Articles
Visual Bilingualism and Mission Art: A Reconsideration of "Early Western-Style Painting" in Japan
Abstract
This paper addresses the topics of artistic hybridity and visual bilingualism, through a critical analysis of Japanese "early Western-style painting," a disputed genre of hybrid paintings from Azuchi Momoyama and early Edo that combine Asian and European traditions. The paper examines one such example of early Western-style paintings, a pair of Japanese folding screens that represents figures of European aristocrats in a European pastoral landscape. The paper shows that this pair of folding screens is a result of cross cultural collaboration between Japanese painters and European missionaries, and analyzes the screens in view of Christian and Buddhist iconographies. The paper aims to demonstrate the way in which the anonymous painter successfully combined Japanese and European tradition to make the artwork "bilingual" aesthetically as well as religiously.