What a Map and a Portrait have in common…

What a Map and a Portrait have in common…

When Kuo Wen-Hua handed me the packet of 12 postcards of EASTS covers, he half-jokingly said that the “gift” came with an obligation; namely, to write a brief 500-word response to any one of the covers. Immediately coming to mind was an image of the EASTS cover of an East Asian female scientist, cloaked in a long white coat over a striped gray-blue skirt and seated in a lab with a microscope prominently featured in front on her desk. I was very familiar with this particular EASTS (vol. 8, no. 3, 2014) cover because the promotional poster made from it had been taped to my office door in the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University for many years after I had received it.

After returning from the 15th ICHSEA in Jeonju, Republic of Korea, I was jet-lagged and up well before dawn when I finally had time to go through the packet of postcards Wen-Hua had given me the previous week. At first I was disappointed that they only went back to 2016 because the cover I wanted to write about was not among them. Nonetheless I went through each one reading the cover image explanation until the map on the cover for EASTS (vol. 11, no. 4, 2017) struck me as particularly interesting.

The Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun published this map in a 1944 colonial report “南方の據點臺灣：寫真報道 (Taiwan-Stronghold of the South: A Photo Report). Formosa is placed as the bullseye of a five-band target that encompasses in the South, all of the Indonesian archipelago, including New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, with north Australia just within reach; to the West, the eastern edges of India, Tibet, and Xinjiang come into view; to the North, all of Mongolia and Manchuria are engulfed with the southern border regions of the Soviet Union at the upper edges; and to the East, Japan (including Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands up to the USSR’s Kamchatka Peninsula) and an insert even of the islands of Micronesia.

The map’s caption identified Formosa as “the center of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” powerfully instantiating Japan’s imperialist vision as radar signals reverberating out from the island and well beyond what Japan had claimed for this sphere. Jennifer A. Liu used this map in “Postcolonial Biotech: Taiwanese Conundrums and Subimperial Desires” (p. 571) to emphasize an analytical point made by a previous author, namely that changing the geographic alignment of Taiwan allows for correspondingly different narratives about Taiwan. In her case, she used the map to emphasize how contemporary genetic studies delink Taiwanese scientifically from northern Han Chinese in favor of Southeast Asian origins.

For me, however, that same map made me recall those dying from starvation just down the coastline within the target’s second ring from failed rice rationing in 1944 Japanese-occupied Hong Kong. Who was the author of this 1944 report and the creator of the map? What other maps did Japanese produce that same year in their “Co-Prosperity Sphere”? Did they produce any maps of the disease and epidemics that spread that year? What work did this map and others printed in 1944 do to further legitimate, or possibly challenge, the Japanese imperialist vision of this map?

Perhaps, however, I thought, this EASTS cover was inspiring me to go down a rather dark and complex historical path I could not possibly describe within the word limit. Instead, I thought, I should consider writing about the more upbeat cover of the woman scientist I was so fond of over the many years it had been on my office door. Retrieving the issue and reading the caption for the cover, however, I was shocked to discover that, in fact, I knew nothing about this image. What I had always assumed was a Chinese female scientist was in fact painted by the Korean artist Yi Yu-tae 李惟台 (1916-1999). Furthermore, Yi had used ink and color on paper to create a portrait of a female scientist in 1944 Japanese-occupied Korea. How is it that I had never realized this? Clearly, I had not read the cover design caption at the back of the issue. Also none of the articles in that issue directly referred to this painting or discussed science and gender within colonial Korea.  

The artist titled the painting only Tamgu探究 “Research.” There are no other clues provided in the cover’s caption. Certainly those credited with providing the image, Professor Kim Yung Sik and Director Chung Hyung-Min of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, would have some answers to these questions. In fact, before Director Chung Hyung-Min responded to my inquiries, a little research revealed that the artist had paired “Research” with “Rhyme” for a dual portrait titled A Pair of Figures: Rhyme and Research. He was a member of the Kim Eun-ho school of Oriental Painting, which at the time was known for their Female Figure Paintings. He submitted this dual portrait to the annual Seonjeon competition (the colonial exhibition run by the Japanese Governor General of Korea), for which it received the first place Changdeok prize.

As Director Chung informed me, Yi Yu-tae had graduated from the Imperial Fine Arts University in Tokyo (帝國美術學校) the year before. Tamgu was a “depiction of a ‘new woman’ (新女性, meaning modern woman), who was conceived in this painting as a scientist or a physician in a lab.” “But whether or not the artist modeled her on an actual person,” Director Chung also clarified, “cannot be discerned.”

Rather, like her twin “Rhyme,” it is clear that this is not a formal portrait of a specific person but rather a visual allegory of what the artist imagined was newly possible for modern Korean woman. In the colonial context of a national art competition, at minimum, it suggests that the artist imagined portraying the new “modern woman” of Korea as a scientist in a laboratory (as well as a writer as in the “Rhyme” portrait) may also be something the Japanese Governor General at the time might choose to award the coveted Changdeok prize.

Looking now together at the two EASTS covers from the female scientist of 8.3 (2014) to the map of the Japanese empire on 11.4 (2017), I’m struck by the different perspectives they depict from the expansionist imperialist vision of someone placed at the military center of the Japanese empire in Formosa to the more contemplative scientific life of an imagined Korean woman situated within colonial Korea. There is surely another probing EASTS article lying behind the history and context of how each of these images was produced (a photo report versus a painting), within what context (colonial Taiwan military context versus colonial Korean art scene), for what end and audiences, and their contemporaneous relationship to each other in 1944, the year before the Japanese Empire collapsed.

This brief writing exercise – my little obligation in accepting Wen-Hua’s gift - raises a broader phenomenon I’d also like to call attention to by way of conclusion.  One of the most delightful dimensions of historical research and writing is the serendipity of discovering how one thing leads to another, often by chance, and how, out of the unforeseen, questions may formulate that deserve further exploration.

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