Woodcut Movements in Asia, 1930s–2010s: Blaze Carved in Darkness
This essay was written while I was a postdoctoral research fellow at Japan Women’s University and originally appeared on my former blog Love From Tokyo.
On Sunday 10 March I travelled with family and friends to the Arts Maebashi museum in the prefectural seat of Gunma prefecture to see the woodcut exhibition Woodcut Movement in Asia, 1930s–2010s: Blaze Carved in Darkness. After wrestling children across four train transfers and a taxi in each direction to visit the Maruki Museum in Saitama prefecture last month, we decided to hire a care for the roughly two-hour journey.
As I explained in a previous piece on the geography of Tokyo, the Kantō plain on which the megalopolis is located is the most densely inhabited region in the Japanese archipelago and indeed the world. Gunma prefecture is located in the northeast of that plain. It is a largely rural area with a few major cities including Maebashi, where we were headed and the neighbouring city of Takasaki. Arts Maebashi stands in the centre of the old part of town near to the JR Maebashi station. As we came down from the expressway into the town we were immediately struck by the number of empty shops. Deserted streets such as these characterise so many of Japan’s regional and rural cities and towns. Using art as a form of <em>machizukuri</em> or regional revival is a popular strategy among rural and regional authorities in Japan and this arts centre seems to be part of an attempt to revive the old centre of town. Some of the sources of the blight affecting these cities is the steady march out to the suburbs, the proliferation of automobiles and the building of strip malls located on outer-suburban highways that lure customers away from densely packed town centres.
Having arrived a little early for a scheduled curator’s talk, we decided to take a stroll through the streets and find some lunch. At ground level the impression was even more dismal than when viewed from the car, although signs of life were certainly present here and there. Our visit was a Sunday, so perhaps more of the shops would be open on other days of the week. Having visited Maebashi previously for a film screening, our travelling companion was keen to visit a local department store. The store was a real relic whose shelves were noticeably empty and with a small restaurant floor that seemed to have lost at least one of the four advertised restaurants. We settled on a Chinese restaurant which evoked memories of rural Australian Chinese restaurant decor and served a classic Japanese interpretation of Chinese cuisine circa 1980.
Returning to the museum we stepped back in time from a present of post-industrial regional decay to a period when the first struggles for modernisation (as they were described on the explanatory panels that opened the museum) took place in the 1930s. Following along with our guide for a while, we learned that it was the Chinese modernist writer Lu Xun who had first acted as cultural mediator for the European woodcut art movement. He gathered around him a group of young artists who were keen to use the medium to communicate the dire circumstances of rural peasants and industrial workers in 1930s China. The museum’s interpretive approach, as highlighted by the curator, was to look at woodcut art as a medium analogous to contemporary social media services like Facebook. Woodcuts enabled pamphlets, posters and propaganda work to be reproduced rapidly at relatively low cost and furthered the spread of proletarian arts and culture movements throughout the East Asian region.
The most fascinating aspect of the exhibition, which was vast both in its temporal and geographical scope and in the number of works displayed, was the way it traced the movement back and forth across the ocean separating China from Japan, to Korea and then southeast through the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia. Chronologically the earlier pieces were mainly Chinese and Japanese in origin. As one progressed through the exhibition, there was a major feature on work from the Korean democratisation movement in the 1980s. Finally we emerged into a series of rooms focusing on contemporary woodblock art movements in Indonesia and Malaysia. In this space there was a strong collection of work from the woodblock print artists collective Taring Padi as well as that of punk band and artists group Marginal. This was also the section of the exhibition which had brought us in the first place, with one of the presenters at our February Love as Politics symposium having contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue based on her research in Indonesia that was presetned at the symposium.
Some of the most striking and disturbing images from various periods in the history of peoples’ struggles in Asia were the stark black and white images of police beating and breaking protesters bodies. Of these, the images from the Gwangju uprising in 1980s were notable not only for their depictions of violence but for how recent these struggles were. As a medium, the woodblock print is a venerable form and as a consequence tends to evoke a sense of antiquity. The continuing use of the medium by contemporary artists in struggles in Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia, however, serves to highlights the deep historical roots that these struggles have in the colonial history of Asia.
On returning home in the evening Melanie and I conducted an interview with a friend for an upcoming podcast. Born in Okinawa, Mori is a sociologist and activist who is deeply involved with the struggle against US military bases in Okinawa. Listening to him talk about these struggles with the images of a century of struggle against militarism, environmental devastation and for democracy and freedom fresh in my mind helped me to visualise the ways in which Cold War structures continue to imprison the peoples of Asia within a geopolitical system which reinforces injustice. The deep-rooted nature of the struggles depicted, however, remind us that while the problems we currently face - from rising militarism to climate change- might seem insurmountable, when we confront them we are standing on the shoulders of our forebears and their centuries-long struggles for freedom, democracy and peace. The artists displayed in the <em>Woodcut Movements in Asia 1930s–1940s: Blaze Carved in Darkness</em> have engraved these struggles not only into physical blocks of wood but into history. Nobody who comes away from seeing this exhibition can fail to sense deep ways in which the struggles for liberation are connected across the region’s borders.
