Research Projects

Research on Creation and Development of Asian Arts Studies

Summary and Aims of the Project

This project inherits and develops from two germinating research projects that have been conducted at the Art Research Center (ARC) and the International Institute for Languages and Culture Studies at Ritsumeikan University, and covers various diverse arts and cultures in Asia including Japan, and the societies surrounding them. It aims to create "Asian arts" from an interdisciplinary and comprehensive standpoint through introducing various academic fields, such as literature, bibliography, history, comparative cultural history, anthropogeography, and digital humanities, as well as some artistic studies in a narrow sense such as aesthetics, art history, and theatre studies, while collaborating with overseas research institutes.

The above research project intends to make archives for artistic cultures inherited from the past to the present, grasp the realities of the successions, transformations, fusions, diffusions, and disappearances of traditional arts and techniques, and clarify the correlations between the awareness of art and forms of society, which were influenced by the results of westernization and globalization. In order to incorporate these issues, this project sets four research branches for comprehensive clarification of arts in Asia: (1) formations and transformations of norms in religious arts in premodern Asia, (2) movements of publishing culture, techniques and publications in premodern Japan and Asia, (3) phases of theatrical arts and societies in Asia and Japan, (4) media representations of modern and contemporary Japan and Asia from the perspective taken by the West.

The project creates a platform to integrate such research practices as an international hub for the research of Asian arts and its archives, and in doing so encourages researchers and graduate students to use it openly and further strengthen their roles. Through this platform, we believe that we can provide an overview of Asian arts, conduct researches on educational materials which use knowledges of cultural properties and archiving technologies, and develop plans for a new art museum and exhibitions.

Research Projects