Global COE Program　INFORMATION

September 4, 2008

Josef Kreiner （Day 2, Part 1 of the Afternoon）

Josef Kreiner (Special Professor, Center for International Japan-Studies and Planning and Strategy Center, Hosei University; Professor Emeritus, University of Bonn)

Japanese Collections in Europe: Their role within the Japanese Studies and their significance for the Formation of the Image of Japan
 
     More than 500.000 items of Japanese arts and crafts including ethnographic material are kept in national, royal or private European collections today. Lacquerware, screens, armour and porcelain kept in cabinets of curiosities (Kunstkammern) since the 16th century, or kimonos highly esteemed as objects of eveyday life, inspired the imagination of the Europeans and fostered a very positive image of Japan in the past. Often these early collections developed to form the fundamental collections of many national museums in the 19th century. The collection of Engelbert Kaempfer for instance was one such early example of a Japanese collection to join the British Museum. But Japanese studies, when it was established as a "new" academic subject around the mid-19th century, was largely conceptualised as philology. A century later its paradigm finally changed towards a more sociological approach, but the value and benefits these vast collections represent for the Japanese studies, is still being widely ignored.
     This regrettable situation was first highlighted by curators from museums, libraries and archives from all over Central Europe at an international symposium hosted by the Institute of Japanese Studies, University of Bonn, in 1980. This was the birth hour of the European Association of Japanese Resource Specialists (EAJRS) and led to a research project on Ainu and Ryukyu/Okinawan collections conducted by the University of Bonn. As a further step, ca. 60 European museums (excluding Russia and the CIS) participated at an international symposium sponsored by the Toyota Foundation Tokyo in Königswinter/Bonn in 2003, to report on their Japanese collections. It culminated in the two-volume publication of the „Japanese Collections in European Museums“ in 2005 (a third volume is in print) containing the overview of 300 Japan collections that currently exist Europe. At this workshop, a platform of cooperation between European museums including ethnographic collections named „European Network of Japanese Art Collections (ENJAC)“, was established. A second workshop in Prague followed in 2006. Currently the University of Zurich is preparing the third forthcoming symposium, focusing on collections of Japanese Buddhist art.
     This lecture will firstly illustrate the history and present situation of Japanese collections in Europe. It will then attempt to analyse their importance within the Japanese Studies and touch on the topic of the formation of the European image of Japan.

Abstracts , DH-JAC2009 | by koho | MORE INFO | | [EDIT]

September 4, 2008

Sarah E. Thompson and Abraham Schroeder (Day 2, Part 1 of the Afternoon)

Sarah E. Thompson (Assistant Curator for Japanese Prints, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Abraham Schroeder (Research Assistant for Japanese Prints, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

The Japanese Print Access and Documentation Project (JPADP) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA)

Joint summary:
The collection of some 50,000 Japanese prints at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is the largest such collection outside Japan and one of the largest in the world; it includes everything from early Buddhist printing to works by living artists but consists primarily of Edo-period ukiyo-e woodblock prints. The enormous size of the collection, much of which was acquired in Japan during the Meiji period, made it difficult to locate individual works within the collection and impossible to publish a conventional hard-copy catalogue. Storage conditions were also often unacceptable by modern archival standards.
To address these problems, in January 2005 the MFA launched a project to photograph, catalogue digitally for website publication, and rehouse the entire collection. The photography, rehousing, and web publication with basic initial cataloguing are expected to be completed during 2010.
The first half of our double presentation will introduce the special problems of the MFA collection and the plans made for dealing with them; the second half will focus on the technical details of the project and the day-to-day workflow for both MFA employees and the MFA volunteers and visiting scholars (from institutions such as Ritsumeikan University) whose help makes the project possible.

Abstracts , DH-JAC2009 | by koho | MORE INFO | | [EDIT]

September 4, 2008

Helena Honcoopová (Day 2, Part 1 of the Afternoon)

Helena Honcoopová (Director of the Collection of Oriental Art, National Gallery in Prague)
 
Collections of Japanese Arts in the Czech Republic and their Digitation
 
I. Czech collections of Japanese arts and crafts - an overview in numbers ( 2 major state collections, 5 regional collections (Brno, Plzeň, Liberec, Olomouc, Opava) -  minor oriental art collections incorporated to the movable property of Czech chateaux and castles).
 
II. Usage of digital means in accessing the public art collections in two major institutions - the National Gallery in Prague (The Collection of Oriental Art), the National Museum (The Asian Art Department of the Náprstek Museum).
 
III. Perspectives of further development of  international cooperation in reasearch through digital means- an attempt of creating a network of European Japanese art collections Enjac - its goals and its limitations.    
 

Abstracts , DH-JAC2009 | by koho | MORE INFO | | [EDIT]

September 4, 2008

Rosina Buckland (Day 2, Part 1 of the Afternoon)