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Abstract
This article examines parallel projection as spatial representation and considers its role in constructing the city image. It investigates the representation of materially intangible concepts, such as infinity, impossibility and irrationality, through a close study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century screen paintings of Kyoto called Rakuchu Rakugai zu. The tools of composition used in the paintings to influence the forms of the urban imagination bring into question the current Eurocentric historiography of parallel projection in architectural drawing by Erwin Panofsky, Yves-Alain Bois, Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Massimo Scolari. The article investigates and critiques Scenes from Another Kyoto through drawing experimentation: how and what are the spaces of urban, political and imaginative tolerances of what is allowed to be represented? The drawing practice reveals, scrutinizes and inhabits aspects of Eastern< >Western authorship and authority in Rakuchu Rakugai zu and speculates on the potential and limits of drawing to influence urban imagination.
Notes
Notes
1 Vittoria Di Palma, “Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy,” in Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City, edited by Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri (London: Routledge, 2009), 240.
2 Mark Dorrian, “On Google Earth,” in Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture, ed. Mark Dorrian and Frédëric Pousin (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 295.
3 Ibid., 297.
4 Mary E. Berry, The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 302.
5 Karen M. Gerhart, The Eyes of Power: Art and Early Tokugawa Authority (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), ix.
6 Matthew P. McKelway, Capitalscapes: Folding Screens and Political Imagination in Late Medieval Kyoto (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 2.
7 Ibid., 3.
8 Berry, Culture of Civil War in Kyoto, 296.
9 Ibid.
10 McKelway, Capitalscapes, 2.
11 Wendell Cole, Kyoto in the Momoyama Period (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), 28.
12 Elise Grilli, Golden Screen Paintings of Japan (New York: Crown, 1962), 3.
13 Miyeko Murase, Turning Point: Oribe and the Arts of Sixteenth-Century Japan (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 234.
14 Berry, Culture of Civil War in Kyoto, 300.
15 Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1990), 264.
16 The view of the city from above has been discussed by many writers, including Michel de Certeau, Vittoria Di Palma, Mark Dorrian and Frederic Pousin, as well as Marin.
17 Alberto Pérez Gómez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 196.
18 Timon Screech, “The Meaning of Western Perspective in Edo Popular Culture,” Archives of Asian Art, 47 (1994): 58.
19 Gómez and Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge, 196.
20 Margaret A. Hagen, Varieties of Realism: Geometries of Representational Art (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1.
21 McKelway, Capitalscapes, 22.
22 Berry, Culture of Civil War in Kyoto, 298.
23 Yuzo Yamane, Momoyama Genre Painting, translated by John M. Shields (New York: Weatherhill), 29.
24 Ibid., 36.
25 Ibid., 30.
26 McKelway, Capitalscapes, 22.
27 Hideo Okudaira and Fred Dunbar, Emaki: Picture-Scrolls (Osaka: Hoikusha, 1987), 16.
28 Ibid., 60.
29 Ibid., 61.
30 Gómez and Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge, 262; Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Livre d’architecture (Paris, B. Prévost, 1559).
31 Kenneth Frampton, Kunio Kudo and J. Keith Vincent, Japanese Building Practice: From Ancient Times to the Meiji Period (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1997).
32 McKelway, Capitalscapes, 24.
33 Olivier Meystre, Pictures of the Floating Microcosm: New Representations of Japanese Architecture (Zurich: Park, 2017), 192.
34 Hagen, Varieties of Realism, 142.
35 Hubert Damisch, A Theory of Cloud: Toward a History of Painting (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 42.
36 The vision of St. John on Patmost, Cupola of San Giovanni Evangelista, 1520–24; ibid., 2.
37 Ibid.
38 Timon Screech, The Lens within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), 177.
39 Damisch, Theory of Cloud, 221.
40 Massimo Scolari, Oblique Drawing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 11.
41 Hagen, Varieties of Realism, 147.
42 This is a parallel to the questions that Dorrian and others ask about Google Earth; Dorrian, “On Google Earth,” 295.
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Sayan Skandarajah
Sayan Skandarajah is a designer and researcher based in London. Alongside his Ph.D. research in Architectural Design, he is a Teaching Fellow in Representation at the emerging School of Architecture, University of Reading. He has studied at both the University of Edinburgh and the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His current research, which is funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership and has received grants from the Sasakawa Foundation, uses drawing as a new line of inquiry into non-perspectival spatial representation in Japanese art.