Abstract
This paper explores the reception of Islamic art by Japanese artists in the early twentieth century. Japanese artists who encountered Islamic art can be divided into three types. The first type comprises those who went to Europe to study Western art and became fascinated by Islamic art. The second type includes those who had opportunities to travel to see Islamic monuments in Spain, North Afritca, and India. The last type consists of those who did not have the opportunity to travel abroad but received inspiration from Islamic art through books and other publications.

Following the publication of Owen Jones’s works on the Alhambra and The Grammar of Ornament, many European artists drew inspiration from Islamic art objects. Prominent artists and museums alike accumulated Islamic art. In this environment, Japanese painters such as Okada Saburosuke, Kojima Torajiro, Manami Kunzo, and Tomimoto Kenkichi encountered Islamic art for the first time. Some visited leading institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum to study textiles, ceramics, and paintings from the Islamic world. Several of these artists returned to Japan with art objects such as textiles from Islamic lands to inspire and educate fellow Japanese artists.

Meanwhile, Yoshida Hiroshi traveled to Spain and was captivated by Islamic monuments such as the Great Mosque of Cordoba and the Alhambra. He also visited Cairo and Morocco to experience the atmosphere of Arab culture, and this interest later led him to India. Yoshida’ s prints of Mughal monuments such as the Taj Mahal are products of these travels. Other Japanese artists also went to India and studied not only Buddhist art but also Islamic art and architecture. A Buddhist painter, Arai Kampo, sketched many Persian and Mughal paintings he saw in the Calcutta Museum. Such encounters with Islamic art broadened their perspectives on art and culture.

In the early twentieth century, even Japanese painters who did not have the chance to go abroad could receive inspiration from Islamic art through publications. A prominent painter, Murakami Kagaku, wished to visit India but never had the opportunity to travel abroad. He therefore studied Mughal and Persian paintings through publications and admired the minute lines in them. His encounter with such paintings was reflected in his works. This paper illuminates these lesser-known connections between Japanese artists and Islamic art.

Bio
Yumiko Kamada is a Professor at Keio University. She received her B.A. from Keio University in 2002, M.A. from the University of Tokyo in 2004, and Ph.D. from the Institute of Fines Arts, New York University in 2011. She specializes in Islamic art history. After the publication of her book, Jutan ga Musubu Sekai: Kyoto Gion Matsuri Indo Jutan e no Michi (Carpets that Connect the World: Indian Carpets and Their Journey toward the Kyoto Gion Festival, University of Nagoya Press, 2016), she received several awards including the Japan Academy Award. Her recent research focuses on Japanese artists’ encounters with and reactions to Islamic art during their stays in Europe in the early twentieth century. Among the articles she wrote are “The Material Translation of Persian and Indian Carpets and Textiles in Early Modern Japan” in In-Between Textiles, 1400-1800: Weaving Subjectivities and Encounters, Amsterdam University Press, 2023, pp. 305-326; “The Attribution and Circulation of Flowering Tree and Medallion Design Deccani Embroideries,” in Sultans of the South: Arts of the India’s Deccan Courts, 1323-1687, Yale University Press, 2011, pp. 132-147; “A Taste for Intricacy: An Illustrated Manuscript of Mantiq al-Tayr in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” Orient 45 (2010), pp. 129-175.

Abstract
This paper examines how the new styles of ceramic art developed in art institutions of colonial India were reinvented in the process of transformation of pre-colonial South Asian Islamic traditions into Pan-Indian or Oriental representations, reflecting the Western gaze as its primary export market. The strong demand for ceramics in nineteenth-century Europe was fuelled by the development of consumerism and a consequent growth of industrial arts, in which design preferences were highly impacted by exoticism embodied at international exhibitions as visual spectacles of the legitimacy of colonialism. It is evident that India was indispensable for satisfying such demand in Victorian Britain since the 1851 London exhibition. From an Indian perspective, the promotion of industrial arts as part of industrialisation became particularly crucial in the late nineteenth century when India was incorporated into the British Raj following the Mutiny, with a view to contributing to the prosperity of the British colonial empire.

Among ceramics curricula in art schools of colonial India, Bombay (founded 1857) and Jaipur (founded 1866) were proved particularly successful. The stylistic norms for pottery products from these institutions were principally drawn from two distinct Islamic traditions: firstly, blue-and-white pottery of Multan in Punjab, and secondly, polychrome pottery of Hara in Sind, both of which are now located in Pakistan. Drawing inspiration from shapes and colour palettes of these Islamic traditional pottery, art-school products adopted indigenous motifs of India such as Hindu deities as well as Buddhist jatakas discovered in Ajanta murals, to present a new aesthetics of Indian industrial arts, infused with Victorian undertones of exoticism and Orientalism. From the 1870s onwards, art-school potteries gained considerable popularity in Britain, as they were introduced by renowned emporia and retailers of Oriental art in London including Morris & Co. and Liberty. Furthermore, these pottery works were exhibited at various regional and international events such as the Jeypore exhibition (1883) and the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (1886). Doubtlessly, such popularity was underlain in conjunction with the prevailing Arts and Crafts movement. Looking through literary sources such as art school reports and exhibition catalogues as well as museum collections of art-school potteries, this presentation thus sets out to argue how pre-colonial sensibilities of Indo-Islamic art were reinterpreted in cross-cultural negotiations of colonial politics.

Bio
Aki Toyoyama is Associate Professor at the Faculty of International Studies in Kindai University (Osaka, Japan). Her research focuses on the history of colonial art and architecture of South Asia, with a particular attention to the global trade of decorative tiles called majolica made in interwar Japan and diffused not only in Japan’s colonies but also in the Straits Settlements, India, and other British and European colonies in the Indian Oceanic world. Her publications include Divine Affection: Enchanting Images of Hindu Deities (Co-author, National Museum of Ethnology, 2003, in Japanese), “A Political History of Handicrafts and Exhibitions in Colonial India” in The Journal of the Society for Arts and Anthropology, Vol. 39 (2023, in Japanese), The Vibrance of Indian Fabrics (Co-author, Showado, 2021, in Japanese), and “Visual Politics of Japanese Majolica Tiles in Colonial South Asia” in The Journal of Indian and Asian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2020).

Abstract
This presentation examines how Iran was represented and perceived at late nineteenth-century world’s fairs. Focusing on the visual and spatial framing of “Iran” within these exhibitions, I investigate how Iranian art objects were selected, categorized, and displayed according to curatorial logics shaped largely by European organizers who sought to situate Iran within an emerging global hierarchy of civilizations. At the same time, the paper foregrounds the perspective of Nāṣer al-Dīn Shāh (r. 1848–1896) of Iran, who travelled to Europe three times and visited world fairs in Vienna (1873) and Paris (1878 and 1889) during his reign. Drawing on his travel diaries, I analyze how he encountered these displays not as a passive viewer but as a sovereign ruler negotiating Iran’s position between imperial powers. His descriptions reveal a desire to counter externally constructed images of Iran by asserting the dignity of his own state. By bringing these viewpoints together, the presentation highlights world’s fairs as sites of cross-cultural encounter where Persian art was simultaneously framed by imperial powers and reinterpreted by an Iranian monarch. This dual reading highlights an Iranian self-fashioning that resisted simple alignment with either imperial centers or colonized territories and Iran’s complex role in global cultural politics of the late nineteenth century onwards.

Bio
Yuki Terada is a part-time lecturer at Rikkyo University and Meiji Gakuin University. She received her Ph.D. from Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo in 2022 and worked as a project assistant professor (2022-2025) at Tokyo College. Her research primarily focuses on the evolution of museums in Middle Eastern Islamic countries. Her publications include “Museum Inclusivity: Multicultural Representation at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art” in The Journal of the Museological Society of Japan, Vol.50 (2) (2025, in Japanese) and “The Nineteenth-Century World Expositions and the Travelogues of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar” in Banpakugaku/Expo-logy, Vol.4 (Shibunkaku Publising, 2025, in Japanese). From 2025 to 2026, she conducted a research project entitled “Museum of Science and Technology and the Paradox of Peace” and examined how art, religion, science, and technology are represented in contemporary Iranian museums and beyond.

Abstract
The modern European perception, dissemination, and impact of Islamic art were greatly enhanced by the displays at the Universal Exhibitions in the second half of the nineteenth century. These exhibitions were a new phenomenon, commercial enterprises that promoted trade and economic growth through national displays of products, crafts, and technologies. The presentations by countries from what was called the ‘Orient’—showcasing architecture and artefacts—opened a new chapter in Europe’s engagement with Islamic art. While such art had previously circulated as luxury goods for princes and nobles, it now attracted the upper middle classes and fed a general interest for the exotic. It was embraced by the art and design industries and by art reform movements of Europe in the age of historicism, which sought sources of inspiration for new designs, techniques, and replicas. While such interest propelled the first substantial studies of the categories, media, and techniques of Islamic art, the Universal Exhibitions also marked a split in reception. As mass-produced nineteenth-century commodities popularised contemporary ‘Oriental’ art, art historians soon dismissed it as commercial and debased, focusing instead on historic ‘Islamic’ art.

This talk situates the displays of architecture and artefacts at the Universal Exhibitions in a broader history of Islamic art that includes the nineteenth century. It examines how such art was presented and framed at the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair, the first universal exhibition organised not by the major colonial powers, France and England, but by Austria-Hungary. The talk considers how the fair shaped collecting in Vienna and catalysed the reception of Islamic art in the fields of design, architecture, and art historiography.

Bio
Markus RITTER is Professor for History of Islamic Art at the Department of Art History, University of Vienna, Austria. His research interests include the visuality and functions of art objects and architecture from the medieval through pre-modern periods in Iran and the Arab Levant, transfer and adaptation processes, and the historiography of Islamic art. His books include Moscheen und Madrasabauten in Iran 1785–1848 (2006), The Golden Qur’an from the Age of the Seljuks and Atabegs (with N. Ben Azzouna, 2015), Der umayyadische Palast des 8. Jahrhunderts in Ḫirbat al-Minya am See von Tiberias (2017), and several co-edited volumes and anthologies, among them The Indigenous Lens? Early Photography in the Near and Middle East (with St. G. Scheiwiller, 2018), and most recently, Islamic Art at the Vienna World’s Fair 1873: Displays, Framings, and Perceptions at the Weltausstellung and Its Time (with S. Göloğlu, forthcoming).