Art and craft as a non-dualism: the Japanese Mingei Movement from a Taiwanese perspective

This study explores two craft movements in Japan and Taiwan in the first half of the twentieth century under the political structure of Japanese imperialism. The thesis is organised into four chapters, the first two focusing on the Japanese Mingei Movement and the last two on the Taiwanese artist Yen Shui-long’s craft practice in forms of design. With the frame of the ‘International Arts and Crafts’ perpetuating in the legacy of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, I argue that these local responses should be seen as an art-historical process of displacement and replacement, rather than mere transmission or absolute subversion. Craft has been made to play the role of a negative in the construction of art’s history. Reconsidering the concept of craft, which has been previously explored by identifying its ‘non-art’ properties, this research re-engages with the art-versus-craft debate to reveal imperialism within European art history’s narratives of Others and its influence in non-European cultures’ acquirement of ‘art’. In searching for alternative aesthetic value for shaping Japanese art history, Yanagi Sōetsu’s mingei theory problematised the dualistic structure of the art-craft category, interrogating the hegemony within the modernist idea of ‘fine art’. Meanwhile, mingei aesthetics’ nuance in Taiwan extends the story to re-examine mingei theory’s own nationalist ideology. I analyse this movement as forms of cultural resistance, challenging the myths of originality, authenticity and other artificial substances used to frame the boundary of cultural identity, highlighting the ways in which ‘craft’ played a significant role in processing local mobilities and autonomies. These two cases give evidence for craft’s dialectical tension in relation to art, open a post-colonial view onto art history’s Eurocentrism and re-examine pervasive imperialism in forms of Japanese colonialism in the early twentieth century.