“Romanticized Japan: Contextualizing Japan Through the Western Gaze” is an exhibition curated by students in Assistant Professor Erin Schoneveld’s Spring 2020 seminar Japanese Modernism Across Media, which examines the revolutionary transformation of Japanese artistic and exhibition practices from the late nineteenth century through the present day. In creating an exhibition about Japanese tourist photography, students in the seminar were tasked with the following question: Do these images accurately document life during 19th century Japan, or are they better suited to reveal the expectations and attitudes of the Western audience who consumed them? Through the curation and exhibition of Japanese tourist photographs and ukiyo-e woodblock prints from Haverford College’s Quaker & Special Collections, students sought to answer this question by exploring methods of artistic production, confrontations between tradition and modernity, and the articulation and representation of identity—individually, culturally, and nationally—during Japan’s Meiji period (1868–1912).
October 19, 2020-February 5, 2021
Visit in person in Lutnick Library or online here: http://ds.haverford.edu/romanticized-japan/
Join us for a virtual opening on October 27, 2020 at 7:00pm via Zoom: https://haverford.zoom.us/j/95782858900