East Asia Seminar Series - Dr Rosina Buckland

Please join us on Monday 8th October 2018 for the first talk in this term’s East Asia Seminar Series; Dr Rosina Buckland: Many Meanings between Two Covers: A shoga album from the 1850s

(please see below for abstract).

The talk will take place 5 – 7pm in room 8/9 in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. There will be 30 minutes of Q&A after the talk, followed by a chance to stay for a glass of wine and a chat. As always the talks are free to attend and open to everyone.

In bakumatsu Japan, the multi-artist album was an established medium within shoga, a rich field of creativity before Western-derived art history split asunder ‘painting’ and ‘calligraphy’. For the album’s owner, it could stand as testament to his network and the cultural capital he commanded. For artists, their contributions might be paid work, tokens of friendship, or a means to advertise their status or ambitions. Edinburgh Central Library holds a deluxe example of such an album, containing 106 works by an impressive array of notable figures. In the late 19th century the album entered the possession of one of the foreign specialists hired by the Meiji government. For him, it delivered a very different kind of symbolic capital, as evidence of the alien culture he had experienced. Later, within the municipal collections, the album’s role shifted once again, to stand as evidence of the global reach of local figures and as symbol of international exchange. Having lain dormant for seventy years, the album will soon go on public display for the first time, repurposed as a representative example of Japanese art in the 19th century. This paper will examine the polyvalent quality of the album, with meanings that enter and recede according to the position and context of the observing individual.

Dr Rosina Buckland is Senior curator, responsible for the Japanese collections at the National Museum of Scotland. Dr Buckland read Japanese Studies at the University of Cambridge and she obtained her doctorate in Japanese art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2008. She worked at the British Museum both before and after her PhD, documenting and researching the collection of Japanese paintings, and was closely involved with the launch of the collections database online. She joined National Museums Scotland in 2010, where she curates the Japanese collections, comprising a large group of 19th-century woodblock prints, ceramics, metalware, lacquer, miniature arts, textiles, arms and armour, archaeological and ethnographic material.