Refracted Modernity
Subtitle: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Published: August 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 285
ISBN-13: 9780824830502
Subjects: History of art & design styles: from c 1900 -; Oriental art; Theory of art; c 1800 to c 1900; Art; Art & Art Instruction; General; Asian; History - Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945); 20th century; Art, Chinese; Imperialism in art; Japanese influences; Taiwan
Description: "The nine essays collected here present different perspectives on Taiwanese visual culture and landscape during the Japanese colonial period (1895 -1945), focusing variously on travel writings, Western and Japanese/Oriental-style paintings, architecture, aboriginal material culture, and crafts. Issues addressed include the imagined Taiwan and the "discovery" of the Taiwanese landscape, which developed into the imperial ideology of nangoku (southern country); the problematic idea of "local color," which was imposed by Japanese, and its relation to the "nativism" that was embraced by Taiwanese; the gendered modernity exemplified in the representation of Chinese/Taiwanese women; and the development of Taiwanese artifacts and crafts from colonial to postcolonial times, from their discovery, estheticization, and industrialization to their commodification by both the colonizers and the colonized." "Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan will be of interest to historians of Taiwan, China, and Japan; art historians of Chinese and Japanese art; and scholars of colonialism, decolonization, modernism, and modernity in general. Readers in the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, visual culture, and women's studies will find its essays timely and highly informative."--book jacket.