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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., East Asian Languages and Civilizations

The dissertation examines the history of modern design in early 20th-century China. The emergent field of design looked to replace the specific cultural and historical references of visual art with an international language of geometry and abstraction. However, design practices also, encouraged extracting culturally unique visual forms by looking inward at a nation’s constructed past. The challenge of uniting these dual, and seemingly contradictory, goals was met in a collaborative book cover design project between Lu Xun (1881-1936), China’s most influential modern writer, and Tao Yuanqing (1893-1929), a painter who transformed ancient motifs into a transnational vocabulary of modern design. As the title suggests, the dissertation provides a history of modern Chinese design in four chapters, with the Lu Xun-Tao Yuanqing collaboration at its core. The investigation begins with the moment of culmination, wherein Lu Xun and Tao Yuanqing’s intersubjective dynamic allowed for evocative yet inscrutable book cover designs to be created. In the new medium of design, the writer’s anxiety regarding the inadequacy of language converged with the artist’s desire for ambiguity in art. The critical analysis then moves back to earlier instances of design and examines how the history of design in China was inflected by the World Exposition, Japan, art education, and commercial art. The inquiry finally moves forward to the discussion of Tao Yuanqing’s art and design’s relationship with a range of discursive fields in aesthetics and literary criticism, including modern notions of beauty, childlikeness, empathy, the native soil movement, cosmopolitanism, symbolism, and ambiguity in art. This part reveals how Tao Yuanqing’s innovations ironically endorsed while simultaneously subverting contemporary interpretive efforts., History of Art and Architecture