Abstract

Looking Modern: East Asian Visual Culture from Treaty Ports to World War II examines multiple dimensions of visual modernity in East Asia from the nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth. The papers were drawn from two symposia held at the Center for the Art of East Asia in the Department of Art History, the University of Chicago, which brought out important themes in East Asian Art and visual culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including photography, cinema, and fashion, changing roles of women, commercialization of art, and the impact of Western cultures. They undertook a broad interpretation of visual modernity to include visual dimensions of human endeavor traditionally seen as outside of artistic production in order to encourage exploration of new and understudied materials across disciplinary boundaries. This volume not only provides important background in the growth of modern visual culture in East Asia, but also is a collection of seminal research on specific topics that have a broad impact upon present-day visual arts of China and Japan.