Realistic Style Research Articles

Transformation of Diseased Women in Ding Ling’s Novels—Based on the Metaphor of Disease

In Ding Ling’s novels, she repeatedly adopted the diseased woman as the protagonist in order to present her own thinking of gender and social issues. By establishing a chronological reading of three protagonists, this paper will not only discuss the transformation of the metaphoric usage, but also explore socio-historical implications and gender issues in depth. To better understand both the features of Ding Ling’s artistic innovation and the transition of her identity, and more importantly, to reconfiguring the position of gender issues, this paper adopts the method of analysis and have close reading of three short stories written by Ding Ling, which are Sophia’s Diary, Girl Amao and When I Was in Xia Village, and combines the fictional stories with historical facts. In conclusion, Ding Ling’s depiction of diseased women gradually developed from a private narrative and imitation of romantism into a realistic style, revealing the struggles of peasant women who were damaged by the society, which suggested Ding Ling’s deconstruction of May Fourth discourse and exploration of her leftist identity.

TURKISH TEXTILES DESCRIBED IN PAINTINGS BY MILITARY PAINTER HALIL PASHA

During the Ottoman Empire, which was established in Anatolia after the Seljuks, many developments were made in the name of art for 600 years. Especially thanks to the Ottoman Empire's value to the artist and art, very good works have been produced in many fields. In addition to branches such as calligraphy, illumination, miniature and marbling, fabrics, carpets and rugs, which attract the attention of the whole world in the field of textile, were also woven. The art of weaving experienced its brightest period in terms of weaving technique, color and pattern in the Ottoman Empire. It is understood that weaving, which continued to be produced traditionally in Ottoman cities, continued its existence as an important cultural element and sector. The clothes of the Ottoman sultans kept after their death and the qualities of the fabrics used in the palace convey very important information at the point of understanding the importance of weaving. The diversity and richness of the weavings and textiles produced in many documents belonging to the period can be clearly seen. In this context, this rich weaving and textile diversity has taken an important place in Turkish culture. Especially this rich variety of weaving and textiles has been painted by many painters in almost every period and has gained an important place in terms of conveying information about their periods. In this study, some of Halil Pasha's paintings in which he displayed an objective and objective approach with a realistic style, some of which are in an orientalist style, are discussed as subject. In the study, will focus on Halil Pasha's life, his understanding of art and the textiles and clothing he depicted in some of his paintings. The textiles and clothes in the paintings were discussed in terms of characteristics such as color, pattern, and texture. Key Words: Textile, weaving arts, clothing, painting, carpet.

The animator’s sensorium: The impact of acting and animation experience on creating reference performances

This research provides an initial investigation into strategies for creating reference performances for animation. The term reference performance has various meanings in animation production; in this article, I use it to refer to a recording of a person performing physical and emotional cues, from which performance elements of an animated character may be derived. Beginning with Max Fleischer’s invention of the rotoscope process in 1915, animation studios began to record actors as a means to inject greater believability into the movements and expressions of animated characters. Throughout this article, I reference Pallant’s understanding of ‘believability’ as a ‘[reconciliation of] realism within the animated form’. While various methods exist today to capture reference performances, it remains axiomatic that the utility of the reference is only as good as a performer’s ability to produce the desired performance. While seasoned actors would seem ideally suited to the task, large-scale animation studios frequently require animators to film their own reference performances, even though the animators may have limited (or non-existent) acting experience. By comparison, smaller studios and independent productions may not have the time or ability for each animator to self-produce reference; instead, they may opt for an animation director/supervisor to record reference for every character, to work from clips available through online video sites (e.g. YouTube) or to forgo video reference altogether. This research examines the potential for acting experience to enhance reference performances and specifically explores three different preconditions of experience when producing animation reference: an actor with no animation experience, an animator with no acting experience and an academic with both acting and animation experience. As an additional site of inquiry, this research explores the use of head-mounted cameras in the production of animation reference as a means to more fully and reliably capture the research participants’ expressive range. This research engages with ethnographic and autoethnographic research models to compare the creative choices of each participant and their ability to produce meaningful expressions, gestures and body movements as reference performance for a short, auteur 3D animated film in a predominantly realistic style. From these analyses, the maximal performance utility of each participant is gauged. By extension, this limited data provides an initial suggestion that acting experience is an essential precondition when producing useful reference performances for the type and style of animation explored in this study. Furthermore, this article relates the acting strategies of its participants to the acting theory of Ivana and the theory of emotional effector patterns as described by . This research suggests that these practice-informed performance theories may prove useful to animator when producing their own reference, regardless of performance experience.

Thinking styles as predictors of psychological readiness of students for innovative activities

The paper deals with the problem of thinking styles and creativity as predictors of students psychological readiness for innovation. The aim of the study was to identify the influence of students thinking styles on their psychological readiness for innovation. The study involved 100 students of the Don State Technical University, aged from 17 to 27 years. The research methods were the survey method, statistical analysis methods (descriptive statistics, multiple regression analysis (step-by-step)). The following methods were used as psychodiagnostic tools: the questionnaire Psychological readiness for innovation (V.E. Klochko, O.M. Krasnoryadtseva); the method of measuring the style of thinking (A.K. Belousova); the method of determining the type of thinking of J. Bruner in the modification of G.V. Rezapkina; the questionnaire Styles of thinking (R. Bramson, A. Harrison, adapted by A. Alekseev, L. Gromova). The study found that students psychological readiness for innovation is influenced by thinking styles and creativity. Predictors of psychological readiness for innovation are creativity, realistic and critical thinking styles. The preference for activities that require innovation is influenced by creativity, initiative, idealistic and realistic thinking styles. Predictors of readiness for change are creativity and critical thinking styles. The practical significance of the research lies in the possibility of applying in the educational process the knowledge about the influence of students thinking styles and creativity on their psychological readiness for innovation.

The Beliefs and Lived Reality of White Russians in Manchukuo：Focusing on Takeuchi Masakazu’s Summer Love and Easter

With the advent of the October Revolution in 1917, a large number of White Russians who lost their homes and became deracinated emigrated to Harbin. Takeuchi Masakazu, a Japanese writer from Manchuria who started working in Harbin in 1934, noticed this particular group of foreigners living in Manchukuo, and in depicting them wrote Summer Love and Easter in a realistic style. The narratives of both works unfold along the Easter timeline of the Orthodox Eastern Church. Through a textual analysis of these works and an investigation of historical documents, it is clear that the cohesion of their beliefs hindered the implementation of a series of policies instituted by Japan which aimed to assimilate the White Russians in Manchukuo. Moreover, Easter was a cultural symbol of the White Russians in the multi-ethnic Manchukuo. Takeuchi adopts symbolic methods to describe their living conditions as they lived through a variety of historical events. In this way he reveals the White Russian longing for their homeland and clarifies their sense of being foreigners in Manchukuo. Through the hints of the ups and downs of Japanese and White Russian relations in Summer Love and the tragic plight of the White Russian in Easter, Takeuchi expresses the powerlessness and suffering of ordinary civilians during the war, and conveys a sense of introspection on the war.

TROP VOZA KAO SIMBOL TRAUME U KNjIŽEVNOSTI HOLOKAUSTA

Traumatic experience such as the Holocaust requires traumatic ways of representation. Those who dare to write about it encounter various dilemmas and difficulties in finding the right ways to write about something that cannot be written about. Train trope is a usual symbol of the biggest XX century trauma because rail- way system and different types of cars enabled transportation of millions of people from the whole Europe, whose lives were terminated in the death camps, as well as their wealth, gold and other valuables. Trains found their way in literature with both survivor writers and those who didn’t experience the Holocaust. The symbol of train had been interpreted within psychoanalysis of dreams as passage of time and life before it started to operate as a symbol of the very death in reality. In this paper we tried to investigate how train trope functions in this trauma based literary genre with those writers who were inside and those who felt them as cultural heritage. Those who were inside death trains, such as Elie Wiesel, insisted that the only way of representation has to be in documentary and realistic style. On the other hand, writers who were lucky not to experience the hell on Earth couldn’t write from the ‘inside’ and had to find other ways of representation. Their styles vary from allegory in Kosinsi’s autofictional novel to magic realism in David and Thomas’s novels. Thomas also adds Freudian psychoanalysis while Pinter experiments with stage representation.

Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist by Simon Grennan et al.

Reviewed by: Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist by Simon Grennan et al. Eszter Szép (bio) Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite . Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist. Manchester University Press, 2020. 272 pp, $120 Marie Duval (1847–1890) is known in comics studies circles as the artist behind the Ally Sloper strips, Ally Sloper being the first recurring character in comics. The character was invented by Charles Ross, editor of the British periodical Judy, in 1867, and Duval drew Ally Sloper strips from 1869. Interestingly, the character is central to only 15% of Duval's creative output. Sloper's peak period came after Duval stopped drawing the strip: in 1884 the character was given its own comic, Ally Sloper's Half Holiday, and was successfully commercialized. Published in the Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century series of Manchester University Press, Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist offers a detailed, contextualized rethinking of Duval's position as a cartoonist, female visual journalist, children's book author, and actress in the second part of the nineteenth century. The three authors, Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite, have previously launched the Marie Duval Archive (marieduval.org) and have published a richly illustrated popular book on Duval. Now they elaborate aspects of Duval's career in the context of Victorian cultural practices and look for connections—this way Duval's work is discussed in the context of nineteenth-century perceptions of gender, class, work, art, publishing technologies, and theatrical practices. This approach to Duval's oeuvre is complex and multidisciplinary, and the clear structure of the book helps the reader navigate this network of knowledge. To illustrate the book's approach to Duval, let me quote how the authors themselves define their project in the introduction: The book identifies Duval as an exemplary radical practitioner in a historic urban media environment, in which new professional definitions were being created for the first time, in terms of the gendering of professions, professional training and consensus, and the theorising of the roles of visual cultures, and in which new congruence between different types of media culture emerged, including performance, illustration, narrative drawing, periodicals and novels. (6) The book starts out with positioning Judy, or the London Serio-comic Journal in the nineteenth-century satire boom as a conservative journal addressing a middle-class, lower-middle-class, and working-class readership. We learn about Duval's unique approach to cartooning, which is illustrated by comparing how Judy's star cartoonist, William Boucher, and Marie Duval responded to the same issues in their work. Both of them drew the Franco-Prussian War week after week in 1870, and the section of the book where Boucher's and Duval's works are put next to each other clearly shows how witty, daring, and critical Duval's art was. We can also see that she had zero artistic training and did not follow any academic schools of drawing. Boucher's status is indicated by the number of double-page [End Page 228] spreads he was given the opportunity to fill with his drawings (Boucher: many; Duval: zero). He worked in a detailed and realistic style, favored visual metaphors and symbols (e.g., of peace, of countries) to express his commentary, focusing mainly on tragedy and death. In contrast, Duval chooses satire and takes a very cowardly Sloper to the front to report on the events for Judy and follows his adventures as he does everything to avoid the fight. This fearless nature of Duval's work gains even more in significance as the chapters map out Duval's position in Victorian entertainment culture. As a woman employee, she was masculinized; as an actress (performing mainly trouser roles) she was sexualized. This experience, according to Grennan, enabled Duval to bring the social transgression represented by the stage to the practice of her drawings. "The thrilling experience of being a woman employed to be feminine on stage was transposed to the thrilling experience of being a woman working at inhabiting the role of a man, as a visual journalist" (43). This position, as well as the masculine humor of her strips and the representation of woman employees, was an important part of...

БАТАЛІСТИКА У ЗАРУБІЖНІЙ ТА УКРАЇНСЬКІЙ ІСТОРІЇ МИСТЕЦТВ

he author of the article shows that in art there have always been and are works of art that accurately reflect life conflict situations. They become an object of study for their further prevention and leveling. In turn, the artistic understanding of conflict phenomena complements, strengthens and facilitates the scientific analysis of the problems of the emergence of conflicts and the dynamics of their passage. In the visual arts, the works of the master depicting war, armed conflicts and confrontations are singled out in a separate - battle genre. Its origins can be found in many ancient cultures around the world. Draws attention to the fact that each of the stages in the development of culture leaves the next generations with examples of art with the fixation of external signs of the way of life. As well as social, national, spiritual, aesthetic issues of their time. Renaissance artists in battle compositions not only glorified the victories of commanders and conquerors and recorded important historical moments of military campaigns, but also filled these plots with new deep content. Artists of the 17th century openly addressed the realities of contemporary life, in particular, such dramatic phenomena as war and armed conflicts. In their works, they praised heroes, kings and generals, at the same time exposed robberies, looting and cruelty of soldiers. During the Napoleonic War, artists concentrated on conveying victories, heroism and glory in the war. They also showed his ugly sides: fear of hunger, cruelty, executions of prisoners, rape and human degradation. In the twentieth century. the methods and means of warfare have changed significantly, this clearly manifested itself during the First World War. Accordingly, the art of this period is the art of great upheavals, revolutions and world wars. Nowadays, both foreign and domestic artists, mainly work in a realistic style, they depict in detail military equipment, elements of combat, soldiers in dynamics. The point is that such paintings are replacing color photography, because today they are in significant demand. Proves that the plots of wars, battles and conflicts remain in demand in art, they continue to actively influence people's emotions and the formation of public opinion.

ОСОБЕННОСТИ СТИЛИСТИКИ РОССИЙСКИХ АРТ-ФИЛЬМОВ НАЧАЛА XXI в.

Contemporary Russian theater and cinema are approving a new aesthetic paradigm that implements such principles of postmodernism as deconstruction, relativism, a mixture of various types, genres, and stylistic devices. The purpose of this article is to identify the most characteristic stylistic features of Russian arthouse films of the 21st century. The author’s task was to show that this style is not something radically new, as some art critics and cultural experts try to present. Using the methods of hermeneutic, art history and comparative analysis, the author identifies the methods and techniques of creating a special art space that are characteristic of modern Russian arthouse. These are combining real and conditional, concrete and symbolic, psychology and parable, recognition of everyday realities and explicit functionality of the characters. Based on the idea expressed by a number of scientists that there is much in common between the state of the modern world (that is, what is now called postmodernism) and the public consciousness of the Middle Ages, the author of the article puts forward a hypothesis about the similarity of the stylistic techniques of the Russian arthouse with the aesthetics of the Middle Ages. First of all, arthouse films bring closer to the literature and art of the Middle Ages such a characteristic as hybridism, i.e. combining different styles in one work, in particular, combining a realistic image with a parable form and symbols and an artistic interpretation of space as a background that weakly interacts with characters. First of all, Russian arthouse films brings closer to the literature and art of the Middle Ages such a characteristic as hybridism, i.e. combining different styles in one work, using, along with a realistic depiction of the parable form and symbols and artistic interpretation of space as a background that weakly interacts with characters. One of the reasons for the emergence of a new aesthetic interpretation of art space in modern Russian literature and cinema was the radical changes that took place in Russia in the 1990s. The disappearance from the world map of a huge country called the USSR and the loss of familiar landmarks and stereotypes could not but affect the worldview of artists, writers and filmmakers trying to artistically comprehend what is happening. The conclusion that follows from the analysis is that many principles of the aesthetics of postmodernism were reflected in the style of the arthouse films of 21st century, with the exception of such traits inherent in the best postmodern examples as humor, irony, game element and non-linearity of narration. The coexistence of real and clearly conditional art space in such films contributes to the fact that the cinematic texture contradicts conditional situations and characters, causing the viewer to feel art inorganic. Analyzing the perception of art films by experts and the audience, the author concludes that the assessments of art critics and viewers are largely diverging for the same reason: viewers mostly perceive author films as works of a realistic style but can not find in them psychological characteristics of the heroes and the motivation of their actions, i.e. the traits inherent in realism; experts evaluate these films based on the presence of the elements of symbolism and metaphorism and metaphysical and universal image of reality.

Story “Beauty and Force” by V. Vynnychenko and prose by M. Gorky. Poetics and typology of individual styles

The paper focuses on the functionality and style characteristics of the authors’ expressive means. It shows differences in the literary handling of similar subjects at the level of forms and functions of pictorial-like images, narrative presentation of action, the integrity of plot and composition in the works. The analysis proves the style originality of the Ukrainian aspiring writer. Gorky’s bright pictorialism with a tendency towards impressionistic images and enthusiastic evaluation connects his narration to the codes and toposes of a higher, elite culture, open to aesthetic contemplative perception and intellectual reaction to the action of a work. While Vynnychenko’s model revises or even rejects external picturesqueness as an attribute of national realistic style. This feature gets a universal ontological dimension, and the verbal representation of scenes approaches to the reality of the potential reader’s world. The internal action in Gorky’s works is characterized by reflection that stays in line with the literary tradition of the rational interpretation of a character and the logical development of a plot leading to the disclosure of existential truth. Vynnychenko, using emotionally perceptible plastic tools of naturalistic psychologism and minimal narrative rhetorical devices, appeals to universal anthropological experience.

INTERACTION OF ARTISTIC PERCEPTION WITH NATURE AND THE SYMBOLIC RESPONSE OF THIS INTERACTION IN LANDSCAPE PAINTING

Artists perceive nature in a variety of ways and interpret nature with the works they create as a result of their perceptions. Landscape paintings, which is described as “görünü” picture in Turkish, are not only a depiction of nature, but also a symbolism that shows the spirituality of the artist. In this study, the main lines of the relationship between nature and human are handled in the context of “görünü” pictures and the idea that “görünü” pictures are symbolic pictures of a spiritual relationship that the painter establishes with nature, beyond the purpose of depicting nature only in a documentary or realistic style, is tried to be examined. Keywords: landscape, artistic perception, nature, Naturalism, spirituality, supreme, icon, Symbolism

Pengaruh Teori Seni Barat Dalam Desain Iklan

Aesthetic has become a clear barometer to measure the beauty value of an artwork. It has been going from the classical era with a realistic style until the modern era which more directed to the applied art. Despite the advancement of the nowadays digital age, an artwork will taste bland when it ignoring these universal basic principles. Those principles are increasingly needed when an artwork turned into a message medium from communicator to communicant. Advertising design is an applied art, where on one hand it should consider the value of beauty of the ad to attract and seize people's attention. But on the other hand, advertising is a medium of visual communication. If the message is submitted by the advertiser and the media is received differently by the target goal, then the communication will failed. Thus the role of art theory as a universal principle need to be applied in ad designing. The application of the art theory must be tailored to the conveyed message and adapted to the present approach.

Enlighten Me

Lighting has been used to enhance emotion and appeal of characters for centuries, from paintings in the Renaissance to the modern-day digital arts. In VFX and animation studios, lighting is considered as important as modelling, shading, or rigging. Most existing work focuses on either empirical best-practice created by artists of the centuries or on lighting perception with basic shapes. In contrast, our work focuses on the effect of lighting on emotional characters. Our study presents an extensive set of novel perceptual experiments designed to investigate the effects of brightness levels (key light brightness) and the proportion of light intensity illuminating the two sides of a character’s face (key-to-fill ratio). We are particularly interested in the effect of lighting on the recognition of emotion, emotion intensity, and the overall appeal, as these are crucial factors for audience engagement. Our results have implications for artists and developers wishing to increase the appeal and emotional expression of their characters, ranging from cartoon to realistic styles. Our key finding is that lighting can be used to effectively alter the intensity of emotion of a character and that brighter conditions increased appeal across all of our experiments.

Irreversible fouling in hollow-fiber PVDF MF/UF membranes filtering surface water: Effects of precoagulation and identification of the foulant

In this study, microfiltration (MF) and ultrafiltration (UF) of surface water were compared in terms of irreversible fouling and effective pretreatment. Hollow-fiber MF/UF membranes made from the same polymer (polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF)) were examined with multiple samples of surface water used for drinking water production. Experiments were carried out in a realistic style: with a constant flow rate and periodic backwashing. Regardless of the source of the feed water, evolution of fouling was less significant in the case of UF. In the case of MF, anion exchange followed by coagulation using poly-aluminium chloride (PACl) efficiently mitigated membrane fouling, whereas PACl coagulation alone was sufficient for UF. Artificial alteration of the composition of natural organic matter (NOM) in the feed water was carried out by MF/UF with different pore sizes, and it was revealed that different fractions of NOM were responsible for evolution of irreversible fouling in MF and UF: large biopolymers and small biopolymers were responsible for irreversible fouling in MF and UF, respectively. The mechanism of fouling mitigation by coagulation was also investigated. Cake (coagulated flocs) deposited on the membrane surface mitigated irreversible fouling in UF, whereas it did not affect irreversible fouling in MF. It was postulated that advection flow caused by membrane filtration made more adsorption sites available inside the flocs for removal of small biopolymers (i.e., UF foulants).

OUR TOWN

OUR TOWN

UKRAINIAN LIBERAL STRUGGLE IN LEONID PERFETSKYIʼS BATTLE PAINTINGS

Summary. The purpose of the work is to investigate the Ukrainian liberation struggle period displayed in L. Perfeckyiʼs work, the artist-battalist, analyzing the artistic manner and the relevance of the historical events interpretation. The methodology of the research is based on the application of a set of methods: the general theoretical – analysis, systematization, generalization of the studied sources; the historical and the retrospective – to study the artistʼs creation stages and the artistʼs works; the art studies – in order to analyze the general creative style and the artistʼsartistic manner. The scientific novelty of the work is that for the first time L. Perfeckyiʼs creative heritage in the battle painting sphere is presented as a complete study, which clearly reflects the Ukrainian independence armed struggle period; the attention was also paid to the relationship between the artistʼs direct participation in hostilities and his service in the ranks of the UNR Army with the subsequent creative activity, which influenced the formation of a realistic style of the artist in conjunction with modernist quests. The conclusions. Unfortunately, the number of artist works were partially lost. However, the preserved ones give an opportunity to think about the artistʼs extraordinary talent and the artistic originality, who witnessed the real events and skillfully embodied them in the artworks. L. Perfetskyi became known as the Ukrainian battalist painter, who managed to reproduce skillfully one of the most difficult periods in Ukrainian history. In addition, Leonidʼs works are supported by his personal view concerning the above-mentioned events as the direct participant. Taking into consideration, the scattered documentary sources, an artistʼs true-to-life image is also important in exploring various aspects of historical events, which makes Leonid Perfetskyiʼs works extremely valuable. Apart from the artistic point of view, Leonid Perfetskyiʼs works are known for their artistic references and searches among the modernist European trends, Cubism, which is constantly reflected in the increased expression and the paintings dynamics. L. Perfetskyiʼs works are filled with the creative experience and the genuine realism, which are capable of conveying the truthfulness seen through many decades.

Gra w Orwella

The article presents an interpretation of Orwell video games in context of available analytical tropes in Orwellian research. The paper touches on various problems described by academic readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four and tries to answer the question whether games provide innovations in the way they problematize socio-political issues in comparison to Orwell’s classic novel. In the introductory part, the author discusses the possibility of utilizing the notion of critical dystopia in the analysis of Orwell video games. The following chapters touch on the subject of cultural references, realistic styles, biopolitics and class representations.

Gra w Orwella

The article presents an interpretation of Orwell video games in context of available analytical tropes in Orwellian research. The paper touches on various problems described by academic readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four and tries to answer the question whether games provide innovations in the way they problematize socio-political issues in comparison to Orwell’s classic novel. In the introductory part, the author discusses the possibility of utilizing the notion of critical dystopia in the analysis of Orwell video games. The following chapters touch on the subject of cultural references, realistic styles, biopolitics and class representations.

NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013): Mobilities and the Afropolitan picaresque

ABSTRACTNoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel We Need New Names depicts social conflict, government abuse, linguistic imposition, displacement and migration through the sceptical voice of ten-year-old Darling, first in a Zimbabwean slum and then in the USA. Darling’s precarious economic situation is portrayed in a humorous tone, rendering what this article calls an “Afropolitan picaresque” that uncovers relations of inequality. Other defining features of the picaresque represented in the novel are the scatological metaphor, the episodic structure, the anti-essentialist stance, the comic voice, the realistic style, marginality and the autobiographical form. The first part of the article identifies the main features of the picaresque and examines the influence of the genre in African postcolonial fiction. The second half offers a close reading of Bulawayo’s debut novel, considering how the picaresque mode helps the writer to interrogate notions of privilege, agency and access to resources.

Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hōgai and the Search for Images by Chelsea Foxwell

Reviewed by: Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hōgai and the Search for Images by Chelsea Foxwell John Szostak (bio) Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hōgai and the Search for Images. By Chelsea Foxwell. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2015. xiv, 281 pages. $65.00, cloth; $65.00, E-book. Chelsea Foxwell's Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hōgai and the Search for Images attempts to answer a seemingly simple question: by what process did Japanese painters in the early-to-mid-Meiji period [End Page 475] (1868–1912) decide what to paint? Her extensive and convincing response, unfolding over six chapters, demonstrates the true complexity of the problem by engaging an array of issues related to image and identity, domestic economic development, international relations, visual and cultural indoctrination, and the politics of exhibition. Specificity of these discussions to the artistic context of Meiji Japan is achieved through extensive visual and contextual analysis of the paintings and craft works created to represent the country in contemporaneous domestic and international expositions. Of particular focus are efforts in the 1880s by Japanese artists and arts administrators to realize a new mode of painting, one requisitely distinct from naturalistic oil painting as practiced in the West, as well as from traditional styles of painting composing Meiji's received pictorial legacy. If there is a motif echoed throughout the text, it is that this new art form, dubbed Nihonga (Japanese painting), became vital to Japan's modern artistic identity precisely because it was unable to completely eschew either of these points of reference. The figure named in the title, painter Kano Hōgai (1828–88), is best understood not as the subject of the study but rather as its linchpin, drawing together disparate aspects of the national "search for images." We learn about Hōgai's life through specific artworks from his oeuvre, carefully selected by Foxwell to illustrate specific historical problems and issues. She also calls into question some of the myths about Hōgai, many dating to his own lifetime, while both affirming and problematizing the centrality of his role in the invention of Nihonga. Chapter 1 explores the impact of international expositions, especially how "the positive and negative associations of exhibitionary culture in the nineteenth century shaped modern Japanese-style painting" (p. 17). As Japan became more egalitarian, painters and patrons of art came to accept the display of works in dedicated exhibition spaces as the final stage of the art-making process, normalizing the category of "exhibition art." It is here, Foxwell argues, that Japanese painting really began to change, as Japanese artists and exhibition promoters worked to fulfill the demands they projected onto a Western viewership. Some Western contemporaries condemned the intrusion of foreign influence as threatening Japan's traditional authenticity, but Foxwell notes that Japanese painting was already in a state of stylistic flux prior to the arrival of Western influence, pointing to proto-modernist qualities in the work of later Edo-period professional painters operating outside or on the fringe of the iemoto system of elite style-schools. These artists, she argues, grew "increasingly reliant on novelty and topicality" to interest patrons, reflecting a fast-growing cognizance of newly introduced, realistic styles of Ming-dynasty painting. This discussion of lesser known pre-Meiji artists, their followers, and their stylistic referents is offered without much visual representation (around 30 Edo-period artists are discussed, with only five illustrated), but it convincingly makes [End Page 476] the case that growing stylistic eclecticism in later Edo-period painting conditioned artists and viewers alike for the even greater flux awaiting painting in the Meiji period. Past studies have characterized Japan's participation in domestic and international expositions as either catalytic to or indexical of historical and cultural transition; in chapter 2, Foxwell suggests exhibitions in the 1880s played both roles and were thus simultaneously instrumental to and evidence of Japan's burgeoning modernism. The metaphor of "doubling" appears several times in the chapter; for example, Foxwell uses it to explain a two-tiered structure of viewing objects created for exhibition, whereby they were exhibited first in Japan, then repackaged for viewing in Europe, thus serving double...