Book Review of *Parallel Modernism: Koga Harue and Avant-Garde Art in Modern Japan*

Parallel Modernism: Koga Harue and Avant-Garde in Modern Japan is a vibrant, much-needed art historiography on contemporary Japanese modernism from the 1920s until after World War II. Focusing specifically on the Japanese artist Koga Harue’s career and his diverse explorations of watercolor, Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and Machine-ism from the 1910s until the 1930s, Chinghsin Wu argues that Japanese modernism did not happen in isolation of but parallel to the Euro-American modernism of the early twentieth century. She defines parallel modernism as the case, “when a Japanese artist adapted a Western artist’s style or an artistic term from the West, [but] we cannot assume that this signifier carried all of its associated Western signs and signifieds with it” (3). Although she doesn’t systematically explain the particular ways in which Japanese modernism via Koga differed from the European modernist movements of Cubism, Expressionism, and Surrealism, Wu importantly highlights the different schools of Japanese modernism that influenced Koga’s career: in the late nineteenth century, Impressionism and watercolor in Japan flourished under the directorship of Kuroda Seiki at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (T?ky? Bijutsu Gakk?). In the 1910s, younger artists broke away from the conservatism of the Tokyo School to form the Nika Kai or “Second Section Society” that would explore Western art beyond the more traditional “Western-Style Art Section” (yoga ka) of the Tokyo School. In the meantime, another “revolutionary” group of young artists who called themselves the Fusain Society (Fy?zankai) aimed to cast off artistic authority and focus on individualism rather than nationalism.

Impacted by all of these various schools of thought and artistic practice, Koga also famously painted “Yumeji style” paintings during his watercolor phase. Takehia Yumeji (1884-1934) was a commercial, independent artist who was known for his iconic long, slim female figures donning kimonos. Wu indicates, however, that it was not until his Cubist phase that Koga established his reputation as an artist: his two early Cubist paintings, From the Upstairs Window and Burial, were selected in 1922 for the Nika Exhibition and won prizes. She briefly introduces the origins of European Cubism through Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and artistic developments by Jean Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier, Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes and Léger and critiques of the movement by Guillaume Apollinaire; however, it’s not entirely clear how Japanese Cubists differed from their European models. Wu does mention the artist Ishii Hakutei and his understanding of Japanese Cubism as “anti-naturalism,” which allowed artists and critics to understand Japanese Cubism as expressions of personal emotions. Influenced by Ishii and later by the German artist Paul Klee, during his Expressionist phase, Koga Harue continued his search for finding new ways to articulate the individual spirit. As Wu puts it, Japanese Expressionism in the 1920s struck the coveted “balance between objectivity and subjectivity” (86).

As in her discussion of Japanese Cubism, Japanese Surrealism is not as clearly delineated from European Surrealism in Wu’s fourth chapter on “Scientific Surrealism.” However, this chapter offers a fascinating analysis of Japanese Surrealism’s dalliance with the Japanese national tenk? movement, which was a cultural nationalistic “Neo-Japanism” or a return to Japanese Confucian and Buddhist roots that occurred in the 1930s. While Marxism took hold of Japanese culture in the 1920s, the Special Higher Police or the “Thought Police” began to surveil socialist artists and intellectuals in the mid-1920s following the passage of the 1925 “Peace Preservation Law.” At its zenith in popularity, the proletarian art movement in Japan eschewed Surrealism, which was criticized by proletarian artists for its non-utilitarianism. However, during the tenk? movement, former proletarian artists of the 1920s began to embrace Surrealism as both political and individualistic. Koga, on the other hand, rejected the utilitarianism of proletarian art and advocated the art for art’s sake of Surrealism, which was politically ambiguous. Although Koga was chastised by contemporary critics for his escapism, Wu defends his social engagement: “Koga elaborates by explaining that the purpose of class struggle is to destroy class differences, but even if class differences between human beings were dissolved, there would ‘still exist other struggles between different races or groups, or the struggle between human beings and other animals or plants, or the struggle between the earth and other planets.’ It is therefore impossible to truly dissolve class or group consciousness” (119). Koga’s Surrealist experimentation with Machine-ist collage of robots and female figures in the 1930s demonstrated his optimism toward technological development but also his discomfort with the changing social standards and progress of modernity.

In Parallel Modernism, Wu adeptly historicizes Japan’s modernism, which ran parallel to European modernism and occurred during the rise of Japanese technological modernization. The height of Japanese modernism coincided with the proletarian movement of the 1920s and The Great Kant? Earthquake in 1923, which destroyed most of Tokyo and claimed thousands of lives. The Cubist, Expressionist, and Surrealist movements of Japanese parallel modernism offered artists, particularly Koga, social engagement through individual expression. In all of its nimble epistemological explorations, Parallel Modernism arrives at an auspicious time when art historians and modernist critics such as Amy Lyford and Richard Jean So have recently challenged critics to refocus our scholarship away from traditional Eurocentric and transatlantic models and, instead, on the transpacific movements of artistic and literary modernism.