Decolonizing Vision as Historiography:
Hirofumi Takemoto through the Legacy of E. H. Carr
When E. H. Carr published What Is History? in 1961, he was not simply writing a book about historiography; he was detonating a methodological revolution. His claim that history is not a collection of neutral facts but a continuous dialogue between the past and the present transformed the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century. For Carr, “facts” do not speak for themselves. They are selected, interpreted, and given meaning by historians who are themselves products of their time. Every historical account is, therefore, a mirror of its author’s social position and conceptual framework.
Six decades later, Hirofumi Takemoto’s artistic practice extends this epistemological rupture from the written to the visual domain. Through his monochrome reinterpretations of Kitagawa Utamaro’s iconic bijin-ga (portraits of women), executed in the chiaroscuro language of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, Takemoto stages a similar dismantling of neutrality—only this time, the battleground is not the archive of documents but the archive of vision itself. His project, aptly called Decolonization of Vision, may be read as a visual counterpart to Carr’s theoretical gesture: a redefinition of how we see, remember, and historicize images.
1. From the Historian’s Archive to the Visual Regime
Carr’s central insight—that a “historical fact” is always a “selected fact”—invites us to question the neutrality of all forms of representation. Takemoto responds by asking: what is the visual equivalent of a historical fact? In the history of art, perspective, color, and figuration have long been treated as self-evident visual facts. Yet, just as Carr insisted that the historian chooses which facts to emphasize, Takemoto exposes how the eye, too, has been trained to choose—through centuries of institutionalized looking.
His canvases, stripped of color and steeped in cinematic shadow, deny the viewer the comfort of aesthetic pleasure. The result is not merely a stylistic choice but a philosophical stance: seeing is never innocent. The transformation of Utamaro’s luminous courtesans into spectral monochromes recalls Carr’s dictum that “the facts of history never come to us pure, since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form.” What Takemoto offers is not an image of the past, but an image of how the past has been visually constructed—and how that construction can be deconstructed.
2. The Artist as Mediator
Carr wrote that the historian’s task is to mediate between the past and the present. Takemoto reconfigures this role in visual terms: the artist becomes a mediator between the visual archive and the institutional gaze. By tracing Utamaro’s compositions—acts of repetition that recall both the scholar’s citation and the curator’s recontextualization—he exposes how every act of looking is historically conditioned.
The figure of the courtesan, originally circulating as a mass-printed commodity in Edo Japan, later canonized as “Japanese beauty” by Western collectors and museums, becomes a site where histories of desire, exoticism, and gender intersect. By translating these images into black and white, Takemoto reveals how even the most celebrated icons of “Japanese art” were products of selection, omission, and institutional framing—the very operations Carr identified as the hidden labor of history writing.
3. History, Power, and the Ethics of Seeing
Carr’s rejection of value-free history resonates profoundly with Takemoto’s rejection of neutral vision. Just as Carr declared that fact and value cannot be separated, Takemoto insists that form and ideology are inseparable. His aesthetic of reduction—eliminating color, flattening depth, isolating gesture—operates as a visual ethics. It compels the viewer to confront the mechanisms through which beauty and otherness have been historically defined.
In this sense, Takemoto’s monochrome is not a retreat into austerity but an ethical necessity. It marks a refusal of the ornamental and the exotic, both of which have been instrumental in the colonial commodification of non-Western art. To look at his paintings is to experience what Carr called “the rational interpretation of evidence”—a mode of seeing that requires active thought, not passive consumption.
The dialogue between light and shadow, presence and absence, becomes a metaphor for the dialectic between the visible and the invisible in history. What is illuminated is not merely the image itself, but the conditions that make the image possible.
4. Causation and Context
Carr dismantled the notion of single-cause explanations, arguing that historical events are the product of multiple, intersecting conditions. Takemoto’s works, too, resist linear causality. Each image emerges from a network of historical layers: the Edo printing industry, the Meiji encounter with Western aesthetics, the postwar cinematic revolution, and the global art system of the twenty-first century.
Rather than offering one “cause” for visual colonization, he reveals a system of overlapping determinants—economic, technological, aesthetic, and ideological. His practice functions as a map of interdependent causes, where each brushstroke becomes an index of historical mediation. The result is a visual model of Carr’s multidimensional causality, translated into form and tone.
5. Progress Reconsidered
Carr’s nuanced conception of progress—neither naive optimism nor cynical relativism—offers another key to understanding Takemoto’s position. Carr argued that to believe in progress is to believe in the human capacity for rational self-understanding. Takemoto does not reject modernity; rather, he seeks to make its visual rationality transparent. His works expose how the so-called universals of modern art—perspective, originality, color—were themselves products of a Eurocentric history that mistook its own conventions for universal truths.
Thus, Decolonization of Vision is not a nostalgic retreat from modernity but an attempt to complete its unfinished task: to recognize the historical specificity of what we once called “universal vision.” In doing so, Takemoto turns Carr’s rational optimism into a form of critical hope—hope that the visual field, too, can be rewritten.
6. The Widening Horizon
In the final chapter of What Is History?, Carr describes history as an ever-expanding dialogue, constantly rewritten as new perspectives emerge. Takemoto visualizes this principle in action. Each act of tracing, each exhibition, each textual intervention reopens the archive. The repetition is not redundancy; it is revision. Through this recursive process, he demonstrates that historical images are not static relics but living sites of contestation.
In an age when museums worldwide are reassessing their collections through the lens of decolonization, Takemoto’s work functions as both symptom and critique. It participates in this institutional self-examination while revealing the visual assumptions that underpin it. His project thus occupies a rare position: it does not merely represent history but performs its rewriting.
To borrow Carr’s phrasing, Takemoto’s practice embodies the “process of constant reinterpretation” that defines history itself. The artist becomes the historian of vision, the chronicler of its myths, and the agent of its transformation.
7. Toward a Historiography of Vision
If Carr’s revolution was epistemological, Takemoto’s is perceptual. Both insist that neutrality is a myth, that selection is power, and that rewriting is an ethical act. Where Carr wrote the history of historians, Takemoto paints the history of seeing. His canvases ask: what if the gaze itself could be historicized? What if we treated the visual field as an archive of decisions, omissions, and ideological investments?
By posing these questions, Takemoto transforms painting into a form of historical writing. His works do not illustrate theory; they enact it. Each monochrome surface becomes a discursive field in which visual pleasure and critical consciousness collide. The painter’s brush assumes the role of the historian’s pen, inscribing not the image of the world but the world’s conditions of visibility.
This alignment between historiography and aesthetics is not accidental. Carr’s insistence that the historian must constantly negotiate between fact and interpretation finds its visual analogue in Takemoto’s negotiation between figure and void, light and darkness. Both operate within the unstable space between what is seen and what is said.
8. The Ethical Imperative of Rewriting
Carr concluded What Is History? with a call for intellectual humility: history, he argued, is never finished. The same humility animates Takemoto’s practice. His repetition of existing images is not an act of reverence but of responsibility—a recognition that images, like texts, demand to be rewritten if they are to remain alive.
In this sense, Takemoto’s work belongs to a long lineage of critical modernism, extending from Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History to Okwui Enwezor’s curatorial “platforms.” It shares with them a belief that the past must be rearticulated from the standpoint of the present, and that such rearticulation is the most political gesture available to art today.
To rewrite vision is to reclaim agency over the narratives that shape perception. To see differently is to think historically. Takemoto’s canvases invite us to inhabit that interval—the narrow space between sight and insight—where art becomes not only an object of contemplation but an instrument of historical consciousness.
9. Conclusion
Carr once wrote that “history is an unending dialogue between the past and the future through the present.” Takemoto’s Decolonization of Vision gives this dialogue a visual form. It is a conversation not only between past and present, but between East and West, color and monochrome, myth and critique.
In reinterpreting the visual codes of both Edo Japan and modern cinema, Takemoto exposes the genealogy of the gaze itself. His practice reminds us that to historicize vision is to liberate it—that to change how we see is to change what history can become.
At a time when the art world seeks to decolonize its institutions yet often fails to decolonize its ways of seeing, Takemoto’s work stands as both mirror and proposition. It tells us, with Carr’s enduring clarity, that history—and vision—are never given. They are always being written.
