Certain 20th century Korean and Japanese writers and tea ceremony practitioners—the focal points of our papers—resisted the compulsion, exerted by nationalist narratives, to secure immediate access to their objects by allegorizing them. Exposing the fiction of this immediacy, these figures transformed their objects from signs with univocal meaning to ambiguous materials that demand repeated encounters, without the promise of interpretive closure.

In these figures we identify a gesture in East Asian aesthetics during and after Japanese imperialism and the Cold War that we take as exemplary for our own critical work: of shifting from the subsumption of objects under the ideas of nation or empire to a fundamental disjunction of object and idea. Central to this latter non-coincidence is the notion of the “original,” or “authentic,” presence of art objects and lived experiences, which our authors and practitioners reclaimed as a locus for generating critical distance from a nation-centered mode of cultural interpretation.

Park discusses an experimental South Korean novel by Shin Kyung Sook Oettanbang (A Girl Who Wrote Loneliness, 1995), an autobiographical account of the author-narrator’s own laborious efforts to adequately represent the life and death of Heejae, a colleague from her own days working in a factory. For the narrator-author, Heejae’s quiet and unnoticed death left behind too few traces for narrative visibility and her story absorbed by a certain national narrative foreclosing her own existence: that of an entire generation of factory girls, whose labor was rendered invisible by effectively becoming nothing more than a literary trope of the sacrifice necessary for South Korea’s economic development. In order to resist the historical narrative of progress, on the grounds of which Heejae’s death could only become another repetition of the factory girl trope, the narrator-author inverts historical time in the novel, writing past events in the present tense and the present events surrounding her act of writing in the past tense, composing, as a result, a temporal quality constituted by repetition.

In the second paper, Ueda will examine a tea container named Saruwaka, which was long recognized by tea practitioners as a meibutsu (noted object) due to its illustrious provenance from the 17th century. In the early 20th century, it was sold at auction and subsequently entered into a museum collection after the Second World War. The increase of the population interested in studying tea in post-modern Japan, resulted in the Saruwaka to be mass reproduced by potters for practitioners to teach and learn how to handle meibutsu as part of the curricula in tea. Now, practices involved using the meibutsu have become more difficult where no one is able to handle the original medium due to the restrictions for cultural properties. Two perspectives are seen with the Saruwaka, through repeated reproduction of the container, each variation will carry on set interpretations different from the original. The second is the practice in using the replica where use and care of a meibutsu is transmitted simply for advancement of the license, but with legal limitations in accessing the original, practitioners instead experience a relative encounter through the reproduction.

The third paper, delivered by Alexander Lin, forms part of a dissertation in progress on iconoclasm as an aesthetic problem in 20th century German and Japanese ekphrastic texts. Here he will present on Japanese critic Kamei Katsuichirō’s best-selling travelogue Yamato koji fūbutsushi (Seasonal Records of the Ancient Yamato Temples, 1943). Kamei, in encountering the 8th century CE cypress-wood statue Kudara Kannon, finds an object that commands even the secularized modern viewer to “worship” (sūhai) and “devotion” (kie) through lengthy and repeated contemplation. Writing during the Second World War, Kamei transposes the Buddhist notion of kie into an absolute devotion to the Emperor and nation. However, Lin will argue, Kamei's focus on subjective experience exceeds his own nationalist interpretation, precisely because of a categorical disjunction between the duration of encounter with art objects and the political theological ideology to which he tries to subsume it.