FORTHCOMING 2010: Nichibunken, Kyoto

Shizilin (Lion Grove Garden, Suzhou), the rockery under construction in early 1920s, photographed by Sirén (photo in the Siren Archive, Museum of Far eastern Antiquities, Stockholm)

> Nichibunken, Kyoto, November 2010

Questioning Oriental Aesthetics and Thinking: Conflicting Visions of ”Asia” under the Colonial Empires

Osvald Sirén’s Encounter with the Arts of China and Japan

> session: Western Rediscoveries of Oriental Culture: Materiality and Spirituality

Minna Törmä

My paper focuses on two early texts by Finnish-Swedish art historian Osvald Sirén (1879–1966), Rytm och form (”Rhythm and Form”, 1917) and Den Gyllene Paviljongen (”The Golden Pavilion”, 1919). Partial translations of these texts have appeared in English; however, they are generally not well known. Yet these two books reveal his enchantment and appreaciation of the arts of China and Japan, respectively, and the initial discoveries that lay at the base of his later scholarship on the arts of China. Sirén, an ardent theosophist throughout his life, was always in search of the spiritual values in art, whether in sculpture, painting, architecture or garden art. These spiritual values were manifested not only in works born under the aegis of Buddhism or Daoism – Sirén particlulary appreciated Chan Buddhist painting – but in landscape paintings or the rock formations of East Asian gardens.