Pacific Asia Museum Cancels the Western Gaze

Paul Jacoulet, Snowflakes, Pengyong, Korea, 1956

"We have a moment right now to deconstruct everything, take us down to the studs," said USC Pacific Asia Museum director Bethany Montagano in a recent KCET interview. "We do have things in the collection that were done by French or British colonial gaze, artists looking at Asian people, and that's not okay, and it doesn't belong in the collection." 

Montagano appears to refer to such objects as the museum's set of color prints by Paul Jacoulet (1896 or 1902–1960), a French artist who specialized in exoticizing depictions of East Asians and Pacific Islanders. Jacoulet was a cultural appropriator before the term existed. Born in Paris, active in Japan, he learned the arts of calligraphy, kabuki, noh, Japanese musical instruments, and ukiyo-e woodblock printing. His print oeuvre falls somewhere between ethnographic documentation, proto-psychedelic fantasy, homoeroticism, and kitsch. His art was admired in Japan for its technical mastery—some images were printed from as many as 60 blocks. Jacoulet was flamboyantly gay, so much so that he was refused entry into the United States. (He snuck across the border at Niagara Falls, wearing a white suit and carrying a silver cane.)

Most of the Pacific Asia Museum's collection of Jacoulet prints were donated in the early 1980s by Mr. and Mrs. Richard W. Child. The gifts resulted in at least three exhibitions of Jacoulet at PAM (in 1983, 1990, and 2002). 

Paul Jacoulet, In Nature, Augur, 1949; Return from a Banquet, Seoul, Korea, 1951

Is Jacoulet's art racist? It's valid to discuss Jacoulet in the framework of colonialism, white privilege, and the construction of otherness. But his art isn't hateful, nor is it likely to have been economically exploitative (Jacoulet never made much money from his art). 

PAM is apparently drawing the line at art by Westerners depicting Easterners. Montagano told KCET's Sharon Mizota that such objects will be repatriated, used as tools to teach about racism, or destroyed.

Jacoulet is a relatively minor artist on the periphery of PAM's mission. It's a legitimate call for PAM to consign the Jacoulet prints to the storeroom, or even to deaccession them. But destroying them is something else again. Curatorial decisions, like conservatorial ones, ought to be reversible.

A box of prints is not like a Confederate statue. It doesn't take much space, just a spot in a climate-controlled vault. As such it can be a time capsule. Fifty years ago the proposition that Western-gaze art should be cancelled would have met with incomprehension. No one knows what viewers 50 years hence will see in such art. 

Even today, not everyone is so quick to reject the Western gaze. LACMA's great, COVID-paused show of Fijian art and history includes early-contact Western photographs and paintings of Fiji. Though the product of colonialism, these documents are vital to tracing the story of Fiji's visual culture. Indeed, colonialism is part of that story.

Much recent scholarship has explored the hybrid art that results when cultures meet. Nineteenth-century Japan produced Yokohoma-e, a genre of prints depicting exotic Westerners for a curious Japanese public. Jacoulet is best regarded as an heir to that tradition. He was an interpreter and advocate, however imperfect, of Asian and Pacific Island cultures to a 20th-century West that was less informed and sympathetic than he was. In that regard, was he so unlike the founders of the Pacific Asia Museum?

Utagawa Hiroshige II, America (American Woman on Horseback in the Snow), 1860