Inspired in Japan | Designed in California | Made in China

Asian Influences in Modern Art and Design

For over 150 years, Asian cultures have had a subconscious yet steady aesthetic and spiritual influence on the Western world’s design and modern cultural production. The history of modern art and design owe an unacknowledged debt to the traditional art and design practices found in this subcontinent. In writing this, I am trying hope to shine a light on some of the unexpected ways that these sensibilities have indelibly shaped modern American culture. This will not meant to be an exhaustive article, it is a focused example meant to peel away the layers of history to uncover some key links in the chains of influence that constructed our world today. I will trace one set of influences that planted the seeds of Modernism’s aesthetic and theoretical frameworks. Seeds that were exported to Europe after the opening of Japan by USA’s Commodore Perry in 1854.

Simon Sadler, a professor of Architecture Theory and History, Design, and Urbanism at the University of California, Davis, states that, ““The modernist tradition becomes — to use Koolhaas’s celebrated term — increasingly delirious, as it gravitates from the Heroic Age Netherlands, to Jazz Age New York, to Aquarian Age California.” I would interject here and say that it started one stop before that, a revised design itinerary goes: Japan - Holland - Germany - New York - California. Japan first opened its doors to international trade with the Netherlands in the early 1600s mediated by the Dutch East India Company and the all-powerful Tokugawa shogunate. The shogun saw the value in trading with foreigners but actively resisted any kind of undue influence, colonization, or cultural appropriation from Europe. The Dutch were restricted to only a few trading ports and weren’t allowed into the influential circles that made up the Empire’s ruling class. 

The 1600’s marked a distinct shift in Japanese aesthetics that predates and predicts Western Modernism by over 4 centuries. This was the rise of Wabi Sabi into Japan’s most elite circles. Sen no Rikyu was a master of “chanoyu” or the tea ceremony. Tea ceremony was only allowed to be practiced by royalty, nobles, and the samurai class. Before Rikyu, the ceremony was a lavish affair, practiced in highly ornamented rooms with intricate carvings, delicate paintings, and precious objects all on display to show off the host’s wealth and power. Many of the tea rooms of this time shared an aesthetic sensibility with the royal interiors in China, with whom the Japanese traded with.. 

In a radical shift Rikyu introduced “wabi cha” which evolved into wabi sabi. He stripped away all of the elegant trimmings of the ceremony and elevated the simple farmhouse as the inspiration for the tea house, and used inelegant, rustic utensils to perform the ceremony. Doing this elevated the common man by placing the poorest farmer’s house as the setting where the most powerful would come to experience the art of tea. Rikyu’s ceremonies were borderline ascetic in order to cultivate his ideologies of directness of approach, humility,  and honesty to self. 

The tea ceremony was considered the highest form of Japanese art, a symphonic experience where the tea master curated the finest crafted objects into a performative moment of pure poetry. Because of its high standing in Japanese society, Rikyu’s influence on the aesthetics of Japanese culture penetrated into its architecture, designed objects, and spiritual value systems (Rikyu was a practitioner of Zen Buddhism). It is fair to assume that the cultural exports from Japan were also influenced by Rikyu and his wabi sabi ethos. When Japan was forcibly opened by Perry 250 years later a flood of Japanese art and design was firmly entrenched in this minimalist aesthetic. In the European markets, Japanese art and design became highly fetishized and desired during that time. 

The “Ukiyo-e” (or Floating World) style of woodblock prints of master painters Hiroshige, Utamaro, and Hokusai held a specific fascination for a small group of renegade artists who were looking for ways to reject the traditional institution of painting and power. This group would later be known as the Impressionists, the first group that defined the aesthetics and values of Modernism. Monet, Van Gogh, Degas, all became inspired by the flattened pictorial space, the striking angular compositions, and the depictions of the erotic, the savage, and the everyday peasant life. 

These ideas and compositional techniques gave the Impressionists a path out of the rigid institutions of Realism, Romanticism, and the social and economic hierarchies that they represented. From this historical perspective, one can draw a direct connection between the populist aesthetics of Modernism and Japanese populist art of the mid-18th century. This is perhaps why my antique Japanese tansu looks so at home in my California mid-century craftsman dining room. Zen Buddhism would also have a continuing influence on Modernism’s later iterations of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. Sadler also points to Zen Buddhism’s influence on Steve Jobs, arguably one of the most influential contemporary designers. He states that, ”Jobs and Koolhaas each project variants of postmodern modernism: one optimistic but quietly doomed, the other doomed but quietly optimistic.”

A quick review of modern design history in the Bay Area: the designs that came out of the 60s and 70s Bay Area was marked by a general utopian optimism (the Age of Aquarius) that valued counter-cultural production, social activism and inclusivity, spiritual awakening, an eco-conscious return to the land, and high craftsmanship. This vision has evolved as the digital revolution and late stage capitalism took root in Silicon Valley. The Digital Revolution was influenced by these early precedents but pushed them into their own well-defined design values such as: “human-centered”, turning “consumers” into “users”, empowering the individual, start-ups, “dropping out” of the mainstream, and connected living.

Let’s consider the small slogan inscribed in small letters in each Apple product, “Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China”. This tagline carries some massive implications that are often overlooked. It is so easy to take for granted the massive amount of Asian labor that has manufactured modern global culture. Mass manufacturing is synonymous with many Asian countries and without that labor we would not enjoy the lifestyle that we currently have. There is of course much to be said and much to criticize regarding environmental conditions and worker’s rights in these industries. My point is to acknowledge the great contributions that these collaborative efforts have had to literally produce a majority of the objects that give shape to our lifestyles. 

There is very little acknowledgement around the contributions of Asians and Asian Americans in creative fields. The truth is that this influence is grafted onto the very bones of Modernism and the movements that followed. These contributions deserve to be illuminated and celebrated. Chances are that you are holding, touching, and using something this very day, perhaps this very minute that has been made possible through Asian influence, ingenuity, and labor. There is a moment in every tea ceremony where participants pause before drinking their tea to quietly thank the potter for making the bowl they sip from. Perhaps we too need a moment to pause and be grateful to the thousands of Asian hands who helped make our lives more beautiful.