UC San Diego

This dissertation examines the historical formation of a Japanese term zōkei from the 1890s to the 1940s. The term zōkei refers to a cooperative relationship of eyes and hands in making forms out of substance. Observing practices informed by zōkei creates a historical condition for looking at “Japanese art” beyond state-defined parameters of fine art. This project examines such beginning moments in “visual practice” alongside modern Japan’s imperial framework in modern Japan. This dissertation examines four episodes of “visual practice” in the context of modern Japan from the 1890s to the 1940s. The first episode introduces the use of vision in the teachings of art anatomy in 1890s Japan. Rather than seeing anatomy from the angle of dissection, I point out the role of pathological observation in the teachings of art anatomy. The contact of vision with the surface of plasters creates a preposition of vision, orienting viewer’s body in the space for looking practices. The second episode details the use of tactile vision in the ethnographical drawings. Descriptively confirming forms of plastic objects, the observing practice of modernologist’s ethnographical drawings diminish the distinction between fine art and folk art, viewing the world as social spaces full of plastic arts. The third episode reviews Bauhaus-informed art classes at elementary schools during the 1930s and design education at the midcentury. Rather than art academicism, the aesthetic education emerging from this context prioritizes the use of vision for sensory experiences, thereby ensuring individual agency. The fourth episode analyzes how observing practices were disrupted during the wartime period, and being consumed by imperial politics as a wartime discourse “visual culture” to build an ideology of Greater-Asia. Throughout the four chapters, this dissertation outlines a framework around the term zōkei to speculate a transition of art-historical writings away from “Japanese art history.” Rather than reenforcing nation-based art-historical writing, or naturalizing vision as an empirical tool for the state’s politics, the project centers on the practice of vision itself and the historical deployments it had that contributes to term to be translated as “visual arts.” In my discussion, “visual art” presents a descriptive mode in orienting the body and plastic objects in a social world. In this context, the artist’s body exists in a multidimensional relationship between vision and plasticity.