Tobunken Seminar: Reverse glass painting in Java, 19th-20th centuries. Reflecting a world in motion by Professor Jérôme Samuel, September 24 (Sun)

The Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo is pleased to announce a lecture on September 24 by Professor Jérôme Samuel, Professor at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris and Director of the Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia in Bangkok, who is an expert on Malay culture in Indonesia. The lecture will be held in English, but Japanese translation will be provided. We look forward to your participation if you are interested in Indonesia, Java, Malay art, and Islamic art.

1.Subject:
 Reverse glass painting in Java, 19th-20th centuries. Reflecting a world in motion

2.Speaker:
Professor Jérôme Samuel
Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO, Paris)/ Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia (Bangkok)

3.Abstract:
Painting under glass was widely practiced in Indonesia between the end of the 19th century and the 1970s. It was so successful that almost all Javanese iconography was reproduced on this medium. However, as works on other media (paper, wood, leather) have survived less well over time, reverse glass paintings give us access to a range of images that would be hard to find elsewhere.
 In my talk, I will focus on the question of modernity. During the span of time mentioned above, reverse glass painting has been a kind of emblem of “modernity”, not only by virtue of the medium itself, but because of the models these paintings reproduced, the images they displayed and the ideas they conveyed.
 Based on a corpus of several hundred items, my aim is to show that iconography on glass can contributes to the study of Javanese history in the 19th-20th centuries, and in particular enable us to better apprehend and understand iconographic tastes and uses, of course, as well as the circulation of ideas, both religious and political, within the different strata of colonial society in its non-European components.

4.Program:
Date and Time: September 24, 2023 (Sun), 15:00~17:00
Language: English(with Japanese translation)
Venue: Meeting Room 303, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, The University of Tokyo
http://www.ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/eng/access/
Open to the public (Registration required from the form below):
https://forms.gle/fDRBqmST8asNfaoB8
*The form should be submitted by November 20 (Wed), 2023, 12:00 (JST)

5.Biodata of the speaker
Jérôme Samuel is a French researcher, full professor (Indonesian and Malaysian studies) at Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO, Paris), and currently Director of the Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia (Bangkok). He is also the editor-in-chief of the journal Archipel (IRASEC, Paris). Part of his work focuses on Indonesian Malay, its language policies, terminologies, didactics and mutual intelligibility with Malaysian Malay. Besides, for the past 20 years, he has been conducting extensive research on traditional and contemporary reverse glass painting in Indonesia (Java and Bali). To this end, through numerous field surveys, he has built a database of over 2,500 items and has published numerous articles on the subject.

6.Contact:
shoko_watanabe@ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp