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Japanese Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Sev­enty years ago, famed Marx­ist philoso­pher Wal­ter Ben­jamin pub­lished his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechan­i­cal Repro­duc­tion” to ana­lyze the con­cepts of orig­i­nal­ity and cre­ativ­ity in a world still com­ing to terms with new tech­nol­ogy in the form of pho­tog­ra­phy, mimeo­graphs and other modes of repro­duc­tion. Ben­jamin wanted to know if the copy of a work of art still main­tained the aura of the orig­i­nal. Did the copy pro­voke the same reac­tion in the viewer? Did it main­tain the same aes­thetic integrity? Did it, in the end, reveal the soul of the artist in the same way as the original?

Today, we are forced to ask these same ques­tions more and more each day as the cutting-edge tech­nolo­gies of our time con­tinue to blur the line between real­ity and imi­ta­tion to such an extent that we must always exam­ine the valid­ity of what we see before us. In an age where tech­nolo­gies such as Pho­to­shop and high def­i­n­i­tion dig­i­tal scan­ning far out­shine the now anti­quated tech­nolo­gies of which Ben­jamin wrote, we must begin to rec­tify the pres­ence of exact copies of famous works of art in our midst and decide for our­selves if these works carry the same mes­sage as the original.

In “Cul­tural Preser­va­tion for the Next Gen­er­a­tion” at Onishi Gallery in Chelsea, view­ers have the oppor­tu­nity to expe­ri­ence just this kind of high qual­ity repro­duc­tion with their very own eyes. Orig­i­nally formed by the City of Kyoto as a way of shar­ing the city’s and Japa’s art mas­ter­pieces with the world with­out hav­ing to worry about dam­age or loss of the orig­i­nals and indeed as a way to pre­serve the ideas and images of the orig­i­nal works the Kyoto Inter­na­tional Cul­ture Foun­da­tion spent years work­ing with top experts in the field of dig­i­tal repro­duc­tion to find the per­fect way to exactly copy such famous works as the National Trea­sures Pine Trees by Hasegawa Tohaku from the early 17th-century and Birds and Flow­ers by Kano Eitoku from the late 16th-century, both painted at the height of Japan’s Golden Age of the Momoyama Period. Using mam­moth scan­ners, multi-color inkjet print­ers and a litany of highly devel­oped tech­niques, the tech­ni­cians that carry out the copy­ing process do not depend on tech­nol­ogy alone to per­fect their craft. For, once the main copy­ing process is com­plete, highly skilled arti­sans, fully famil­iar with the tra­di­tional tech­nique of gold leaf appli­ca­tion, are called to duty to apply layer upon layer of gold to the repro­duced images, cre­at­ing a copy that, when placed next to the orig­i­nal work, is nearly indis­tin­guish­able from the actual work.

Hailed by the orga­niz­ers as the ideal way to pre­serve actual works of art located in tem­ples and muse­ums across Japan, these hybrid repro­duc­tions might best be viewed as good­will prox­ies that pro­vide a visual rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the orig­i­nal work so that view­ers who might not oth­er­wise be able to travel to Japan can still expe­ri­ence the work in close prox­im­ity. As a coun­ter­point, cer­tain tem­ples in Japan have, in addi­tion to pre­serv­ing their his­toric trea­sures, invited con­tem­po­rary artists to cre­ate wholly new works, such as famed nihonga painter Hiroshi Senju’s major instal­la­tion at the Annex of Daitokuji-Jyukoin in 2003. Projects such as these breathe new life into Japan’s sacred spaces, and per­haps more impor­tantly ensure that tem­ples and their trea­sures remain impor­tant in the public’s eye.

In clos­ing, for all of their beauty and tech­no­logic advance­ments, the repro­duc­tions exhib­ited in the Onishi Gallery show might be all the more inter­est­ing thanks to the philo­soph­i­cal debates they arouse, exactly in line with Benjamin’s now all too impor­tant queries on the true essence of a given art­work in an age when tech­nol­ogy brings with it the promise of flaw­less repro­duc­tion in all areas of our lives. Fac­ing the glit­ter­ing gold of these beau­ti­ful cre­ations, the viewer must make up her own mind where the orig­i­nal ends and the copy begins.

Eric C. Shiner, Inde­pen­dent Curator

Eric C. Shiner is an inde­pen­dent cura­tor and art his­to­rian spe­cial­iz­ing in Japan­ese con­tem­po­rary art. He holds two Mas­ters degrees in the His­tory of Art, one from Yale Uni­ver­sity and the other from Osaka Uni­ver­sity, and focuses on the con­cept of bod­ily trans­for­ma­tion in Post­war Japan­ese pho­tog­ra­phy, paint­ing and per­for­mance art. Shiner was an assis­tant cura­tor of the Yoko­hama Tri­en­nale, Japan’s first ever large-scale exhi­bi­tion of inter­na­tional con­tem­po­rary art, held in 2001. He has also orga­nized exhi­bi­tions in Chicago at Julia Fried­man Gallery (2002), and in New York City at Ise Cul­tural Foun­da­tion (2004). In addi­tion to his own exhi­bi­tions, Shiner has also worked on large shows at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pitts­burgh and the National Museum of Mod­ern Art, Kyoto. He is an active writer and trans­la­tor, and is a con­tribut­ing edi­tor for Art Asi­a­Pa­cific mag­a­zine. He is cur­rently orga­niz­ing a large-scale group show of con­tem­po­rary art by Japan­ese artists liv­ing in New York City titled “Mak­ing a Home: Japan­ese Artists in New York” that will be held at the Japan Soci­ety from Sep­tem­ber 2007 through Jan­u­ary 2008.