The society was founded in 1999 with two academic members of the Department of Art Studies in the Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts, a postgraduate student in the Comparative Arts and an auditor. One member is an artist who is studying contemporary art in Okinawa, and the other members specialize in Japanese art in the modern era, European medieval art and Chinese and Korean popular art. All of the members were somehow afraid that scholars of Okinawan history, culture and folklore were showing little interest in using images and iconographies as documentary materials.
There is a famous phrase of Tarō Okamoto which is quoted often when we talk about Okinawan culture: the vertigo of emptiness (a feeling of vertigo caused by emptiness) (何 も な い こ と の 眩 暈). Actually when he visited sacred places as “Utaki” in the main island and Kudaka Island, he was impressed by the places without any construction. The phrase then, became a sort of cliché to define Okinawan visual culture. There are, however, images and icons found plentifully in the places used for ancestor worship. Thus, the society was set up first of all, to introduce and to research into the meanings and functions of these images and icons from the view point of art history. We have specialists in Okinawan history and Okinawan folklore as advisors, and started to take the Yanbaru area as the main field of research. Our first task was to go and look for images on scrolls or framed pictures hanging in private houses or in the places used for ancestor worship, or sculptures and other objects, and photograph them.
We then came to realize that those images could be classified into Buddhist images like Kannon (Avalokitesvara) (観 音), images derived from Taoism or Confucianism such as Gaun Yu (関 羽). There are also others associated with cults from mainland Japan, as well as various auspicious images.
The society received a grant from the Uruma Foundation, for the academic years of 2001 and 2002, and is able to set up a homepage to publish the picture database and study including their classification and interpretation, and so on. We look forward to any criticism, opinions and advice from various quarters.
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