Fragment versus Specimen: Logics of Assemblage in Early Modern Japan

In early modern Japan, albums arose as a powerful medium for not only assembling knowledge about the material world, but ordering it. Paintings, religious texts, textiles, photographs, fans, prints, and calligraphic samples were ensconced within the architectonic logic of the medium. In art-historical parlance, the individual artifacts contained therein are typically called fragments, yet as this talk will argue, the fragment may not actually be the most apt conceptual frame. For instance, when considered alongside the parallel rise in specimen collecting in the natural sciences, such albums are seen in a new light. Ultimately, the conceptual tension between "fragment" and "specimen" points to the limits and biases of many common art-historical tropes surrounding formal change, trace, aura, authenticity, and originality.

Kristopher W. Kersey is associate professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles where he researches the intersecting histories of Japanese art, design, and aesthetics. His first book Facing Images: Medieval Japanese Art and the Problem of Modernity (Penn State University Press, 2024) highlights the enduring relevance of nonwestern, premodern objects to present scholarly debates. The book was awarded the 2025 Monica H. Green Prize for Distinguished Medieval Research from the Medieval Academy of America. Shorter essays address a wide array of topics: the encounter with Europe ca. 1600 CE, the modern trope of impermanence, death and Buddhist manuscript culture ca. 1200 CE, theory and historiography, and the archival anxieties of the Anthropocene. At present, he is at work on a monograph tentatively titled “Art as Metabolism: Fragmentation, Decay, and Assemblage in Japan,” which centers on the themes of creativity, cultural heritage, and archival survival.