Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit

Abstract

Reviewed by: Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit Daniel Poch Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019. Pp. xv + 315. $75.00 cloth, $45.00 paper. Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit’s new book, Aesthetic Life, is a rich investigation into the emergence of the bijin 美人 (beautiful woman) as a prominent figure in mid-to-late Meiji- and Taishō-period Japanese culture. The immediate goal of the study is more specifically art-historical: to examine the factors that led to the emergence of bijinga 美人画 (paintings of beautiful women) as a distinct subbranch of nihonga 日本画 (Japanese-style painting) in the early twentieth century. But in doing so, Lippit uncovers the stunning ubiquity of the bijin, within and much beyond the visual field, as a figure continuously depicted in Japanese artworks and literary texts and discussed by prominent artists, critics, journalists, literary authors, and politicians from the 1880s onward. [End Page 539] The book’s fundamental insight is that the bijin emerged concurrently with the notions of modern Japanese aesthetics (bigaku 美学) and art (bijutsu 美術)—with which she shares the character bi 美 (beauty)—as a reaction to the encounter with Western art. Lippit argues that the bijin was an “ideological figure” (p. 17), produced as the embodiment of Japanese aesthetics and as a “staple figure associated with Japanese art and culture” (p. 10) in a historical environment of intense cultural nationalism marked by Japan’s wars against China and Russia, as well as its colonialist expansion in East Asia. Doing justice to the broad cultural presence of the bijin in discourses and artistic works, Aesthetic Life covers an impressive range of primary sources and secondary scholarship, straddling the disciplinary divides of art history, literary studies, and history. Its interdisciplinary ambition is one of the study’s most salient strengths. While highlighting the visual and textual imagination of the bijin as part of a national debate surrounding Japanese aesthetics and art, Lippit also sheds light on the figure’s transnational production. A reaction and challenge to the importation of Western notions of art, especially in Japanese yōga 洋画 (Western-style painting), the bijin was actively exported internationally as the epitome of Japan as a beautiful, cultured, and feminized nation. The global circulation of the bijin contributed, Lippit argues, to the Western fascination with Japanese art and beauty in the era of Japonisme (the craze for Japanese aesthetics in European art), which in turn influenced Japanese intellectuals and artists. At the same time, the international promotion of the bijin aimed to conceal Japan’s contemporaneous aggressive expansion as a military and colonial power. Aesthetic Life consists of seven chapters (plus an introduction and a short coda) that often combine art-historical and literary analysis with a discussion of a rich array of critical and contextual material. The first two chapters are specifically concerned with the transnational production of the bijin. Chapter 1 starts by examining Western discourses on Japanese women and their beauty, especially under the guise of the geisha, as indicative of Japanese culture and civilization in the context of nineteenth-century Western imperialism and colonialism. Japanese writers and intellectuals, such as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke 芥川龍之介 (1892–1927), both reproduced and questioned these discourses in their uneasy position between colonized and colonizer. The chapter also [End Page 540] points out that Western observers often perceived Japanese women, both in reality and as represented in artworks, as unnatural and ugly. This perception, Lippit argues, challenged the beauty of the allegedly natural nude woman in the Western aesthetic tradition and opened up an alternative field of artistic representation, in Japonisme, of the bijin as “unnatural” beauty clothed in kimono (p. 53). Chapter 2 discusses how the Japanese government conceived of sending artworks and living women to various world’s fairs, especially the one held in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904, as part of an “artistic warfare” (p. 63) meant to strengthen Japan’s international geopolitical position as a cultured nation. Lippit shows that the geisha-bijin as the feminized artistic epitome of Japan was perceived as extremely highly ranked within the new racial hierarchy at the fair. The...