The Multi-centered Modernities of Hokusai’s “Under the Wave off Kanagawa”
Authors
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Christine Guth
Royal College of Art, London
No single image from Japan, possibly even all of Asia, has been reproduced so often or undergone so many reincarnations in so many parts of the world as Hokusai’s “Under the Wave off Kanagawa.” At once abstract and concrete, this archetypical great wave is bound up with powerful mythologies of natural destruction and renewal. It draws attention to the border-crossing movement of ideas, people, technologies, capital, and commodities. It evokes the oceans over which Europe, America, and Japan have struggled for territorial control. It forces us to rethink the fruitful relationship between creativity and hybridity. But above all, it challenges the binary thinking of boundaries and limits, inside and outside, centers and peripheries.
Hokusai’s woodcut has been a site where the tensions and contradictions of globalism have been negotiated and aestheticized since its appearance as part of the artist’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. This paper explored the multivalent meanings of this dramatic image through its iterations across a multi-sited network spanning Japan, Europe and America from the time of its publication in 1831 until 1904 in media ranging from Danish porcelains and French sheet music to Russian book illustrations. By looking closely at the local conditions, strategies, and practices associated with these cultural transfers, it argued for a more nuanced sense of the complex geographies of modernism and modernity.
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Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
