Caricatures in the Far East
Wednesday 18 September 2024 : Caricatures in the Far East, conference by Marie LAUREILLARD, HDR lecturer in Chinese studies at Lumière Lyon 2 University and member of the Institute of East Asia and the Center for the Study of Writing and Image.
Marie Laureillard presents the book she co-wrote Caricatures in the Far East: Origins, encounters, crossbreeding, with Laurent Baridon, published by Hemisphères.
The general presentation of the work associated with the study of Asian caricatures and their receptions demonstrates that this art comes, not from Europe, as commonly accepted, but from Asia and more particularly from Japan.
Caricature in the Far East Origins, encounters, crossbreeding draws up an overview of the archaeology of satire in East Asia up to the contemporary world, on all types of media (kites, seals, maps, drawings, prints, etc.), by creating a dialogue between the works between Western and Eastern points of view and by questioning the perception of each, between reception and analysis of the caricatures.
Caricatures, satirical images, are said to have been born in the 12th century with funny paintings of animals, and to have been cultivated within mangas/manhwas (a term invented by Hokusai with his work La Manga and which was exported to China in the 20th century).e century to give rise to the Chinese term Manhwa), terms covering notions of press drawings, caricatures and comic strips.
Caricature eludes a simple and concise definition: one must first look for an exaggeration in the graphics and a satirical content. Do these two characteristics also appear in the Far East or do they remain specific to the concept of Western caricature? Identifying satire means understanding iconography, a cultural, anthropological and historical notion, which requires instantly grasping the allusions and references summoned. Caricature is an image that acts: we speak of agency.
 Guan Xiu (839-912), The Sixteen Arhats (details), leaf prints, 120 x 52 cm, Shengyin Temple in Hangzhou, 894. |
 Sumo wrestling between rabbits and frogs. Chōjū-giga, ink on paper, height 30 cm, detail of the first scroll. 12th-13th centuries. ©Tokyo National Museum. |
Illustrated satire in Asia is generally associated with Japan and not China, a fact questioned and studied through the prism of Confucianism. For the Chinese of the 20e century, caricature represents a kind of painting that uses allegories, hyperboles, personification, summons humor and relies on satire. Nevertheless, the history of caricature in China sometimes goes back to the physical deformations already visible in the Neolithic in order to make this art coincide with local temporality, differentiating itself from the Japanese apprehension which originates in the 7th century, at the time of burlesque paintings of animals. This type of support persists until the contemporary era, of which the triptych of Kawanabe Kyosai, The Great Battle of the Frogs, gives an overview.
The first axis of the book, “Approaches to Satirical Culture in the Far East”, deals with the meaning of images, the use of games and satirical texts through two examples.
Choju-giga, a Japanese animal emaki from the second half of the 12th century, is thus said to be at the origin of satirical culture. This burlesque painting is seen as a criticism of the government in place through figures of rabbits or frogs with human attitudes and comical behavior. In the case of Korean manners painting, Kim Hongdo still shows scenes of daily life interpreted as a mockery of the court, a criticism of the inequalities of Chosŏn.
The demonstration thus illustrates the need for the reader to possess each of the keys to analysis (cultural, historical and anthropological factors) for an effective meaning and understanding of these caricatures.
“Encounters and Stereotypes”, the second chapter of the book, focuses on the establishment of new ways of thinking about the world and seeing others (foreigners, enemy countries): creating stereotypes through satire during the 19th and 20th centuries.
 Honda Kinkichirō, Candidates!, Marumaru Chinbun, August 4, 1877. |
 Kobokpuran (高腹弗安), Taehan minbo, July 18, 1909. |
For many of them, the caricatures then draw the portrait of foreigners by stigmatizing them. During the Bunmei-kaika, a period of opening up to the outside world, Japan thus broke with Confucianist ways of thinking and drew inspiration from Western ways of life, even if it meant mocking them. A caricature of morals took hold, mocking Westerners or, conversely, offering a satire of the Japanese people that can be observed, for example, in the work of Georges Bigot.
These Western-Eastern exchanges generate multiple satirical images which, for the most part, create numerous stereotypes still anchored in customs today.
“Current Events and Conflicts” deals, in the third part, with this continuity and illustrates in particular the characteristic opening of Shanghai in the 1930s to the international culture of satirical images based on the caricature magazine Modern Sketch where the influence of the Western press circulating at the time is clearly visible in the parallels drawn with the conflicts of the 20th century.
 Map of the present situation (時局圖), probably published in Japan and reproduced in the American magazine Leslie's Weekly in 1900. |
 Ah To 阿塗, The Situation in the Far East 2022 (Shijutu 時局圖). |
 CoCo (Huang Yuan-nan 黄永楠) (1953- ), CoCo comedy album (CoCo 漫畫集) Taipei, Éditions The Eighties, 1981. |
But while the Chinese press condemns the 2015 attacks, it does not publish any Charlie Hebdo cartoons. Refraining from criticizing the government in place, the caricature turns to foreigners: in China, freedom of expression is denounced through satire and caricature.
The last development, devoted to “Satirical Traits”, explores the subject in depth by drawing on various examples: satirical geographical maps produced in China and Japan at the beginning of the 20th century which question the boundary between art, the press and propaganda, to the caricaturist CoCo (Huang Yuan-nan) who participated in the rise of democracy in Taiwan and whose pictorial production is inspired by the press to summon a universal language.
Analogies with European forms of caricature are thus revealed through shifts, diverted allusions, exaggerations of physical or moral traits, metaphors, amplification, parody, animalization, reification, the reversal of hierarchies and values, or even the transgression of usual figurative codes... These processes, whatever the period, overlap and join those known in the West.
In the light of a crisis of caricature now shifted to social networks, these analyses thus contribute to the construction of a global history of visual satire, for a history of art connected between different countries, a broader and de-Europeanized angle of view.
The genre of caricature is linked to freedom of expression: an ordinary painting whispers while a caricature screams.
