Project Head

Prof. Dr. Joachim Rees

Research Fellow

Nora Usanov-Geißler, M.A.

Project Description

This research project investigates, from a comparative perspective, the genesis and impact of a visual topos of long-distance maritime trade in the visual cultures of Japan and the Netherlands from the mid-16th to end of the 18th century. This comparative orientation is intended to widen our understanding of the formation of the early modern world system, whose history has thus far been told primarily in terms of economics and politics, by supplying insights from the sphere of art history and visual studies.

The primary focus thereby falls upon contextualizing, within the historical framework of mercantile interdependence, forms of visualization of littoral contact zones and transfer processes in the visual cultures of Japan and the Netherlands. We shall thereby inquiry into the prerequisites and medial reach of early modern visual ‘regional policies’ and into the function of pictorial forms in cultural translation practices and their contribution to the historization of contacts between cultures.

Our project starts from the finding that, in both of the visual cultures under study, the representation of littoral contact scenarios in mobile visual media with a high aesthetic niveau (panel painting, byōbu) disposed, at the latest from the beginning of the 17th century, of a differentiated repertoire that fixed in iconic form and hence sustained the geographical range of long-distance maritime trade, the diversity of the groups of actors involved and the (cyclical) repetition of the forms of interaction represented. At the level of visual phenomena, forms of imagination of the littoral can be apostrophised as liminal images that, in the visually richly orchestrated crossing of the land/water boundary, at the same time offered images of identification for socially dynamic and politically and militarily competitive societies and groups of actors.