This research project challenges the dichotomic system of art, which divides ‘Oriental’ and ‘Western’ painting through investigations of Oriental painting. By analysing what Oriental painting has meant under the influence of Orientalism and colonialism, this study demonstrates that Oriental painting is not the antithesis of Western painting, but an entity comprised of intercultural hybrid art forms. Furthermore, through painting practice that uses hybridisation as a practical strategy, this project changes the problematic understanding of Oriental painting as a marginal and vernacular form of art to a hybrid art which blurs the cultural boundaries in globalised, diasporic societies.

The analysis of Oriental painting begins by reviewing the meanings of nihonga (Japanese painting) and its separation from yōga (Western painting) in Meiji Japan (1868−1912). This initial analysis is expanded through another binary systematisation of art in Japanese colonies, such as tōyōga (Oriental painting) and yōga in the early twentieth century. The overlaps and disparities between nihonga and tōyōga show how colonial mimicry was applied within Japan’s self-awareness as a periphery under the dominance of Western powers yet a new imperial power in East Asia. The colonial interplays between Europe, Japan, and the Japanese colonies – Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria – explain the cultural junctions and disjunctions that shaped the idea of modern art in East Asia. Throughout this historical analysis, this thesis problematises
the binary systematisation of art by revealing colonial mimicry and cultural appropriation.

Against this background, this research explores the concepts of hybridity/hybridisation and uses them in painting practice as a tool of intervention. Firstly, the postcolonial interpretations of hybridity and hybridisation are reviewed by examining theories suggested by Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895−1975). This analysis elucidates how hybridisation can be utilised for expressing double consciousness and ambivalence derived from (post)colonial cultural encounters within the limit of the site of representation. Secondly, based on historical and theoretical investigation, this thesis experiments with a strategic mode of studio practice called painterly hybridisation. Painterly hybridisation is based on two propositions: detaching visual signifiers of Oriental painting from their original context and juxtaposing them with nonconventional elements and overlapping multiple layers of pictorial spaces by using the formal characteristics of painting as a two-dimensional form of art.

Within the close network of art histories, postcolonial theories, and painting practice, this research project offers a new understanding of Oriental painting as a historical repository which can be re-used and re-imagined for contemporary art practice. By defining Oriental painting as an entity of intercultural hybrids, this project sheds light on how the problematic past of Orientalism and colonialism can be reviewed and re-presented in contemporary art.