A critical catalogue of Japan's "Southern Barbarian" 南蛮　Folding Screens 屏風

Parsed Cargoes creates a visual database Nanban folding screens made in Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and traces the motifs that fold and reappear across the corpus. Drawing on the Warburgian concept of Bilderfahrzeuge (“image vehicles”), the database will demonstrate how these motifs functioned as carriers of meaning across the maritime trade networks connecting Japan, the Iberian Peninsula, South and Southeast Asia, and the Americas. By assembling multiple screen pairs in a single searchable interface, the project reveals how individual motifs of trade goods, which were gathered by mariners from previously disconnected cultural spaces, converge and transform at the intersections of knowledge regimes and empires. The project will additionally investigate the potential for AI-assisted tools to enable panoptic readings across the full corpus, revealing compositional patterns and iconographic relationships that close reading of individual screens cannot easily expose, as these screens are scattered in different locations across the globe.