Orientalism, the Male Gaze, and Girl in a Japanese Costume

The Brooklyn Museum’s recently transformed American Art galleries, titled Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, display artworks and belongings from the Americas across eight galleries organized into distinct frameworks. The framework “Several Seats” offers a new way of engaging with historic seated portraits: In this space, the portraits are hung closer to the ground than usual, as if the figures in the paintings are sitting down. Inspired by the phrase “have several seats,” which emerged from New York City ballroom culture, the framework includes “reads” from local drag and ballroom artists who offer clever, humorous, and incisive critique in many of the wall labels.

Brooklyn-based drag queen Emi Grate spilled the “T” in her label for William Merritt Chase’s Girl in a Japanese Costume. Here, she offers an extended analysis of the painting. —Caroline Gillaspie, Assistant Curator of American Art, Brooklyn Museum

Working and teaching in New York City in the late 1800s, American Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase subscribed to America’s then-newfound fascination with Japanese arts and culture (Japonisme)—an early “weeaboo,” if you will. This new trend of Japonisme was made possible thanks to Western imperial and military pressures; in 1853, just three years after the annexation of California, America became the first of the Western powers to force Japan to open up for foreign trade after over 200 years of Japanese isolationism. America and Europe welcomed an influx of Japanese artifacts, the aesthetics of which were incorporated into the arts, and Japan received an influx of foreign currency, which destabilized its economy.

On a first look at Chase’s painting Girl in a Japanese Costume, we may recognize the “Japanese costume” in the painting as a kimono. Birds, trees, and flowers are common visual motifs on kimonos. They’re often worn with white or solid-color undergarments, which are visible around the neckline. The front closure of the kimono goes left over right, and it is tied at the waist with an obi (sash). There is also a casual kimono variation called the yukata, which is worn in the summer, at bathhouses, and without undergarments. Here, the model wears no undergarment, and the closure goes right over left, which is more standard in Western clothing. The details on the kimono and obi are indiscernible due to Chase’s Impressionist brushstrokes.

Let’s examine this artwork through the frameworks of Orientalism and the male gaze. In his 1978 magnum opus of literary criticism, Orientalism, Palestinian American philosopher Edward Said observes that the Occident (West) creates representations of the Orient (East) because it assumes the East is unable to present or represent itself. In the process, the “Oriental” subject loses its original value and meaning while being assigned new and perhaps incongruent ones by an outsider.

Meanwhile, employing a psychoanalytic lens in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” film theorist Laura Mulvey has posited that narrative films facilitate scopophilia (pleasure of/from viewing or looking). They ultimately differentiate between the “active/male” who looks and gains pleasure and the “passive/female” who is looked at and fantasized about. Mulvey argues that this dynamic, present throughout various societies, creates what she calls “the male gaze.” Female subjects are portrayed in ways that are not dissimilar to the misrepresentation of subjects in Orientalist literature written by an outsider author. This same phenomenon can apply to brushstrokes on canvas.

And who is this “girl”? Do we think she was sitting on a stool or bench, as a model would in an art studio, or was she on the floor or a tatami (grass mat), as the Japanese would sit? Does it matter? Despite her distinct facial features, which are more detailed than the patterns on the kimono, the girl remains unidentified; though speculated to be a family member, she became a mere visual spectacle wrapped in another. Both her identity and her outfit have been subjected to exotification and the male gaze.

Rather than dismissing Chase as racist or sexist, I acknowledge this painting as more than an Impressionist rendering of an unknown girl in Japanese costume. The artwork reflects imperial expansions, international trade negotiations, currency exchange, tariffs, and transportation across water and land—all events that happened before the kimono and obi arrived at Chase’s Greenwich Village studio to join the collection of foreign artifacts he loved showing off to patrons.