Awards

This dissertation examines the transregional circulation and remaking of paintings of West Lake in premodern East Asia, covering China from the Southern Song to the Qing and Japan from the Muromachi to the late Edo period. “Transregional” encompasses shifts across media, display settings, and ways of viewing, as well as movement between China and Japan. Combining close visual analysis, textual corroboration, and media analysis, the study investigates how a local scenic site became a pictorial subject that could be recognized, reassembled, and recreated abroad.

It argues that scenic names, landmarks, titles, and literary memories sustained the circulation of West Lake imagery. In Japan, these resources were reorganized within temple, screen-painting, publishing, and garden contexts. Through comparisons of causeways, bridges, pagodas, and lakeside scenery, the dissertation proposes reading the landscapes framed by screens and windows in Picture of a Chinese Mansion (唐人館之図), attributed to Okumura Masanobu, as West Lake-type imagery. This case reveals how West Lake could shift from an independent scenic subject to a cultural marker of an imagined China in ukiyo-e. Works by Ike Taiga demonstrate a different transformation, as shared knowledge of West Lake was reworked through brushwork, titling, and the discourse of “true view” within literati painting.

Comparison with the Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers further suggests that West Lake tended to retain its identity as a specific foreign place, while the Eight Views more readily served as a model for organizing local scenery. The dissertation thus shows how Chinese paintings of celebrated places retained their recognizability while acquiring new ways of viewing and new cultural functions through transregional circulation.