Zhang Shuqi

Charleston, 8

Chen, Chi-Kwan, 240

Chen Shaoping, 187

Chi, Chen, 240

Chiang Kai-shek, 131, 258n7

Chiang Yee, 135, 141n15,20

Chicago Society of Etchers, 236, 245n8

Chien, Chih-Yung, 181

Chien, Chun-Wuei Su, 181−82, 185, 186, 189n12–14

China

abstract art in, 184–86, 184, 185

“Anti-spiritual pollution campaign,” 181

arts and crafts from, interest in by US audiences, 

129–30, 140n3

Clinton’s visit to, 6, 16n4

as contact zone, 4

contemporary art and influence of American art 

on, 187–88, 191, 192–93

cultural diplomacy of, 128–29, 132–33, 139–40

Cultural Revolution, 11, 178, 180, 183, 185, 198, 

202, 243

economic ascension of, 5

education of US public about Chinese art, 11

export market, art made for, 104

imperial portraiture in, 103, 103, 108n24, 227, 234

imports from, historic and contemporary interest 

in, 6–7, 8

isolation of, 186

language, written and spoken, 208–9, 212n8

methods and techniques, adhering Chinese art 

style, 148

Ming dynasty, 191–92

official art style in, 183

open-door policy, 186, 187

painting methods and techniques, Chinese 

compared to Western, 137

papermaking in, 179–80, 179

policies of and US policy toward, 6, 16n4

racism in US and anti-colonial movements in 

India and China, 146

ROCI China project, 11, 178, 181–87, 188n1, 

189n12–14

Roosevelt, gift of painting to from, 128, 131–32, 

131, 140n10

traditional art techniques and development of 

national style, 131

transcription systems and spelling of words, 55

traveling exhibitions from, 265, 270n8

travel to and transformation of worldviews, 10–11

Western art, interest in by, 180–81

Western contemporary art shows in, 178, 180–81

Western culture, openness to, 105

Westernization of arts in, 130, 131

Yanbian University, teaching art at, 261–63, 269

See also Empress Dowager Cixi

China Institute in America, 138

Chinese Art Club of California, 148

Chinese Exclusion Act, 127, 234

Chinese Museum, 129

Chinese Revolutionary Artists’ Club, 156n22

Chinese Spring Festival, 197

Chinnery, George, 127

Chong, Fay, 240

Choo, Chunghi, 242

Circa 1492 exhibition, 9

civil disobedience doctrine, 33

civilized, semi-civilized, and uncivilized people, 83–84, 

84, 86, 91–92, 91, 93n15

Cixi. See Empress Dowager Cixi

Clinton, Hillary, 6, 16n4

Clive, Robert, 32

Clive of India, 32

Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 222–23, 222

Cohen, Warren, 3, 15, 16n5, 130

Cole, Thomas, 265

Colebrooke, H. T., 29

colonial art and architecture

British influences on, 7–8

Orientalism and, 23

The Philippines and, 43−46

Western artistic traditions and evaluation of 

qualities of, 23

colonial era

India and US encounters comparison to 

Indo-British relationships, 27–29

printed materials and the circulation of 

knowledge, 25–27

racism in US and anti-colonial movements in 

India and China, 146

“Colored California” (Du Bois), 151

color theory, American models of, 48

Columbus, Christopher, 9, 75, 87

“Combines” (Rauschenberg), 179

commerce

Asian trading partners, relationships with, 28, 

75–77

circulation of objects through and worldviews, 

10–11, 69, 72–73, 74–75, 77–78

knowledge, free trade, and, 75, 77–78

Salem and commerce between China and the 

East Indies, 69–70, 71

communication, printed materials and the circulation 

of knowledge, 25–27

Conger, Sarah Pike, 102, 107n14, 227, 228

Connaissance du Viêt-nam, 168, 169

contact zones

concept of, 10, 24

destructive creation in, 10
280 East–West Interchanges in American Art

examples of, 4

mobile contact zones, 11

power and power relations and, 24

printed materials and the circulation of 

knowledge, 25–27

productive relationships through exchanges 

in, 24

spectrum of, 10

types of interactions in, 10

Container Corporation of America, 240, 246n17

contemporary art

American art, influence of on Chinese art, 191, 

192–93

international and nomadic artists, 6

readymade and contemporary art strategies, 

182–84, 182, 183

Western art and authentic contemporary art, 178

Contemporary Art Museum in Honolulu, 245n12

Coomaraswamy, Amanda Kentish, 250, 255

Copley, John Singleton, 263, 265

Corné, Michele Felice, 77, 77

Correa, Charles, 34

cosmopolitanism

concept of, 25

cultural exchange and, 24–26

ethnicity, invoking or repressing visual signifiers 

of and, 11

power and power relations and, 24–26, 228, 

230n30

printed materials and the circulation of 

knowledge, 25–27

privilege and, 25, 228

solidarity and, 25

travel and, 10–11, 173, 225–26

universalism and, 25

virtual cosmopolitanism, 25–27

Crane Room, 224

creativity, Daoist view of, 56

Crotti, Jean, 55–56, 64n12−13

cultural diversity, cultural exchange, and globalization 

of culture, 21, 35n1

cultural exchange

asymmetrical exchanges, 24

breakdown of cultural blockade and ROCI, 

187–88

cosmopolitanism and, 24–26

Eurocentrism and the modern world, 22–23

global community and, 27, 36n14

globalization of culture and, 21, 35n1

multiculturalism and, 24

multiple criss-crossings of ideas, 23

power and power relations and, 9, 10, 24

reciprocity of, 23–24, 29

scrutiny of own culture and, 35

cultural imperialism, 13–14, 163, 178

Cultural Revolution, 11, 178, 180, 183, 185, 198, 

202, 243

cultural studies, post-structuralist deconstruction 

and, 23

cultural superiority, 9, 23, 27–28

culture, translation of, 209

DABU/TABU, 55–56, 64n12

Dada

as American aspect of Buddhism, 55

creativity, Daoist view of and, 56

Daoism and, 10, 53–54, 55

elements of and objects for, found or manufactured, 55, 56–57, 56

as everything and nothing, 54–55

metaphor and, 57–58, 62–63

reality and, 62–63

as state of mind, 55

technology and, 57–58

understanding of, 55

Dada Almanac (Huelsenbeck), 55

Dalling, John R., 77

Dao de jing, 54, 56, 57, 59–60, 61–62, 63n9

Daoism/Taoism

aspects with appeal to artists, 56

bellows and, 59–60, 59, 61

Buddhism, blending of with, 54

creativity, view of, 56

DABU/TABU, 55–56, 64n12

Dada and, 10, 53–54, 55

inter-alchemy, 55, 62

mental equilibrium, 62

principles of, 54

reality and, 54

spiritual perspectives of, 63n5

transcription systems and spelling of words, 55

understanding of, 53–54

yin and yang, 55, 58, 58, 60–62

Dark Princess (Du Bois), 146

Date, Hideo

White Gardenias, 240

Davidson, Abraham

The Story of American Painting, 263, 270n3

Dearth, Henry Golden

Bronze Buddha, 235

Deng Xiaoping, 186, 187, 187, 265

Dewey, George, 44

Dewey, John, 138

Dewing, Thomas Wilmer

Before Sunrise, 221

The Four Sylvan Sounds, 221

Lady in White, 235

The Necklace, 235

Dey, Mukul, 235, 245n8

Dey, Ramdulal, 28, 76

de Zayas, Marius, 58, 59

dialogic process, 26

dime novels, 85

Doane, Ralph Harrington, 40

Doi, Isami, 240

Near Coney Island, 239

The Wayward Muse, 246n15

Dong Qichang, 192

Doshi, Balkrishna, 34, 35

Doshisha University, teaching art at, 261–63, 266–69, 

267, 270n9–10

Douglas, Aaron, 145, 155n8

Dow, Arthur Wesley, 249, 250
Index 281

Dream House (Young and Zazeela), 254–55, 255

drypoint etching, 236

Du Bois, W. E. B., 144, 146

“Colored California,” 151

Crisis, 151, 153

Dark Princess, 146

Duchamp, Marcel, 53, 54–56, 56, 61

Bicycle Wheel, 57

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 58

Coffee Mill, 57–58, 64n20

“delay in glass,” 62–63

Étant donnés, 62

Fountain, 61–62, 61, 64–65n31–32

readymade strategy, 183

Duchamp, Suzanne, 55–56, 61

Dunn, Nathan, 129, 140n3

DuPont upholstery line “Cambodia,” 173

Durgaprasad Ghose (Pal), 28

Dutch learning, 85

Dutch traders and cartographers, 83–84, 85, 93n11

Eakins, Thomas, 263, 265

Eames, Charles, 33

Eames, Ray, 33

easel painting, academic study of, 8

East Coast Asian American Art Project (ECAAAP), 

237–38

Eastern Bloc

art of, 178

breakdown of cultural blockade and ROCI, 

187–88

East India Marine Society

activities of, 70–71

artifact collection and museum for objects, 10, 

71–79, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78n6–8, 79n15

Asian trading partners, relationships with, 75–77

formation of and membership in, 70

meanings of collection for society members, 

74–75

meetings of, 69–70, 74–75, 78, 78n1, 79n20

East–West terminology, 13–14

Egyptian reserve heads, 149, 150

Eight American Artists exhibition, 264, 270n5

‘85 Movement, 183, 205

Elkins, Henry, 72

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 30, 31

Empress Dowager Cixi, 100–106, 107n11–13, 

108n25

Carl’s portrait of, 102, 105, 107–8n15–16, 234, 

243

distribution of images of, 101–102, 107n13, 228

The Empress Dowager of China, Cixi (Vos), 10–11, 

97–98, 98, 102–6, 107–8n15, 108n20–22, 

109n28,30–32, 227

Le Rire front cover, 101, 101

The Ocean is the Dragon’s World (Liu), 243, 243

photographs, 227–28, 227

Enlightenment, 25, 29

ethnicity. See race and ethnicity

Europe

art, European influences on, 3, 7

demography of US and ancestors from, 6

Eurocentrism and the modern world, 22–23

Evans, William T., 234, 235, 245n5

The Exhibition of Japanese Paintings and Sculpture, 

264–65

exoticism, 5, 9, 31–32, 83, 114–15, 124, 173

Ezawa, Kota, 244

LYAM 3D, 244

Federal Art Project, Works Progress Administration, 

151–54, 157n30–31,33–34, 239–40, 246n15

Feng Guodong, 185, 187

Fenollosa, Ernest, 17n8, 222, 250

Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 245n12

Flexner, James T.

The Pocket History of American Painting, 262–63, 

270n1,3

Fong, Wing Gig, 240

Fortune magazine, 120–21, 122

Foster, Willis, 152

Frankenstein, Alfred, 137

Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and 

Museum, 132, 140n10

Freer, Charles Lang

collection of, 41, 217−19, 222−23

correspondence and interchange between 

Japanese artists and, 221–24, 223

Dewing, relationship with, 221

East–West narrative of collecting by, 219

Japan, travel to by, 223–26, 223

portrait of, 222, 223

restrictions placed on collection by, 218

Whistler, relationship with, 217, 219

Freer Gallery of Art (Smithsonian Institution)

aesthetic harmonies among the objects in, 

217–18, 222–23

collections and resources, 219−22, 229n8, 245n1

connection to Sackler Gallery, 218, 228n1

A Long and Tumultuous Relationship: East–

West Interchanges in American Art conference, 

role in, 4

marketing slogan of, 217, 228n1

opening of, 217

organization of collections, 218, 222

Peacock Room (Whistler), 219–21, 220, 224

photographs of Japan in, 225–28, 226, 227

restrictions placed on collection by Freer, 218

Frost, Rosamund, 119–20, 120

Fu Baoshi, 131

Fukuzawa Yukichi, 85, 86–88

Sekai kunizukushi, 86−87

Gandhi, Mahatma, 33, 240

Gao Jianfu, 131

Gao Minglu, 178, 184–85

Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 12–13, 12

Garth, John, 137

Garvey, Marcus, 146

Gee, Elizabeth, 145, 146–47, 156n12,15

Gee, Yun, 240, 246n16

Indo-China, 246n16
282 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Gellatly, John, 219, 235, 245n6

Gill, Irving, 45

Ginko-, Adachi

The Strange Tale of the Castaways, 88–89, 88, 

89, 90

Ginsberg, Allen, 249

Glass, Philip, 33

global community, 27, 36n14

globalization

American popular culture and, 261–62

Asian American identity politics and, 257

cultural exchange and globalization of culture, 

21, 35n1

technology, the closeness of Asian nations, and, 

5–6

glocalization, 269

Golden Gate International Exposition, 144

Goo, Gwen-Lin

Semblance, 241

Grand Canyon, 31

Graves, Morris, 133, 237, 245n10, 249, 264

Folded Wings—Memory—& the Moon Weeping, 

237

Great Britain

colonial art and architecture, British influences 

on, 7–8

India and US encounters, comparison to 

Indo-British relationships, 27–29

Indian art history and British colonial relationships, 27

Queen Victoria, distribution of images of, 102, 

107n13

Great Ideas campaigns, 240, 246n17

Great Ideas of Eastern Man, 240

Great Ideas of Western Man, 240

Greek art, 23

Griffin, Walter Burley, 34

Grotell, Maija, 242

Gu, Wenda

Cultural Transference—A Neon Calligraphy Series, 

205, 210–12, 210, 213n13–14, 16–17, 20

Forest of Stone Steles: Retranslation and Rewriting 

of Tang Poetry, 205, 206, 207–10, 207, 208, 

211, 212, 212n6, 213n11

transmission of influences and ideas through 

artwork of, 11

transnational experience of, 205, 208

united nations series, 205–7, 206, 212n3, 213n20

Gu Dexin, 184, 185–86, 187

Gunga Din, 31, 32

Guston, Philip, 123, 192, 197

Gysin, Brion, 253

Hanhardt, John, 244

Hara Tomitaro-, 223–24, 223

Hare, David, 270n5

Harmon Foundation, 138, 143, 155n8, 157n33

Harvard Art Museums, 97, 104

Hassam, Childe

Tanagra, 235

Hausmann, Raoul, 54

He Duoling, 198–200

A House with a Loft, 200

Snow Goose, 200

Spring Wind Has Been Awakened, 198–200, 199

Youth, 200, 200

Heidegger, Martin, 29

Henry and Nancy Rosin Collection, 226

Higa, Karin, 237

High Fiber exhibition, 242

Hill, Thomas

Irrigating at Strawberry Farm, 41

Hinduism

articles of faith, questioning of, 30

Emerson’s interest in, 30

interest in by US, 30–31, 251, 254−55

Hirasuna, Delphine, 242

Hiratsuka, Un-ichi, 241–42

Key Bridge in Winter, 242

Washington Monument, 242

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden 

(Smithsonian Institution), 239, 245n1, 246n16, 

20, 25

Hodges, Benjamin, 72, 73, 77

Hofmann, Hans, 180, 241

Hollywood and images of India, 31–32, 31

Homer, Winslow, 263, 265

The Chinese in New York, 233–34

Honolulu Academy of Art, 245n12

Hood, Marlowe, 184, 185, 186

Hopper, Edward, 265

Horan, Claude, 242

Horiuchi, Paul, 141n20

House in the Garden exhibition, 265

Hsieh, Tenching

Punching the Time Clock on the Hour, 251

Huelsenbeck, Richard, 55

Huet, Henri Giles, 167

humor, Zhuangzi’s use of, 54

Hu Shih, 133, 138

Hyde, Helen, 222, 236

Alley in Chinatown, 234

The Sauce-Pan Shop, 236

Igarta, Venancio, 240

Freedom! 240

Ikegawa, Shiro, 240

imitation, 191–92, 202

immigration and migrants

Asian immigrants, 256

imperialism and, 7

imperialism

artistic interchange and, 9, 10

cultural imperialism, 13−14, 163, 178, 252

migrants, immigration, and, 7

Orientalism and, 252−53, 258n4

Impressionists, Asian influences on works by, 130

India

architecture and Indo-US relationships, 33–35, 34

art history and British colonial relationships, 27

as contact zone, 4

Eurocentrism and the modern world, 22–23
Index 283

films and Hollywood’s image of, 31–32, 31

Indian philosophy, reception of Americans to, 29, 

30–31, 251, 254−55

influences on American art, 255

non-cooperation movement in, 33

photographic documentation of, 32, 32

racism in US and anti-colonial movements in 

India and China, 146

Transcendentalism, discovery of by US, 24, 27, 

30–31

travel to, 12–13

Twain’s characterization of, 28–29, 30

US, trade relationships between, 28, 36n16

US and American Dream, interest in by, 32–33

US encounters, 23−24, 26, 27−29

India International Centre, 34, 35

“Indian Superstition” (Emerson), 30

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, 32

Industrial Revolution, material comforts, and cultural 

superiority, 27

Inokuma, Genichiro, 240

International Style in India, 22, 33–35, 34

Iwata, Kiyomi, 242

Jacques, Bertha, 236

The Jade Mountain (Bynner), 208

James, William, 31, 37n27

Japan

art from, US interest in, 7

blacks, images and representation of, 81, 83, 

89–92, 89, 91, 92n5

bombing of, 7, 258n7

closing of borders and isolation of, 81, 85

as contact zone, 4, 256

Doshisha University, teaching art at, 261, 266–69, 

267, 270n9–11

Dutch, contact with, 85

imports from, historic and contemporary interest 

in, 6–7, 235

modernization of, 85–86

Native Americans, images and representation of, 

81, 83, 85–89, 87, 90, 92, 92n5

opening of by Perry, 7, 81–82, 90, 91–92

painting styles of artists in Tokyo, 120

photographs of, 225–28, 226, 227

post-war enthusiasm for Japanese culture, 

122–24

print movement and Whistler, 222

self image of, 11, 81, 84, 92

traveling exhibitions from, 264–65

travel to, 223–26, 223

US economic and political ties to, 256

Western correspondence and interchange between 

Japanese artists and dealers, 221–23, 223

Westerners in, woodblock images of, 82–83, 82, 

88–89, 88, 89, 90–91, 91

world map and hierarchy of people from different 

nations, 83–84, 84, 92n8

World War II and treatment of Japanese American 

artists, 115–22, 121, 124, 125n4, 242

Yo-ga (Western painting) movement, 116

Japanese American National Museum, 237, 245n12

Jean Shin: Common Threads exhibition, 244

Jeffers, Robinson, 200

Jiang Xiaojian, 202–203n8

Johnson, Nelson T., 132

Johnson, Sargent

African subject matter and style in works by, 

143–44, 144, 146–50, 147, 153, 154, 156n17

Anderson, 149

Asian subject matter and style in works by, 143, 

144–45, 146–47, 150–51, 153–54

Chester, 146–50, 147, 156n15,17

children, sculptures of, 143, 144, 145–51, 145, 

156n15

Defiant, 157n33

Elizabeth Gee, 147, 148–49, 158n12,15

Esther, 151

Forever Free, 152–54, 153, 157n33–34

Head of a Boy, 146, 150–51, 150

Medal of First Award for Sculpture, 149, 

156n22–23

Mother and Child, 157n33

multicultural identity, adoption of, 11, 154

multicultural subject matter and style in works 

by, 142–45, 147, 148, 151, 154, 156n15

Negro Woman, 154

New Negro movement and, 143–44, 146

Pearl, 143, 144, 145–46, 147, 150, 151, 155n8, 

156n15

San Pablo Park, life in, 146, 155–56n11–12

Works Progress Administration, Federal Art 

Project activities, 151–54, 157n30–31, 33–34

Johnston, Harriet Lane, 234–35

Jung, Carl, 250, 253

Kahn, Albert, 32, 32

Kahn, Louis I., 34–35

National Assembly Building, 22, 34–35

Kamekura, Yusaku, 240

Kandinsky, Wassily, 29, 36n14

Kaneko, Jun, 242

Kanemitsu, Matsumi “Mike,” 122–24, 240, 241, 

246n22

Quarter to Five, 123, 123

Santa Anita Yesterday & Today, 241

Kanvinde, A. P., 34

Kan’ya, Morita, 88–90

Kayama, Matazo, 240

Kennedy, John F., 162, 164–65

Kerouac, Jack, 249

Kim, Elaine H., 113–14

Kimura, Keichi

Hawaii, 246n17

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 33

Kingman, Dong, 141n20, 192, 239, 245n13

Bridge Over River, 239

Station Platform, 239

Kipling, Rudyard, 28, 32

Kline, Franz, 7, 122, 123

knowledge, commerce, and free trade, 75, 77–78

Koliang Yih, 194
284 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Korean Association of Historians of Western Art, 

265–66

Kos, Paul

Sound of Ice Melting, 251

Kuniyoshi, Yasuo, 119–22, 124, 239, 245n13

Rape, 120–22, 121

Relaxing, 119–20, 120, 121

Remains of Lunch, 238, 239

Kusama, Yayoi, 16n3, 246n25

La Farge, John, 235

Asian influences on works by, 12, 130, 249

The Last Waterlilies, 133, 141n13

Peonies in the Wind with Kakemono Borders, 235

Water Lily in Sunlight, 235

Lambert, Leon J., 42–43, 48

Park and Colonist Band, 42−43, 42

Langley, Samuel P., 217, 218

Lang Lu Sun, 202–203n8

Laufer, Berthold, 194

Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 31, 37n25

Lebel, Robert, 62

Lee, Anthony W., 7, 10

Lee, Cliff, 242

Lee, Nikki S., 246n25

Léger, Fernand, 194

Liang Zuting, 202–203n8

Li Bai, 197, 209

Li Cheng, 192

Li Jinfa, 202–203n8

Lin Yutang, 133

Lipton, Seymour, 270n5

literati painting, 191, 195–96

Liu, Hung, 243

The Ocean is the Dragon’s World, 243, 243

Liu Haisu, 130, 131, 135, 140n6, 141n16

Liu Kaiqu, 202–203n8

Lives of Bengal Lancer, 32

Li Xianting, 178, 183–84

Li Yishi, 130, 131

Sketch of Zhang Shuqi, 128, 130–31

Locke, Alain, 144, 146, 147–48, 149–50, 156n17

Lodge, Henry Cabot, Jr., 170

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 132, 245n12

Luce, Henry, 133

Lum, Bertha, 222, 236

Luneta and gazebo landscapes, 41–42

Luo Jialun, 131

Machida, Margo, 237

Mack, Ruth, 164

Ma Kelu, 184, 185, 187, 189n21

Mandarin language, 208–209, 212n8

marine societies, 70, 78n3

See also East India Marine Society

Marsh, Joanna, 244

Martin, Agnes, 249

Martinelli, Ezio, 270n5

Masterpieces of Korean Art exhibition, 265

Matisse, Henri, 194

Matsukata, Miye, 242, 245n13

McIntire, Samuel, 77, 77

Mehring, Walter, 55

Melmac plastic dinnerware, 161

Melville, Herman, 31, 37n26

Merce Cunningham Dance Company, 178–79

Merton, Thomas, 250, 251

migrants. See immigration and migrants

Millet, Jean Francois, 131

Ming, Wang, 240

Miró, Joan, 194

Mitchell, Samuel Augustus, 86, 93n15

Mitter, Partha, 10

Much Maligned Monsters, 23

The Triumph of Modernism, 25

Mitter, Raj Kissen, 28

Mizuno, Mineo, 242

Moby Dick and Vishnu’s Matsya incarnation, 31, 

37n26

Mokuami, Kawatake, 88–89

Mondrian, Piet, 29

Montgomery, E. J., 154

Moser, Joann, 237, 243

Motherwell, Robert, 123, 124

Mowbray, H. Siddons

Idle Hours, 235

Moy, Seong, 240, 241, 245n13, 246n21

Kuang Kung, 241, 241

Mrs. Harry C. Norcross Collection, 226, 226

Much Maligned Monsters (Mitter), 23

Mu Ch’i, 12

multiculturalism

cultural exchange and, 24

Johnson’s multicultural subject matter and style, 

143–45, 147, 148, 151, 154, 156n15

multicultural practices of black artists, 11, 150, 154

Munakata, Shiko, 240

Munroe, Alexandra, 7

Munsell, A. H., 48

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 180

museums, partnerships between US and Asian, 16n3

Nakagawa, Ikuyo, 250

Nakamizo, Fugi, 239

Nakashima, George, 34, 242

Nakashima, Tom, 246n24

Sanctuary at Western Sunset, 246n24

Nankoku, Hidai, 123−24

Nath, Pran, 254

National Art Museum of China, 180–81, 182, 182

National Assembly Building, 22, 34–35

National Gallery of Art, 9

National Institute of Design, 33

nationalism, printed materials, and the circulation of 

knowledge, 25

National Museum of American History, 245n1

Native Americans

civilized, semi-civilized, and uncivilized people, 86

ethnographic project by Vos and, 99

images and representation of, 85–89, 87, 88, 90

Japanese responses to images of, 11, 81, 83, 92, 

92n5
Index 285

Nehru, Jawaharlal, 33, 34

Neil, T. A., 28

New Analysts Group, 187

New Deal art programs. See Works Progress 

Administration, Federal Art Project

New Negro movement, 143–44, 146–50, 152, 154

New World Metaphysics, 30

New York

as center of American art studies, 8

Chinatown, paintings based on scenes from, 

233–34, 245n3

Ng, Win, 240

Two Sides of Three Blocks #3, 240–41

Nichols, George, 76

Noguchi, Isamu, 192, 196–97, 240, 245n13

focus of scholars’ attention on, 7

Grey Sun, 240

Noguchi Museum, 245n12

Nomura, Kenjiro

The Farm, 240

Nomura Michi, 224

Nomura Yo-zo-, 223–24, 223

No Name Group, 184

Nusserwanjee Maneckjee Wadia, 76–77, 76, 79n25

Obama, Barack, 6

Obata, Chiura, 115–18, 119, 124, 141n20, 156n22, 239

Setting Sun, 115–16, 115, 124

Sunset, Water Tower, Topaz, 117

Yosemite and national parks landscapes, 239, 

245n14

Obata Rokuichi, 116

Office of War Information (OWI) propaganda posters, 

121–22, 121

Okada, Kenzo, 240, 246n19

Grey, 240

To Point, 240

Okakura Kakuzo-, 252

The Book of Tea, 252

The Ideals of the East, 252

Okamura, Arthur, 240, 246n20

Stray Cur, Eucalyptus Grove, 240

O’Keeffe, Georgia, 61, 265

Okubo, Miné, 117–19, 122, 124

Fortune magazine illustrations, 120–21, 122

Mother and Cat, 117–19, 117

People were in Shock, 118, 119

Olcott, Henry, 31

Ono, Yoko, 246n25

Oppenheimer, Robert, 30, 31

Orientalism

American art and, 6, 147, 221, 234–37, 252–53, 

258n3–4

colonial art and architecture and, 23

concept of, 23, 252−53

imperialism and, 258n4

power and power relations and, 258n4

Oriental Renaissance, 26, 29–30

Pacific Northwest, 4, 8

Pacific Rim, 8, 144–45, 154

Paik, Nam June, 244

Electronic Superhighway, 244

Megatron/Matrix, 244

Zen for TV, 244

Painting in the Chinese Manner (Zhang and Chiang), 

135, 141n15

Pal, Sri Ram

Durgaprasad Ghose, 28

Panama Pacific International Exposition, 144

Pan Tianshou, 131

Park and Colonist Band (Lambert and Springer), 

42–43, 42

Parker, Luther, 41, 45, 46, 50n5

Parker, Maud, 41, 45, 46, 50n5

Parsons, William E., 43–45, 46, 47, 50n10

“Passage to India” (Whitman), 31

Paxton, William M.

The Figurine, 245n7

Peacock Room (Whistler), 219–21, 220, 224

Peale, Charles Willson, 72–73

Pearl Harbor, 119, 120, 132, 242, 258−59n7

Pell, Alfred Duane, 245n6

Perry, Matthew Calbraith, 7, 81–82, 90, 91–92

Peters, John R., 129

Philadelphia, 28, 72, 129, 140n3

Philippine-American War, 39, 41–44, 46

Philippine Islands

architecture and landscapes in, 39–46, 42, 45, 46, 

47, 50n4–5, 50n10

art and craft education and sale of works by 

schoolchildren, 10, 48–49, 51n19

art from, US interest in, 7

church landscapes, 45–46, 46, 51n14

colonialist political agenda and transformation of, 

10, 39–49, 50n5

colonization of by US, 7

as contact zone, 4

Flag Law, 49

holiday celebrations in, 41–42, 47–48, 48, 49, 

51n21

Iwahig Penal Colony, 42, 43

schools and US social engineering, 40, 46–49, 48, 

51n16,19,21

philosophies, Asian

discovery and use of by the West, 22–23, 24, 29, 

33−35, 250

Indian philosophy, reception of Americans to, 29, 

30–31

Pho, Binh, 242

Picabia, Francis, 55, 58

Comic Wedlock, 58, 58

“Dada Manifesto,” 54

Edtaonisl, 58

Ici, C’est Ici Stieglitz Foi et Amour, 59–60, 59, 64n24

Stieglitz Gallery show, 58–59

Udnie, 58

Picasso, Pablo, 58, 194

Piper, Adrian, 249

The Pocket History of American Painting (Flexner), 

262–63, 270n1,3

Pollock, Jackson, 122, 123, 180
286 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Portrait of Lirongbao’s Wife, 103

Pound, Ezra, 249, 250

Pratt, Mary Louise, 24, 25

print culture, circulation of knowledge, and cosmopolitanism, 25–27, 82−83

printed materials. See books and printed materials

privilege, cosmopolitanism and, 25, 228

Qi Baishi, 131, 196

Qin Yufen, 185, 187

race and ethnicity

component of Asian American art as, 113–14, 124

cosmopolitanism and visual signifiers of ethnicity, 

11, 146−51, 223−24

ethnographic imagery and, 81−84, 99–100, 104, 

107n5–6

post-war enthusiasm for Japanese culture and art, 

122–24

racism in US and anti-colonial movements in 

India and China, 146

stereotypes and, 9, 81

World War II and treatment of Japanese American 

artists, 115–22, 121, 124, 125n4, 242

Rauschenberg, Robert

Central Academy of Graphic Art, lecture at, 180

combine technique, 179, 186, 187

Deng Xiaoping portrait for Time magazine, 186, 187

generation gap between Chinese artists and, 

189n21

Gold Standard, 179

Japanese Clayworks, 182

Kabal American Zephyr series, 182

Merce Cunningham Dance Company, work with, 

178–79

readymade and contemporary art strategies, 

182–84, 182

7 Characters, 179–80, 179, 180, 183

Seven-Person Exhibition, visit to, 184–86, 184, 

189n21

Summerhall series, 182

“Tobago Statement,” 176–78

Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Exchange (ROCI), 

11, 177–88, 182, 188n1, 188n5, 189n12–14

Raymond, Antonin, 34

readymade and contemporary art strategies, 182–84, 

182, 183

Reich, Steve, 33

Reid, Robert

The Mirror, 245n7

The Violet Kimono, 235

Reif, Rita, 172

Reinhardt, Ad, 122, 249

Renaissance Society, 193, 194

Ren Bonian, 131

Renwick Gallery, 242, 245n6

Rhoades, Katherine, 222

Riley, Terry, 254

Rivera, Diego, 118, 148–49, 156n22

ROCI. See Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Exchange 

(ROCI)

Roosevelt, Alice, 228

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 128, 131–32, 140n10

Roosevelt, Theodore, 44, 228

Ross, Nancy Wilson, 250

Roy, Rammohun, 29, 30

Russel Wright Program Silk Screen Workshop, 162

Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 235

Ryder, Worth, 116–17

Sackler Gallery. See Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

Sadahide, Utagawa, 90–91

Saff, Donald, 179, 180, 189n8,14

Said, Edward, 23, 252, 258n3–4

Salem, Massachusetts, See also East India Marine 

Society

commerce and, 69–70, 71

as contact zone, 4

Samant, Mohan B., 240

San Francisco

blacks in, attitudes of toward Asian neighbors, 151

Chinatown, paintings based on scenes from, 4–5, 

5, 234

cosmopolitan city, development as, 153

racism, opposition to in, 149

San Francisco Art Association, 144, 149

Sarabhai, Gautam, 34

Sarazin-Levassor, Lydie Fischer, 62

Schamberg, Morton Livingston

God, 56–57, 56

Schertel, Barbara, 154

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 29

Schwab, Raymond, 26

Sekai kunizukushi (Fukuzawa), 86–87

Sekimachi, Kay, 242

Sélavy, Rrose, 61

Seven-Person Exhibition, 184–86, 184, 189n21

Shanghai Art Academy, 130

Shankar, Ravi, 33

Shimomura, Roger, 242–43

Diary, 242

Shin, Jean, 244

Chemical Balance III, 244

Jean Shin: Common Threads, 244

Shiryû, Morita, 123–24

Sloan, James Blanding, 236

Smithsonian American Art Museum

American art with Asian subject matter and style, 

233–37, 234, 236

Asian American art, 237–44, 238, 241, 243

collections and resources for study, 11, 233−244

A Long and Tumultuous Relationship: East–

West Interchanges in American Art conference, 

role in, 4

Research and Scholars Center, 244, 245n1

Smithsonian Institution

Archives of American Art, 152, 153, 238, 241, 

245n1, 246n21

collections and resources for study, 244

collections and resources for study of East–West 

interchanges, 11
Index 287

museums of Asian art, 218

See also specific museums and galleries

Snyder, Gary, 250

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 7, 14, 15, 

249−250, 250, 256

See also The Third Mind exhibition

Song dynasty, 41, 191, 197, 213n11

“Song of Myself” (Whitman), 29

Sonneman, Eve, 245n3

Southeast Asia, handicraft production in, 161–62

South Korea

translation of books for, 262–63

traveling exhibitions from, 265

Wonkwang University, teaching art at, 261–63, 

262, 266, 269

Spartali, Christina, 220, 220

Springer, Milton, 42–43, 48

Park and Colonist Band, 42−43, 42

Stackpole, Ralph, 149

Staged Stories exhibition, 242

Stanley, Henry Morton, 28

Stein, Doshi, and Bhalla, 35

Stein, Joseph Allen, 35

Stieglitz, Alfred, 58–2 59, 64n24, 265

Fountain, 61–62, 61, 64–65n32

Songs of the Sky in Five Pictures, 60

The Story of American Painting (Davidson), 263, 

270n3

Strolling to a Lakeside Gazebo, 41

Stuart, Gilbert, 28, 36n16, 76, 265

Sugimoto, Hiroshi, 246n25

Sullivan, Louis, 34

sumi (black liquid ink on paper), 123, 124, 241

Sundown, 32

Sun Yat Sen, 151–52, 153, 154, 202–203n8

surf boats, 12–13, 12

Suzuki, D. T., 250

Suzuki, Sakari

Merrick Road, 239–40

Sze, Mai-mai, 240

TABU/DABU, 55–56, 64n12

Tactile Sensation Group, 187

Taft, William Howard, 228

Tagore, Rabindranath, 202, 236, 240

Takaezu, Toshiko, 240, 242

Tam, Reuben, 241, 246n20

The Shores of Light, 241

Tamotzu, Chuzo, 241

Tang dynasty poetry. See Gu (Forest of Stone Steles)

Taoism. See Daoism/Taoism

Taylor, Jill Bolte, 63n5

teaching and art education

American art, teaching of in East Asia, 261–70, 

262, 267

approaches to, changes in, 11

art and craft education in the Philippines, 10, 

48–49, 51n19

challenges of, 262–63

Doshisha University, teaching art at, 261–63, 

266–69, 267, 270n9–10

textbooks for, 262–63, 266

traveling exhibitions and, 263–65, 270n4,8

Wonkwang University, teaching art at, 261–63, 

262, 266, 269

Yanbian University, teaching art at, 261–63, 269

technology

Dada and, 57–58

globalization, the closeness of Asian nations, and, 

5–6

teaching American art and, 263

Temple of Heaven (Altar of Heaven), 196

Teng Baiye, 193–96, 193, 202–203n7–8, 237

Teraoka, Masami, 243

MacDonald’s Hamburgers Invading Japan/Tokyo 

Ginza Shuffle, 243

Oiran and Mirror, from the AIDS Series, 243

Tale of 1000 Condoms/Geisha and Skeleton, 243

Teruo, Fujieda, 123

Thayer, Abbott Handerson, 235

The Theatre of Eternal Music, 254

The Third Mind catalogue/book, 249, 250–51, 

252–53

The Third Mind exhibition, 11, 14, 15, 53, 249–59, 

250, 251, 255, 256

Thoreau, Henry David, 30, 33, 250, 251, 255

Walden, 30

Time magazine, 186, 187

Ting, Walasse, 240

Tobey, Mark, 133, 192, 193–95, 237, 245n10, 249, 264

Advance of History, 194, 195

Broadway Norm, 195

Canticle, 237

white writing, 133, 195, 237

Toward Cathay exhibition, 9

Transcendentalism, 24, 27, 30–31

transnationalism, 143–44, 162–63, 163, 167, 

172–73, 192, 202

travel

to Asia, 9, 225–28, 226, 227, 256−57

cosmopolitanism and, 10–11, 173, 224–26

cultural tendencies and expectations, 12–14

landscape painting, scholarly interest in and, 7

transformative experience of ocean-crossing and 

worldviews, 10–11, 256–57

The Triumph of Modernism (Mitter), 25

Tryon, Dwight, 223, 225, 229n18

Twachtman, John Henry, 235

Twain, Mark, 27, 28–29, 30

Tzara, Tristan, 54, 55, 63

Uchida Kuichi, 227

Uchima, Ansei, 240

Unitarianism, 73

United China Relief, 132

United Nations (fine-art advertising campaign), 240

United Nations Economic and Social Council, 164, 

174n12

United States (US)

architecture and Indo-US relationships, 22, 

33–35, 34

Asia and history of, 258–59n7
288 East–West Interchanges in American Art

Asian American population in, 3, 6, 16n5

Asian art, interest in by US audiences, 7, 14, 

129–30, 140n3

Asianization of daily lives in, 3

Asian nations, relationships with, 3

Chinese art and education of US public about, 

11, 128–29, 133, 135–39

globalization and American popular culture, 

261–62

identity creation as former colony, 27–28

impact of Asian contacts on, 15

India, interest in US by, 32–33

India, trade relationships between, 27–29, 

36n16

India, encounters with, 23–24, 26, 27−29

Indian philosophy, reception of Americans to, 

29, 30–31

Japan, economic and political ties to, 256

liberty and equality championship by, 28

as Pacific power, 255–56, 258–59n7

population diversity and American art, 3

racism in US and anti-colonial movements in 

India and China, 146

Roosevelt, gift of painting to from China, 128, 

131–32, 130, 140n10

Transcendentalism and, 24, 27, 30–31

United States Information Agency (USIA), 262–63, 

264

United States Information Service, 263

United States State Department, 161–62

Upanishads, 29, 30

Uyemura, Ken, 171

Uyemura, Michiko, 171

Vanderlyn, John

The Murder of Jane McCrea, 87–88, 88, 89, 90, 

94n21

Van Gogh, Vincent, 130, 131, 133

Vedanta societies, 252

Victoria, Queen, 102, 107n13

Vietnam

American cultural and economic influences in, 

162, 164−65

as contact zone, 4

department store exhibition of handicrafts 

from, 173, 175n45

export market and handicraft production, 11, 

161−62, 163−64, 169–73, 174n12

“Handicraft Program for Tourism” in, 162

handicrafts, production and distribution of, 

161–62

mobility, modernity, and resources for people 

in, 163, 165–67

refugees and, 163, 164–69, 167, 168, 169

Russel Wright Program Silk Screen Workshop, 

162

significance of, 164–65

tourism to, 162, 173

transnationalism and US-Vietnam handicraft program activities, 162–63, 163, 167, 

172–73

war in and US interest in art from, 7

virtual cosmopolitanism, 25–27

Vishnu’s Matsya incarnation and Moby Dick, 31, 

37n26

Vivekananda, Swami, 29, 252, 255

von Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa

God, 56–57, 56

Vos, Eleanor Kaikilani Graham, 99, 99, 107n4

Vos, Hubert

career of, 98–99, 106

Chicago World’s Fair, association with, 99

Eleanor Kaikilani Coney Graham Vos, 99, 99, 

104

The Empress Dowager of China, Cixi, 10–11, 

97–98, 98, 102–106, 107–108n15, 108n20–

22, 109n28,30–32, 227

ethnographic project, 99–100, 104, 107n5–6

painting style of, 97–99, 100, 105

training of, 98

Vroman, Adam Clark, 45

No. 3. Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, 45, 45

Walden (Thoreau), 30

Waley, Arthur, 250

Walker, Josette, 161

Wang, Chun Wen, 242

Wang Linyi, 202–203n8

Wang Yidong, 200, 201

Wan Luyan, 184, 185–86, 187

Warashina, Patti, 242, 245n13

Washington, George, 28, 36n16, 76

Watson, Margaret, 223, 223

Watson-Schütze, Eva, 194

Wechsler, Jeffrey (Asian Traditions/Modern 

Expressions), 240

Weeks, Edwin Lord

Street Scene in India, 234–35, 234

Wenda Gu, see Gu, Wenda

Weng, Wango, 138, 141n21

Western cultures, diversity of, 24

Weston, Edward, 200

What’s it All Mean (Wiley), 237

Whistler, James McNeill

Arrangement in Flesh Colour and Green, 221

Asian influences and, 130, 219, 249

collections of works by, 219, 229n8

focus of scholars’ attention on, 7

Freer, relationship with, 217, 219

Japanese print movement and, 222

Peacock Room, 219–21, 20, 224

La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine, 220–21, 

220

“Ten O’Clock” lecture, 217–18

Venus Rising from the Sea, 222, 223

White Society (Baishe) and “whiteism” in paintings, 133, 141n13

Whitman, Walt

Indian philosophy, interest in by, 30–31

Leaves of Grass, 31, 37n25

“Passage to India,” 31

“Song of Myself,” 31
Index 289

Wiles, Irving R.

Brown Kimono, 235

Wiley, William T., 16, 53, 237

Body Dharma, 237

There is no Buddha Out There, 237

What’s it All Mean, 237

Wilkins, Charles, 29

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 23

Winkler, John, 234

Winstanley, William, 36n16, 76

Winther-Tamaki, Bert, 9, 13, 14, 15

Wonkwang University, teaching art at, 260–63, 262, 

266, 269

Wores, Theodore

The Chinese Fishmonger, 4–5, 5, 234

Works Progress Administration, Federal Art Project, 

151–52, 157n30,33, 239–40, 246n15

Wright, Frank Lloyd, 34−35, 172

Wright, Russel, 161–75, 166, 167, 168

Wu Changshuo, 131

Wu Fuzhi, 131

Wu Pingren

History, 183, 184

Wyeth, Andrew, 201

Christina’s World, 198, 198, 200

impact of work by on Chinese painters, 192, 197–202

Wyeth, James, 200

Xuan Paper Mill, 179–80, 179

Xu Beihong, 131

Xu Bing, 178, 182, 182–83

Xuling, 227

Yamada, Shige, 242

Yanbian University, teaching art at, 261–63

Yo-ga (Western painting) movement, 116

Yokohama picture (yokohama-e), 82–83, 82, 

90–92

Yong, Lai, 127

Yoshida Hiroshi, 224

Yoshitoyo, Ichiryusai, 91

American Black Men (Amerika kuronbo-), 91

Young, La Monte, 254–55

Dream House, 254–55, 255

Yuh, Sun Koo, 242

Zazeela, Marian, 254–55

Dream House, 254–55, 255

Zen Buddhism

development of, 55

interest in and influence of, 6, 12, 16, 53, 237, 

242, 256

Zhang Daqian, 131

Zhang Shuqi, 126−41, 128, 136, 138

Lone Cypress, 134, 135

Messengers of Peace/A Hundred Doves, 128, 

131–32, 131, 137, 140n10−11

Painting in the Chinese Manner, 135, 141n15

Sketch of Zhang Shuqi (Li), 128, 130–31

Sunflowers, 133–34, 134

Zhang Wei, 178, 184–86, 184, 185, 187

Zhao Shao’ang, 131

Zhao Zuo, 192

Zhuangzi, 54, 55

Zhu Jinshi, 184, 185, 187, 189n21
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The East–West Interchanges in American Art symposium 

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