This event has been postponed until further notice. 

How was landscape experienced in nineteenth-century Japan? How were travelers’ multivalent experiences of landscape—from their physical acts of roaming and gazing to their mental acts of internalizing and remembering—shared with others? This talk will explore these questions by looking closely at Plum Blossoms in Tsukigase Valley, a handscroll produced by the woman literati artist Okuhara Seiko (1837–1913) in 1896. The work brings to life the painter’s visit to the plum-filled valley of Tsukigase, high in the mountains of what is now Nara Prefecture, eighteen years earlier. Combining painting, prose, and poetry, Seiko’s scroll immerses its viewer in the sensory pleasures of wandering this paradisal valley that mediates between the real and the remembered, the physical and the fantastic.

Image: Okuhara Seiko, Plum Blossoms in Tsukigase Valley (detail), 1896, handscroll, ink and colors on silk, 28.4 x 508.2 cm. Koga City Museum of History.

Bio
Yurika Wakamatsu (PhD, Harvard) is assistant professor of East Asian art history at Occidental College. She is a specialist in literati art—the combined practice of painting, poetry, and calligraphy—of Japan’s Meiji period; her work focuses especially on women artists. Her most recent article “Imagined Selves: Mediating Desires and Subject Positions in the Japanese Literati Art of Okuhara Seiko (1837–1913)” appeared in Archives of Asian Art. The article examines how a work of literati art not only can function as a form of self-expression on the part of the artist, but can also generate identities and mediate social relations between the artist and the viewer. Her current projects investigate depictions of actual sites in nineteenth-century Japan, as well as the shifting conceptions of art, home, and womanhood during Japan’s modernization.