Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts

The idea that Japanese art is produced through rote copy and imitation is an eighteenth-century colonial construction, with roots in Romantic ideals of originality. Offering a much-needed corrective to this critique, Michael Lucken demonstrates the distinct character of Japanese mimesis and its dynamic impact on global culture, showing through several twentieth-century masterpieces the generative and regenerative power of Japanese creativity.

The idea that Japanese art is produced through rote copy and imitation is an eighteenth-century colonial construction, with roots in Romantic ideals of originality. Michael Lucken demonstrates the distinct character of Japanese mimesis and its dynamic impact on global culture through several twentieth-century masterpieces.

Michael Lucken is a professor at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris. He is the author of L'Art du Japon au vingtième siècle (Japanese Art in the Twentieth Century, 2001) and a coeditor of Japan's Postwar (2011).

Thoroughly documented, and including a select bibliography, Lucken's book is required reading for artists and for historians and connoisseurs of Japanese arts.... Essential.

Shigemi Inaga, International Research Center for Japanese Studies:
Lucken questions the very 'orientalist' hegemonic structure of, in the words of Edward Said, 'grasping the other,' which has woven up the discourses on things Japanese in mutual dependence. Therefore, his book endeavors to overcome the dominant academic framework, which has been concocted in the midst of Western imperialism, and the reactions against it from the rest of the world.

Ming Tiampo, author of Gutai: Decentering Modernism:
This book is an erudite, far-reaching, and deftly transnational inquiry into the philosophical bases and artistic practices of imitation and creativity. Lucken mounts an effective critique of one of the most fundamental underpinnings of discourses privileging Euro-American modernism and offers conceptual alternatives for rethinking modernist studies. This elegantly translated book is a must-read for anyone interested in modernism and is particularly essential for scholars working on multiple modernisms.

Gennifer Weisenfeld, Duke University:
Lucken skillfully takes on the powerful and persistent stereotype of the Japanese as imitative and derivative. His erudite and measured treatment not only debunks this misrepresentation once and for all but also authoritatively demonstrates its insidious ideological legacy.

Jonathan Reynolds, Barnard College:
A well-written and rigorously researched analysis that is grounded in both Continental and Japanese theoretical literature. The book will offer a perspective that is fresh for many readers and will be a significant contribution to the current literature on modern Japanese art and visual culture.

Thomas Rimer, coeditor, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature:
Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts is a sophisticated and complex meditation on the nature of Japanese creativity and. by extension, on the nature of artistic creativity in general. Michael Lucken's writing is a performance, and it is dazzling.