Book: Borrowed Scenery

Borrowed Scenery: The Afterlives of Empire in Contemporary Japanese Art is a forthcoming publication by Keith Whittle exploring how contemporary artists in Japan and its former colonies confront the enduring legacies of Japanese imperialism. Bringing together artistic practices that engage with archives, personal histories, embodied experience and inherited memory, the book examines how art can challenge dominant historical narratives, recover suppressed histories and question the silences that continue to shape understandings of empire and colonialism.

Focusing on artists working across Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Okinawa and the wider Asia-Pacific region, the publication investigates how the past is remembered, contested and transmitted across generations. It considers how artistic practices operate as forms of counter-history, bringing marginalised perspectives into view while examining the intersections of colonial memory, national identity, gender and historical responsibility. Rather than treating imperial history as a closed chapter, the book explores how its political, cultural and psychological consequences remain embedded in contemporary life.

Drawing on the Japanese concepts of shakkei (borrowed scenery) and fūkeiron (landscape theory), the publication develops a framework for understanding how histories are constructed, obscured and made visible through cultural and spatial landscapes. These concepts offer ways to consider how the traces of empire persist within everyday environments, collective memory and national narratives. Through this lens, *Borrowed Scenery* asks how contemporary art can disrupt established ways of seeing history and create space for more complex, plural and critical understandings of the past.

Ultimately, the book positions contemporary art as an active site of historical inquiry and intervention. By tracing the afterlives of empire across borders and generations, it considers how artistic practices can challenge historical revisionism, confront unresolved colonial histories and open new possibilities for thinking about memory, responsibility and reconciliation in the present.