Painting in Between: Gender and Modernity in the Japanese Literati Art of Okuhara Seiko (1837-1913)

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the aesthetic and conceptual transformations of literati art—a dominant mode of both being and representing in the East Asian cultural sphere that experienced unprecedented popularity in early Meiji-period (1868-1912) Japan. Although literati culture had predominantly been seen as a male prerogative since its genesis in medieval China, in early Meiji Japan, the female painter Okuhara Seiko capitalized on this mode of picture-making and self-fashioning. Producing dynamic ink landscapes and deliberately idiosyncratic calligraphy while simultaneously embodying literati ideals through her manner of living, Seiko inhabited the persona of a literatus and crafted an alternative social world. Seiko’s work thus provides a compelling lens through which to reconsider socially constructed dichotomies in the modern era—specifically, conceptions of premodernity and modernity, masculinity and femininity, and China and Japan—as she negotiated the boundaries of these ostensibly dichotomous categories to create a space in which to assert her agency.

Chapter 1 reconstructs the sociocultural circumstances within which literati art thrived in the 1870s. It demonstrates that Seiko deployed literati art as a means of pursuing her autonomy, embodying eremitic ideals both in painting and in actual life and blurring the boundaries between the real world and the ideal world of litterateurs. Chapter 2 examines Seiko’s and contemporary artists’ attempts to “modernize” literati art. These efforts were formulated in response to the reconceptualization of Sinitic culture from the 1880s onward, when the newly defined category of bunjinga (literati painting), as well as Sinitic prose and poetry, came to be deemed incompatible with modernity. Focusing on Seiko’s engagement with literati art in her place of retirement, chapter 3 analyzes the ways in which works of literati art could accommodate multiple subject positions and enable an imaginative transgression of gender and cultural boundaries. Chapter 4 and the epilogue investigate discursive constructions of female artists by contemporary critics in relation to shifting conceptions of art, gender, and sexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Examining the complex relationships between changing perceptions of Sinitic culture and women’s place therein, this study ultimately seeks to reconceptualize the relationship between gender and literati art.