Vortrag von Dr. Paride Stortini (FWO Research Fellow, Ghent University):
The Allure of the Past: Indian Aesthetics and the Re-Sacralization of Buddhist Art in Modern Japan.
Montag, 04.11.2024, Beginn: 18.15 Uhr
Abteilung für Asiatische und Islamische Kunstgeschichte, Adenauerallee 10, ÜR (EG)
Scholarship on religion and visual culture often posits that the birth of modern museums and art historical approaches brought to a secularization and aestheticization of religious art. This might also explain why many scholars of art have explored the intellectual and artistic networks created in the early 20 th century between Japan and India and centering on the encounter between the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore and the Japanese art historian Okakura Kakuzō, but they have not considered the importance of Buddhism in this transnational flow of visual culture. This presentation will trace recent scholarship on modern Buddhism that is shedding light on the role of Buddhist priests and intellectuals in the circulation of visual culture between Japan and South Asia, and will focus on the work of one specific Japanese artist, Nousu Kōsetsu, and on the way his art has been redeployed in modern spaces of Buddhist religious practice in a transnational context that links India, Japan, and the United States.
About Dr Paride Stortini: Paride Stortini is a research fellow at Ghent University, which he joined after completing a PhD in history of religions from the University of Chicago and a JSPS fellowship at Tokyo University. His research explores ways in which Buddhism has provided Japan with a cultural repertoire to rethink modernity and transnational encounters. His first book project shows the active role of Japanese Buddhists in redeploying ideas and images on India in scholarship, literature, and visual culture to inform the role of religion in modern Japan. Stortini is developing a second project which explores the concept of “Silk Road” in twentieth century Japan, at the intersection between cultural heritage, religious practices of memorialization and pilgrimage, and media representation of travel and “Buddhist cosmopolitanism.”