Mediating the Foreign

Abstract

In 1726, Dutch painter Willem van Royen’s painting: Birds and Flowers arrived in Japan as a gift from the Dutch East India Company to the Shogun Yoshimune. Subsequently, the painting was gifted to Gohyaku Rakanji, a Zen Obaku temple in Edo, where Japanese rangaku scholars: brothers Ishikawa Tairo and Moko and Tani Buncho encountered and copied the work. This article examines the translation in cultural meaning Van Royen’s painting underwent by analyzing transcultural remediations, or indigenous re-interpretations spawned by encounters with the work, and the persistence of the image due to its ability to be “visually trilingual,” that is, visually legible to three audiences: Dutch VOC merchants, Obaku worshippers, and Japanese scholars. Previous scholars have explored the meaning of the painting for Dutch and Japanese audiences, but I argue the devotional and hybrid cultural context of Rakanji as a Zen temple and the eclectic visual culture of the Edo period, in which viewers understood this object, is fundamental to a complete exploration of the painting’s reception. Since Edo natives considered the Obaku sect of Zen Buddhism an import from Ming-dynasty China, the image’s location surely impacted the viewer’s interpretation of the painting. Building on the pre-existing cross-cultural methodologies of visual bilingualism and transcultural mediation, Van Royen’s painting is a case study for how objects placed in culturally hybrid contexts may exhibit visual multilingualism. For works of art to translate in hybrid and foreign societies, these works must exhibit legibility to various groups and cultures which encounter it. Although most cross-cultural case studies focus on two cultures, expanding the purview of transcultural exchange from “bilingual” to “multilingual” allows for a more inclusive method to interpret cross-cultural, transnational, and hybrid works of art.