April 15, 2021
8:30 am–12 pm (Montreal/Washington, DC)
1:30 pm–5:00 pm (London)
2:30 pm–6:00 pm (Berlin)
9:30 pm–1:00 am (Osaka)
5:30 am–9:00 am (Seattle)
Register online
Program | Agenda | Current Research | Speaker Bios | Acknowledgement
Program
Yamanaka & Company was one of the most prolific art dealers selling Asian art to buyers in Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century. A family business that was initially based in Osaka, Japan, it became a shareholding corporation and a global leader in selling Asian art mainly to a Western clientele.
In 1894, the first gallery outside of Japan opened in New York City, with more branches following in Boston, Chicago, London, and Beijing, among other locations. Art collecting giants including the Rockefellers, Ernest Fenollosa, Charles Lang Freer, and Osvald Sirén were some of Yamanaka’s clients. The broad variety of Asian objects from East Asia and South and Southeast Asia sold by Yamanaka are now in leading museums around the world, including the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Freer Gallery of Art. Examining the history of Yamanaka & Company illustrates the complicated nature of the art market at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, implicating colonial entanglements, inner Asian translocation of objects from broader Asia to Europe and North America, and forced sales during WWII. This webinar will bring together members of the Yamanaka family, researchers, and museum specialists who will discuss the impact of the Yamanaka trading activities on today’s museum collections.
This program is the second installment in the series Hidden Networks: Trade in Asian Art.
Organized by:
- Najiba H. Choudhury, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC
- Joanna M. Gohmann, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC
- Christine Howald, Zentralarchiv/Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
- Laura Vigo, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Agenda
Thursday, April 15, 2021
8:30 am–12 pm (Montreal/Washington, DC)
1:30 pm–5:00 pm (London)
2:30 pm–6:00 pm (Berlin)
9:30 pm–1:00 am (Osaka)
5:30 am–9:00 am (Seattle)
8:30–10:00 am (EST)
- Welcome & Opening Remarks
Joanna M. Gohmann, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
Christine Howald, Zentralarchiv/Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Introduction
YAMANAKA Tatsuro, CEO, Yamanaka & Co., Ltd., Kyoto, Japan - A History of Yamanaka Shokai: Romantic Challenges on the World Stage
YAMANAKA Yuzuru, CEO, Yamanaka & Co., Ltd., Osaka, Japan - The Rise and Fall of Yamanaka & Co., Japan’s Most Successful International Art Dealer
Yuriko KUCHIKI, Independent scholar - Questions & Discussion
Moderated by Najiba H. Choudhury, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
10:00–10:05 am (EST)
- Break
10:05–10:50 am (EST)
- Introduction to Museum Spotlights
Laura Vigo, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Museum Spotlights Part I:
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Monika Bincsik, Diane and Arthur Abbey Associate Curator for Japanese Decorative Arts - The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherland
Ching-Ling WANG, Curator of Chinese Art - The British Museum, London, United Kingdom
Jessica Harrison-Hall, Head of China Section, Curator of the Sir Percival David Collection and Chinese Decorative Arts
Yu-Ping LUK, Basil Gray Curator: Chinese Paintings, Prints, and Central Asian Collections
Rosina Buckland, Curator, Japanese Collections - The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada
Laura Vigo, Curator of Asian Art - Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada
Akiko TAKESUE, Independent scholar/curator
10:50–11:00 am (EST)
- Break
11:00 am–12:00 pm (EST)
Museum Spotlights Part II:
- Världskulturmuseerna/Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, Sweden
Ji Young PARK, Research Associate, Technische Universität (TU) Berlin, Germany
Michel Lee, Curator (China, Korea, and Sven Hedin Collections), National Museums of World Culture, Stockholm, Sweden - Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC, United States
Najiba H. Choudhury, Assistant Collections Information Specialist & Provenance Researcher - Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom
Josephine Rout, Japan Curator, Asian Department - Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, United States
Rachel Harris, Asian Art Conservation Associate - Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Christine Howald, Provenance Researcher Asia, Collections,
Zentralarchiv/Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Questions & Discussion
Moderated by Laura Vigo, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts - Closing Remarks
Christine Howald, Zentralarchiv/Museum für Asiatische Kunst,
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Joanna M. Gohmann, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
Current Research
Choudhury, Najiba. “Seizures and Liquidation Sales in the United States during World War II: Tracking the Fate of Japanese Art Dealership, Yamanaka & Company, Inc.” Journal for Art Market Studies 4, no. 2 (2020). https://doi.org/10.23690/jams.v4i2.125.
Kuchiki, Yuriko. “The Enemy Trader: The United States and the End of Yamanaka.” Impressions 34 (2013): 33–53.
Maezaki, Masako Yamamoto. “Innovative Trading Strategies for Japanese Art: Ikeda Seisuke, Yamanaka & Co. and their Overseas Branches (1870s–1930s).” In Acquiring Cultures: Histories of World Art on Western Markets, edited by Bénédicte Savoy, Charlotte Guichard, and Christine Howald, 223–38. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2018.
Speaker Bios
Akiko TAKESUE is a Japanese art specialist who has worked on multiple curatorial projects at museums in Australia, Canada, and the United States, from conducting research on the Japanese collections to curating a permanent gallery and special exhibitions. She was a cocurator for the exhibition Obsession: Sir William Van Horne’s Japanese Ceramics, held in Toronto and Montreal from 2018 to 2020, which was based on her PhD research. In 2017–2019, she was part of the organizing team for the exhibition The Life of Animals in Japanese Art at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC.
Dr. Ching-Ling WANG is curator of Chinese art at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. He received his doctoral degree in East Asian art history from Freie Universität, Berlin, in 2013. Formerly, he worked as curator of premodern Chinese art at Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
Christine Howald, PhD in history, is deputy director of the Zentralarchiv (Central Archive) and provenance researcher for the Asia collections at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (National Museums in Berlin) and heads the research focus Tracing East Asian Art (TEAA) at Technische Universität Berlin. Her projects focus on the European market for East Asian art and colonial withdrawal contexts in Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Christine is the cofounder of the international network and workshop series Provenance Research on East Asian Art. She has published on the marketing of the Yuanmingyuan loot in Paris and London in the 1860s and is coeditor of the volume Acquiring Cultures: Histories of World Art on Western Markets (de Gruyter, 2018) and of two issues of the Journal for Art Market Studies, “Asian Art: Markets, Provenance, History” (Vol. 2, No. 3, 2018) and “Asian Art: The Formation of Collections” (Vol. 4, No. 2, 2020).
Jessica Harrison-Hall is the principal investigator for the international project Cultural Creativity in Qing China from 1796 to 1912, which is funded by the UK government’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. This project, with London University, will result in a book and an exhibition in 2023. Previously she was the lead curator for two permanent galleries: the Sir Percival David Collection of Chinese ceramics and the Sir Joseph Hotung Gallery of China. She has curated several special exhibitions, including Ming: 50 years that changed China. Her most recent publication is China: A History in Objects.
Ji Young PARK studied art history (Seoul National University) and museology (École du Louvre/Université d’Avignon/Université du Québec à Montréal), specifically Asian art historical knowledge communication in museum space, and worked as a curatorial assistant of Korean art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her research interests center around museum exhibitions of foreign cultures with displaced objects due to a global imbalance of power and the reception of society. She is currently writing a book on the Otani collection exhibitions in the National Museum of Korea as part of the translocations team and is participating in a data-driven research project on Korean art(i)facts of diplomatic relations in European collections
Joanna M. Gohmann received her PhD in the history of art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the World War II-era provenance researcher at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. Before coming to the Freer and Sackler, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art at The Walters Art Museum. Gohmann is particularly interested in the history of collecting and artistic exchanges between China and the eighteenth-century French court.
Josephine Rout is a curator in the Asian Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum, specializing in Japanese art from the Meiji era to the contemporary period. She was project curator of the exhibition Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk and is author of Japanese Dress in Detail (2020).
Laura Vigo is curator of Asian arts at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where she has recently worked on the new permanent galleries for Asian arts in the Wing for the Arts of One World and has adapted the exhibition Obsession: Sir William Van Horne’s Japanese Ceramics. She received her doctoral degree in Chinese archaeology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, in 2004. Before moving to Montreal, she worked as a consultant for private galleries and cultural organizations in Europe and as an assistant curator at the Museum of Oriental Art in Genoa. Her most recent research focuses on how Chinese art was perceived, consumed, and distilled through the Western colonial gaze.
LUK Yu-ping is responsible for Chinese paintings, prints, and the Stein collection and related material from northwest China at the British Museum. Previously, she was curator (China) at the Victoria and Albert Museum; project curator of the British Museum exhibition Ming: 50 years that changed China; and assistant professor at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She received her PhD at the University of Oxford, and her publications have mainly focused on empresses in Ming and Qing China. She is currently working on an exhibition project about the Silk Roads.
Michel Lee is a curator working with the China, Korea, and Sven Hedin collections at The National Museums of World Culture, Sweden. He received his first degree in anthropology at The George Washington University, Washington, DC, and an MA in the history of art and archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Mr. Lee has previously worked at the Smithsonian Institution; has served as curator at and director of the Museum of East Asian Art in Bath, United Kingdom; and has served as the director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, Sweden, from 2013 until 2015.
Monika Bincsik specializes in Japanese decorative arts and textile. From 2008 to 2009, she was a Jane and Morgan Whitney Research Fellow at The Met. Later, she worked as a research assistant at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, where she earned a second PhD in Japanese lacquers. From 2013 to 2015, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at The Met and became assistant curator in 2015, then Diane and Arthur Abbey Associate Curator in 2019. She was cocurator of Kimono: A Modern History (2014) and curated Discovering Japanese Art: American Collectors and The Met (2015), Japanese Bamboo Art: The Abbey Collection (2017), and Kyoto: Capital of Artistic Imagination (2019). She has published widely on decorative arts and collecting history.
Najiba H. Choudhury is a collections information specialist & provenance researcher at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. She supports provenance research at the Freer and Sackler, including WWII-era and new acquisitions, and handles public requests for provenance information. She also assists in managing the collections database. She frequently organizes and gives talks on provenance research. She received her BA in art history (specializing in Asian art) and economics from George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia, and holds a postgraduate certificate in antiquities, trafficking, art crime, and repatriation from the University of Glasgow. She is completing her masters in provenance & collecting in an international context from the University of Glasgow. Her article on Yamanaka & Co. and the US seizure of the American collection during WWII was published in the Journal for Art Market Studies (Vol. 4, No. 2, 2020).
Since 2014, Rachel Harris has been involved with various Asian-related projects at the Seattle Art Museum. Her current work focuses on the Seattle Art Museum’s newly established studio for the conservation of Asian paintings.
Rosina Buckland received a PhD from The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She has previously worked at the National Museum of Scotland and the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada. Her primary research area is pictorial art of the nineteenth century, with a focus on Chinese-inspired culture. Her publications include Shunga: Erotic Art in Japan (2010) and Painting Nature for the Nation: Taki Katei and the Challenges to Sinophile Culture in Meiji Japan (2013). She is currently writing a book on the Japanese art of the Meiji era (1868–1912).
YAMANAKA Tatsuro is the fourth-generation member and CEO of the Yamanaka & Co., Ltd., Kyoto. After graduating from Kinki University, he worked in food technology and biochemical engineering. In 2001, he joined the Yamanaka & Co., Ltd., Kyoto, where he worked in the wedding business division before being appointed CEO in 2003.
Since 2003, YAMANAKA Yuzuru has been the CEO of Yamanaka & Co., Ltd. in Osaka, Japan. Before joining the Yamanaka & Co., Ltd., he held positions at the Marubeni Corporation from 1972 to 1999.
Yuriko KUCHIKI is a Japanese author whose books and magazine articles explore the history, politics, and social dynamics of the international art scene. Before moving to New York City in 1994, KUCHIKI was the deputy editor in chief of Esquire magazine’s Japanese edition in Tokyo. In 2011, she published House of Yamanaka: The Company that Sold East Asia’s Treasures to America & Europe (written in Japanese, from Shinchosha).
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to Frank Feltens, Alan Francisco, Alexander Hofmann, Ji Young PARK, Melissa M. Rinne, Wibke Schrape, and Motoko Shimizu for their guidance and support in this project.