September 14, 2026 (Sat.)

International Symposium "The Intersection of Representations about the Orient: Traveling Artists in the Outer Fields, International Expositions for the Inner Needs" 

In nineteenth-century Europe, visual images played a crucial role in shaping and disseminating cross-cultural understanding, alongside written works such as travelogues and essays. These images took various forms, including works of art, particularly paintings, and objects displayed at the international expositions. Paintings produced on location by European itinerant artists brought images of foreign lands to the minds of people in their home countries who had never visited those places. International expositions held across Europe likewise became immensely popular, enabling large numbers people to experience distant places vicariously without leaving their own countries. Despite being presented as “international” or even "universal," however, these expositions remained shaped by inward-looking, self-centered tastes. Such representations and images gave rise to phenomena such as Orientalism and Japonism, which distanced people from the realities of the places they depicted. Focused on the travels of the European artists across the Mediterranean and the staging of the international expositions in Europe, this symposium examines the representation and perception of the Orient from the perspective of “inside and outside.”

Time and Venue:

September 21, 2026, start at 13:00

Seminar Room 4, National Museum of Ethnology

Also available via Zoom

*Advance registration required

Registration Form:

https://forms.gle/F5qbJ8kP7iwV6mYbA

Program:

• Opening Remarks

• Ami Nishijima (Associate Professor, Onomichi City University)

“From Experience to Representation, from Representation to Perception: Delacroix’s Moroccan Experience across Media”

In France during the July Monarchy, against the backdrop of the conquest of Algeria, painters who had traveled to North Africa brought their experiences back to Paris through various media, contributing to new representations of the Orient. Focusing on Delacroix (1798-1863), this paper examines how firsthand experience was recorded, reconstructed, and made present and intelligible in Paris through notebooks, objects, paintings, and prose. Drawing on Frédéric Pouillaude’s account of representation (2017), it asks what these different representations stand for, and how they function in the absence of the original experience.

During his journey to Morocco and Algeria in 1832 as part of a government mission, Delacroix developed a complex practice of recording, combining written notes, croquis, and sketches to capture color, texture, figures, and events (Hannoosh, 2023). He also brought back objects from North Africa that later served as material resources for his work. After returning to Paris, however, these records, memories, and objects did not simply enable him to reproduce what he had seen. Rather, they became the basis for different reconstructions of his experience in different media.

This process is particularly evident in Jewish Wedding in Morocco (Musée du Louvre) exhibited at the Salon of 1841. Delacroix transformed his experience of a Jewish wedding in Tangier into a pictorial reconstruction structured through light, shadow, color, and spatial composition. In prose published the following year, by contrast, he reconstructed aspects of the same experience through descriptions of customs, dress, and the traditions surrounding the bride. These representations do not add up to a complete reconstruction of the original event. Instead, each medium selects and reorganizes different aspects of the experience: the journey becomes communicable precisely through such partial and medium-specific reconstructions.

Finally, Salon criticism shows a further transformation. Elements rooted in Delacroix’s particular encounter with North Africa—notably color, ornament, and material abundance—were increasingly received as generalized characteristics of “the Orient.” The paper thus traces a movement from experience to representation and from representation to perception, asking how representations rooted in individual experience could contribute, through reception and repetition, to the formation of Orientalist patterns of seeing. 

• Geneviève Guétemme (Associate Professor, University of Orléans, France)

"Revised and Revisited Representations of the Orient in Contemporary Western and Middle Eastern Art Works"

The 19th-century craze for Orientalism was a vast cultural, literary, and artistic movement reflecting the West's fascination with the Orient—particularly the Ottoman Empire, the Maghreb, and Egypt. In 1829, in the preface to Les Orientales, Victor Hugo noted that "the Orient has become a matter of general interest." Artists travelled to Spain, Greece, Turkey, and Algeria and brought back their own vision, both captured on location and mystified, reflecting a distinctly Romantic aesthetic driven by a quest for the exotic. And the World's fairs played a major role in the dissemination and popularisation of Orientalism in Europe with, for example, spectacular reconstructions—such as a Turkish Bosphorus district or streets of Cairo—offering the public a picturesque immersive experience.

However, decolonisation and the evolution of artistic practices have overturned these perspectives and my proposal will be focusing on the contemporary artistic representations of orientalism by oriental artists, with new gendered and intercultural discourses, visible in both oriental and western contexts such as international art fairs (Documenta 13 in Kabul), new museums in Goa (India), Cairo (Egypt), ​​Rotterdam (Fenix in Holland), and online, “as a living breathing and cultural dialogue”.[1] The analysis of a selection of art works engaging with the thorny legacy of Orientalism such as Houria Niati’s piece based on Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1829) er Raeda Saadeh’s Who Will Make Me Real (2005), that reinterprets (in reverse) Ingres’s Grande Odalisque, will present the critical postcolonial approach aimed at decolonising knowledge and cultures, and seeking to rethink Western normative perspectives within global environments at a time when mobility is no longer a marginal phenomenon.

The exploration of contemporary cultural practices will bring forward the idea of an “oriental” sense of belonging across multiple places and temporalities, a constellation of cultural and political identities made of co-presences and connections, drawn on memory and emotions. This presentation plans to offer a better understanding of complex environments that are constructed, reconstructed, transmitted, lost, reborn, expanded, or restricted over the course of history at the intersection of ethnicity, gender, and social class, contributing to the decolonisation of knowledge and exploring the evolution of forms of belonging and citizenship.

[1] https://museumofgoa.com/

Online resources:

Houria Niati : No to torture (2006)

Raeda Saadeh’s Who Will Make Me Real (2005)

Arte TV (in French) : Le Barde noir

• Tetsuo Nishio (Professor Emirtus, National Museum of Ethnology), Naoko Okamoto (Assistant Professor, National Museum of Ethnology) and Yoko Fujii (Lecturer, University of Tsukuba)

"Guillaume-André Villoteau (1759–1839): His Pioneering Research on Arab Music and Its Influence on Subsequent Instrument Exhibitions: From the “Exotic” to Ethnomusicological Classification"

Guillaume-André Villoteau (1759–1839) was a renowned musicologist who conducted research on Egyptian music as a member of the scholarly delegation that accompanied Napoleon on his Egyptian campaign. The results of his research were published in the section on music in Description de l’Égypte, the monumental historical work commissioned by Napoleon. His descriptions there, together with the accompanying illustrations, constitute an exceptionally accurate and outstanding ethnography of folk music. A former singer at the Opéra, Villoteau—a musician whose exposure to other musical cultures was sparked by his cross-cultural experiences—sought to elucidate Arab music using the logic of the Western musical world, which served as his foundation, thereby creating the new field of ethnomusicology. This is why he is often referred to as the “father of ethnomusicology.” The presenters are currently editing Dictionnaire de musique orientale contenant l’explication de tous les termes en usage dans la musique arabe, turke, persanne, indoue d’après les meilleurs auteurs orientaux, an unpublished manuscript by Villoteau, which is scheduled to be published by a French publisher in the near future. Although Villoteau brought the musical instruments he collected in Egypt back to France, many of them have been lost, and some are now housed in museums in Paris and Brussels. In this presentation, we will elucidate the contents of the Villoteau Collection and examine how Villoteau’s research influenced the display or exhibition of musical instruments in the years following his work.

• Haruka Kihara (Junior Fellow, Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)
  "Perspectives on the Belly Dance at the 1889 Paris Exposition"

This presentation discusses the audience’s gaze at the belly dance during the 1889 Paris Exposition. This dance, referred to as the danse du ventre at the 1889 Paris Expo, has generally been understood and discussed within the context of Orientalism. In previous research, discussions have been based on the premise that belly dancers were passive objects of Western curiosity, focusing　on the Western gaze directed at them. The existence of belly dancers has often been oversimplified.

However, this presentation reconsiders the belly dance performed by the living bodies of women from North African regions such as Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, as a physical dance performance. By chronologically analyzing newspaper articles published during the expo, I examine how visitors viewed and described the dance and dancers. The belly dance was primarily represented through the abdomen rather than the dancer as a whole, with abdominal movements perceived as separate and detached from the performer. While some observers experienced disappointment, confusion, or perceived it as a "pathological body," these gazes were generated for two main reasons: first, the abdominal-based movements of the belly dance fundamentally differed from Western dance culture, which emphasizes leg-based movements; and second, the uncorseted abdomens of the North African dancers appeared to be the exact opposite of corseted women in Western society. Furthermore, viewed through a Western gaze, the belly dance was often dismissed as a primitive and unrefined dance.

Simultaneously, at the exposition, the belly dance was also perceived not merely as a performance by North African women, but as embodying a healthy body. It was viewed as a form of physical expression associated with physical health, entirely distinct from traditional Western dance forms. 

In conclusion, the belly dance at the exposition was not merely consumed as an exotic spectacle; rather, this discussion highlights the profound impact that visitors experienced when encountering these foreign bodies.

• Atsuko Ukai (Associate Professor, Teikyo University)

"Émile Gallé and the Making of the Orient: Between Cultural Encounter and Artistic Reinterpretation"

Émile Gallé (1846–1904), an artist based in Nancy, France, in the late nineteenth century, is widely known in Japan for his works incorporating elements of Japonisme. Numerous examples can be found, including glassware featuring motifs derived from Hokusai Manga and ceramics inspired by Imari ware. Yet for Gallé, Japanese motifs constituted only one aspect of his broader engagement with other cultures. His works also reveal strong influences from the Middle East and ancient Egypt, including lamps in an Arabic style, ancient Egyptian motifs, and designs incorporating hieroglyphs and Arabic script. Gallé actively incorporated motifs associated with cultures that attracted contemporary European interest and integrated them into his own artistic practice, thereby constructing a distinctive artistic identity and establishing a recognizable presence in the international art market.

International exhibitions played a crucial role in this process. Gallé regarded expositions not merely as venues for displaying his works, but as commercial and cultural platforms through which he could present his technical expertise and aesthetic vision to an international audience. At the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle, he worked under the direction of his father, Charles Gallé, and received an honorable mention in the glassware division. After taking over the family business in 1877, he made his full international debut at the 1878 Paris Exposition. From 1885 onward, he also expanded into the production of luxury furniture. At the 1889 Paris Exposition, he received the Grand Prix in Class 19 (crystal glass, glass, and stained glass), a gold medal in Class 20 (ceramics), and a silver medal in Class 18 (furniture). Recognition across all three fields—glass, ceramics, and furniture—demonstrated the comprehensive nature of his artistic and commercial enterprise.

The 1900 Paris Exposition further reveals Gallé’s distinctive approach to exhibition design. His works were displayed in showcases characterized by organic curves, while vases accompanied by ferns and other plants created an environment in which art and nature appeared to merge. Historical photographs suggest that Gallé sought not simply to display individual objects, but to construct an integrated aesthetic environment in which the surrounding space itself became part of the artistic experience.

Gallé’s engagement with other cultures can also be traced in his writings and statements. He expressed an interest in new approaches to glassmaking in the “Orient” and sought forms of artistic production capable of resisting the standardization brought about by industrialization. In this context, Japan, a nation undergoing rapid modernization in the Far East, served as an important point of reference. Moreover, whereas nineteenth-century Europe tended to distinguish the decorative arts from the “fine arts,” such as painting, Gallé perceived in the cultures of the East an alternative conception of art rooted in everyday life. Based on this understanding, he sought to promote an art that was not confined to an elite but could be accessible to a broader public.

From this perspective, Gallé’s use of Japanese, Middle Eastern, and other non-European motifs cannot be understood simply as an expression of exoticism. Rather, these cultural references functioned both as sources through which he explored new possibilities for art in the age of industrialization and as a means of distinguishing his work within an increasingly international market. Gallé did not merely appropriate elements from other cultures; he transformed cultural difference itself into a means of creating novelty, distinction, and artistic identity.

• Comment by Kuniko Fujiwara (Associate Professor, Koshien University)

• General Discussion

• Closing Remarks

Contact:

toyochichukai[at]toyo.jp

Organized by:

NIHU Global Area Studies Program; Global Mediterranean at National Museum of Ethnology; Global Mediterranean at Asian Cultures Research Institute (ACRI), Toyo University

JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S) "Studies on the mechanism by which narrative manifests itself in terms of the relationship between language and music for the purpose of constructing its development model in the human history" (25K24684)

2026年11月14日（土）

国際シンポジウム「オリエント表象の交錯：外遊の芸術家・内製の博覧会」

日時・会場：

2026年11月14日（土）13:00開始

国立民族学博物館

Zoomでのハイブリッド開催（要事前登録）

参加登録:

https://forms.gle/F5qbJ8kP7iwV6mYbA

発表者：

西嶋亜美（尾道市立大学）

ジュヌヴィエーヴ・ゲタム（オルレアン大学）

西尾哲夫（国立民族学博物館）、岡本尚子（国立民族学博物館）、藤井陽子（筑波大学）

木原悠（東京外国語大学）

鵜飼敦子（帝京大学）

コメンテーター：

藤原久仁子（甲子園大学）

お問い合わせ：

toyochichukai[at]toyo.jp

主催：

人間文化研究機構グローバル地域研究推進事業グローバル地中海地域研究国立民族学博物館拠点及び東洋大学アジア文化研究所拠点

科学研究費助成事業基盤研究(S)「言語と音楽の関係をめぐる〈物語性〉発現メカニズムの解明と人類史的展開モデルの構築」（代表：西尾哲夫、研究課題：25K24684）