Ecstatic Forms: Air and the Apsarā  during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945)

Abstract As a minor deity in Buddhist art, the apsarā (feitian/hiten) is a beloved figure in China and Japan today. Their images adorn bottles of high-end liquor, while their names are bestowed upon moon-bound spacecrafts. Ecstatically tumbling and twirling in the air, the impossible contortion of their acrobatic bodies creates a sense of weightlessness and boundlessness. This essay argues that the apsarā only emerged as an art-historical subject during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), when intellectuals, artists and performers, on both sides of the frontlines, became concerned with the intermingling of space and form through the medium of air. Tracing how modern writers and choreographers used the apsarā to adumbrate modernist aspirations of movement, speed, aviation and progress, I show how the apsarā was folded into new international discourses on mood, atmosphere and space in art and dance in the early twentieth century.