-tfit- i]t, ji ,il I CHINGHSIN WU Art History, UCLA REFLECTINGAND REFRACTINGMODERNITY IMAGES OF TF{E MODERN GIRL IN 19205 AND 19305 JAPAN In 1930, an avant-garde painter, Koga Harue (1895-1933), painted a large-scale oil painting, Makeup through the Window (fig. 1), in which a dancing girl standing on top of Bauhaus-style buildings dominates the painting. Compared with the mechanical buildings and geometric squares and lines, she is the only organic object, which makes her the most visually arresting aspectof the image. She is located at the highest point in the scene and her dramatic pose echoesmany items in this painting. First, her open hands echo the humanized hand of the robot-like figure in the lower left. Second, her lifting skirt is mirrored by the four para- chutes.Third, the right angle her two hands form is similar to the right angle made by the two iron towers on the left. If we consider the robot and the surrounding machinery as modern mechanized industry, let the two iron towers remind us of the tall radio trans- mitter towers of the Tokyo broadcasting station, which was the symbol of modern life under a broadcast communication network, and think of the parachutes as a symbol of airplane training, this girl is simultaneously not only an incarnation of, Modernity but also its conductor, standing astride the process of modernity, and leading its intricate dance. Koga Harue's image of this woman exemplifies how female images in the 1920s and 1930s are not merely reflections of the condition of women during the period, but also a medium that artists used to express the desires or anxieties of an emergent Modernity. Women act as cultural symbols that embody actual processes of industrialization, urban development, and physiolo- gical transformation occurring in Japan during those decades, as well as artists' imaginings and fantastical visions of alternative modernities.