context: thematic routes > realism > sources

The Realism on Asian Arts

This is a shoddily put together collection of conference papers from The 12th International Symposium. Much of it is in Japanese, but not all of it - I assume the English is translations of the same material. I expect this would be hard to find, and it isn't worth trying. I guess it might conceivably have been worth reading had it used a translator who was fluent in English and who understood punctuation, but actually I suspect that even then it would just be a slapdash collection of small bits of academic research without anything interesting to say. Far too keen on simply pointing at a couple of things and saying "Look! This one is more realistic than that one!" To be fair it occasionally adds some explanation, usually amounting to "that is because this artist wanted to be more realistic," which doesn't add a great deal. the repros are tiny, B&W, only sometimes captioned in English, and sometimes so grey as to be unreadable. The one readable section, probably because it was delivered in English originally, compares pairs of images and discusses the contrasts - so of course the reproductions never show both images of any pair...

I can't find it on Amazon.