Fanology: Hand-fans in the prehistory of mobile devices

Introduction

No new medium or technology can ever be entirely novel. By its very existence, it must connect with the aesthetics, desires, and practices of the past. Continuities between old and new media are traced by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999) to identify how new technologies “remediate” their predecessors to produce entirely new products and experiences, but along familiar lines. The approaches of media archaeology, as articulated by Errki Huhtamo, offer ways of studying “recurring cyclical phenomena that (re)appear and disappear over and over in media history, somehow seeming to transcend specific historical contexts” (Huhtamo, 1997, p. 222). For Jussi Parikka and Jaakko Suominen (2006), the procedural nature of media archeology means that “new media is always situated within continuous histories of media production, distribution and usage—as part of a longer duration of experience” (2006). While narratives of mobile technologies arriving seemingly out of nowhere abound, in the nuances of their social use, the past is always present, but is not always recognised or understood.

Prehistories of mobile devices

Mary Morley Cohen (2016) laments the lack of in-depth studies of prewalkman mobile technologies, noting that “hand-held devices have a long and rich history that can help us understand the specific contexts in which we use and become attached to mobile technologies” (Cohen, 2016, p. 2). Attention has been drawn to the way the visual, textual, and haptic practices of mobile phones evoke earlier rituals and technologies such as wristwatch use (Kopomaa, 2000), 19th-century letter writing (Milne, 2012), postcard sending (Hjorth, 2005; Rogan, 2005), and gift giving (Taylor & Harper, 2002), thus highlighting their remediated nature. Yet, the role of the hand-fan in the lineage of mobile communicative devices has largely been overlooked. In his Archaeology of Mobile Media, Erkki Huhtamo calls attention to hand-fans as important objects in an untold history of mobile media devices. Hand-fans, he remarks, “form a continuity of, if not the technologies, then the ways that people have thought about and used and reacted to personal devices” (Huhtamo, 2004, p. 32). Their importance, he remarks, “goes beyond their roles as collectibles or decorative arts” to become “manifestations of the owner’s social status, and a means of erotic play” (2004, p. 32).

The scholarly neglect of hand-fans within media studies may be accounted for by the very mediums from which they are made. Often constructed from fine timber, silk, or paper, most hand-fans are generally not built to last more than a summer or two. Owing to their ephemerality as physical artifacts, we must look to more robust platforms to trace the history of this media device. Though only a limited number of antique hand-fans remain in existence, their historical impact is widely documented in painting, photographs, poetry, and most notably, literature. Wue notes of the Chinese fan, although few histories have been written, their extensive use is detectable in pictorial evidence, in exhibition catalogues of surviving fans, in historical literature, and in the chronicles of foreign visitors to China (Wue, 2014). Although Wue caveats against the European exoticisation of fan use in the East, she also traces “an expanse of unwritten rules regarding the usage of fans, the complex considerations that went into any individual’s choice of fan (and fan accessories), and the niceties of behaviors—ritual, social, sartorial, fashionable—connected with their use” (2014, p. 38). Wue finds that the recurrence of fans across historical literature goes well beyond any practical use to suggest “a broad culture of the fan with sartorial and gestural aspects” (2014, p. 39).

Fysh links European use of hand-fans to contemporary use of the mobile phone and connects both to the handheld media storage device of the novel. “(L)ike the novel, the fan is small and portable. It tells the story on a sequence of leaves, though in the case of the fan, they can all be viewed at once” (1997, p. 76). Like a book, Fysh continues, a hand-fan is a textual and graphic medium—it is “meant to be visible.” But while a book is principally intended to be seen by the reader, a hand-fan is intended “to be seen by others . . . to be used visibly.” The hand-fan is a screen to be both held and beheld. For Fysh, the connotations of the fan are abundantly more complex. “The fan itself was used as an instrument for sending signals, as a deliberate extension of the user’s body language. The fan in the 18th century”, Fysh concludes “was never only an instrument for moving air” but in fact was “a fully developed technology of communication” (1997, p. 76).

In the observations of Wu and Fysh, two trajectories of the hand-fan emerge, each with close resemblance to the contemporary scholarship of mobile technologies. The mobile screen as an image- and text-carrying device able to construct intimate spaces, as examined by scholars such as Kopomaa (2000), Huhtamo (2004), Richardson (2010), and Hjorth (2005), and the mobile device as haptic technology, as explored by Cohen (2016), Turkle (2007), Richardson (2012), Hjorth (2014), and Gye and Tofts (2011). These twin trajectories are deeply imbricated, and form the structure of this study. Tracing a lineage of hand-fans as communication devices across China, Korea, and Japan, and through Europe via Portugal and Spain, this paper traverses an interdisciplinary journey to bring a sustained investigation of the hand-fan as a handheld communication device. While it is accepted that hand-fans featured across multiple ancient cultures, and likely formed part of communication in many, the focus of this paper is the evolution of the hand-fan from China to Japan, and then to Europe. In this essay, I will trace a parallel journey embarking on a history of both the mobile-screen (optical) and handheld (haptical) aspects of the hand-fan.

The mobile screen

Special attention must be paid to the details of our engagements with mobile screens as distinct from their fixed-screen counterparts (Richardson & Wilken, 2012). In an early discussion of mobile devices, technology researcher Timo Kopomaa departs from the marketing discourse of mobile phones as “third screen” (the first being television and the second the computer), to instead describe them as a “third space” (2000). For Kopomaa, the defining feature of the mobile device is its ability to shape public and private space in new ways. Not only do mobile users become nomadic, Kopomaa argues, but mobile devices also allow users to construct and transport individual and intimate spaces everywhere they roam. In this way, the mobile screen is not simply visual but also embodied, spatial, and architectural. To accommodate Kopomaa’s spatial notion, it is productive to think of screens not in the Western canon of fixed screens such as cinema and television, but through Eastern architectural traditions of sliding screens and movable walls that shape space known as (Huaping [畫屏] or Shuping [書屏] in China, and Shoji [障子] in Japan). These architectural screens in North Asia evolved from movable to mobile with hand-fans, transforming both private and public experiences of spaces. Not only were hand-fans used “if two users wanted to giggle, whisper comments or share secrets behind them” (Tsang, 2002, p. 12), but with the “dexterous switching of a fan from one side of [the] face to the other” a user could conduct “two intimate but independent conversations” (Styan cited in Sofer, 2003, p. 133). Indeed, the earliest use of the Chinese hand-fan was as a privacy shield for women and the high born, as attested in its original name: zhangmian (障面), meaning “block the face” (Tsang, 2002, p. 322). More recently, Richardson has mapped similar spatial qualities of screen–body relation while “being-on-the-phone” such as bowing the head to conceal the face and reduce audibility, shielding one’s mouth with the hand, and averting the gaze, all serving to create spaces and sensations of both privacy and intimacy in public settings. These recent spatial and sensorial observations regarding the embodied semiotics of mobile screens find their ancestry in the practices of the hand-fan.

But mobile screens are more than spatial; they are also portable media devices able to carry image and text on their surface. Hjorth suggests that genres of the mobile screen, such as SMS and MMS, continue traditions of communication and customisation established in the postcard (Hjorth, 2005). For Hjorth, the postcard constitutes an important precursor to the mobile phone screen in its textual and visual discourses and compression of gestures of intimacy. As will be elaborated here, the hand-fan constitutes a primary screen predecessor to both the mobile phone and the postcard as a carrier of intimacy through materiality, scent, image, and text in Western and Eastern contexts. A tension at the heart of this intercultural discussion is the contrasting definitions and understandings of the screen across continents and cultures. Having briefly introduced a prehistory of mobile screens in China and Japan, I now turn to their Western counterparts. Huhtamo (2004) informs us that the word “screen” first appears in English texts around the 14th and the 15th centuries, to refer to a “contrivance for warding off the heat of fire or a draught of air” (Oxford English Dictionary cited in Monteiro, 2017, p. 82). Like their North Asian counterparts, these European screens usually involved translucent fabric stretched on a wooden frame, or a series of connected, folding frames. Huhtamo finds there were also smaller hand-held versions for ladies. “A text from 1548 speaks about ‘Two litle Skrenes of silke to hold to their main purpose,’ decorated hand-screens were—like fans—also objects of fashion, aesthetic pleasure, and erotic play” (Huhtamo, 2004, p. 36). We might conclude from Huhtamo’s exposé that hand-fans not only constitute the first hand-held screens in Europe, they list among Europe’s first screens whatsoever.

Hand-fan as screen surface in Asia

While the hand-fan features among the prehistorical objects in numerous cultures, circular hand-fans appeared as early as the Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) in China (see Figure 1). The purpose of these early fans was not as cooling devices but to shield from rain, to obscure the revered visage of the emperor, and to protect the modesty of an unmarried woman (Kawashima, 1999). In the volume Chinese Fans: Artistry and Aesthetics, Gonglin Qian provides a concise overview of the history and evolution of the Chinese fan, detailing how circular hand-fans remained entirely unadorned until the eminent Jin Dynasty calligrapher Wang Xizhi (321–379) painted several fans—purportedly infuriating their owner—until they sold for triple the price (Qian, 2004, p. 5). This legend from the Three Kingdoms period popularised the painting of silk and paper fans in the Song Dynasty such that they became so treasured as to be removed from their handles and placed in keepsake books. Silk fans in the Song Dynasty became carriers of sentiment and a medium through which artists could express their deepest emotions (Qian, 2004, p. 5). With the establishment of the Imperial Painting Academy attracting artists from the Western Shu and Southern Tang (Zhu, 2009), beautifully elaborate fan iconography developed, rich with structural and screen symbolism featuring “withering flowers, drifting clouds, gurgling streams, peaceful trees and howling winds” (Qian, 2004, p. 11). For artists, fans afforded a unique freedom of expression. According to curator Ka Bo Tsang, Chinese fan paintings were often simplified renditions of larger hanging scrolls, but while the larger formats required detailed planning, painted hand-fans were frequently created among close friends and in literary circles, their swift and impromptu execution allowing for more individual expression than the larger, more constrained, formats would allow.

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Figure 1.

Left: Chinese circular fan is also called “court fan,” wan shan or tuanshan (团扇).

Across China, it became custom to send fans from the bride’s home to the groom’s and vice versa, on the occasion of the “great ceremony” preceding marriage itself (Casal, 1960, p. 112). Qian informs us these fans were not simply attractive objects but also profound poetic expressions and commentaries that broadened ideas of creativity; “fans became like stories, poems and musical journeys in providing people with excitement and vigour in generating their thought, and expanding their imagination. The fans brought them joy and mesmerized them” (Qian, 2004, p. 11).

Chiba tells how circular fans were brought to the Japanese court as gifts from Chinese and Korean emissaries in the sixth century. The fans soon took a similar place in Japanese ceremony and society as in China (Chiba, 1962; see Figure 1, for examples of each). Yet within two centuries, the round and static Japanese and Chinese fans were overtaken in popularity by the innovation of the Japanese folding fan. These dynamic objects developed new visual and gestural modes, meanings, and associations that remain traceable in the literature of the period.

In a study of the conversational function of fans, in Japanese literary classic The Tale of Genji (源氏物語), Park catalogues references to the fan throughout the renowned saga. The shape of the folding fan is conjured to evoke falling hair, fans are gifted in religious ceremonies and romantic exchanges, are tapped to mark the rhythm of a song, and are suggested as able to summon the moon. Hand-fans are cherished for their aroma, and as reflections of the sartorial style, dignity, and character of their owner (Park, 2016). For Park, the poems written on fans in The Tale of Genji function to pierce the excruciating politeness between noblemen and noblewomen in Heian-era Japan (794 to 1185). Not only did these fans convey literal messages, their elegance, fragrance, personality, and materiality also served to provoke questions and conversations for characters in the story, as well as meanings and implications in the mind of the reader (Park, 2016).

Zhu states that the Japanese practice of painting folded fans (known in Japan as senmenga [扇面画]) was introduced to China by Korean and Japanese cultural emissaries during the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1179; Zhu, 2009). These fans bore both images and text—one side often featuring painting and the other bearing calligraphy (Cheng, Tang Wai, & Choy, 2017). Liu Tingji’s The Miscellaneous Notes of Zaiyaun (1715/1966–1978) records that interest in folding fans exploded during the Yongle period of the Ming Dynasty (1403–1424), with Emperor Chengzu being instrumental in fuelling the trend. Chengzu was particularly taken with the portability of folding fans and their novel feature of being able to be snapped open or shut in a split second. Gaining popularity through the middle and late Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), Chinese painting of folding fans developed into a high art form among the literati of Wumen (now Suzhou; Cheng et al., 2017). Tsang (2002) speculates that fans in this romantically charged era may have borne clandestine love notes, erotic poems, as well as imagery for private enjoyment and exchange between lovers thereby foreshadowing contemporary sexting practices. The romance associated with folding fans persists across centuries and cultures.

Folding fan calligraphy and painting occupy the conceptual centre of K’ung Shang-jen’s revered Qing Dynasty play The Peach Blossom Fan (1699/1976), which recounts the 1644 collapse of the Ming Dynasty. Amid the chaos and political factionalism depicted in the play, a fan bearing a poem is sent as a pledge of love from the scholar Hou Fangyu to the courtesan Li Xingjian. Soon after betrothed to another, Li Xingjian takes her own life in a violent act that leaves blood spots on the fan. The artist Yang Wencong acquires the fan and paints around the bloodstains, transforming them into peach blossoms. He returns the fan to Hou Fangyu as evidence of Li Xingjian’s enduring loyalty. The expressive symbolism of The Peach Blossom Fan both as object and a work of theatre expresses Chinese values of integrity against a backdrop of civilisational decline. It also serves to demonstrate that the most serious of societal issues were appropriate subject matter to be communicated via hand-fan.

As with contemporary mobile electronic devices, a central affordance of the hand-fan is its transportability. The capacity of the hand-fan to travel from one individual, land, and culture to another as gifts and cultural artifacts made them an important transmitter of information and aesthetics. Professor Nakatani (2013) has explored how painted fans were propagated, influenced, and transformed by the distribution from Japan over the Korean Peninsula to China, and eventually to Europe, and then back to Asia. Nakatani elaborates that the spread of painted fans across foreign countries was not a one-way journey but an aesthetic conversation, constituting a rare and complex case of dynamic continental contact between East Asia and Europe in the history of art and culture.

The hand-fan as screen surface in Europe

Chinese and Japanese style hand-fans grew intensely popular in Europe, and soon many more were being produced locally than imported. Guilds formed, and the number of imported fans was restricted to protect the growing European industry (Blum, 1988). European hand-fans were customised with an opulence that far exceeded their Asian counterparts (see Figure 2), yet in a manner that would influence fan fashion in Beijing and Shanghai (Wue, 2014). Seventeenth-century fans displayed religious and classical subjects, with the reverse side offering ornate flower designs. Eschewing the plain bamboo, hinoki (Japanese cypress), and aromatic sandalwood of Japanese fans, European fan makers fashioned their devices extravagantly, employing mother-of-pearl, ivory, or tortoiseshell, inlaid with gold or silver piqué work often opening to form a complete semicircular screen surface (Rhead, 1910). Fans were promoted and collections augmented with a wide variety of accessories; guards, cases, tassels, and other accoutrements became available. For Huhtamo, the contemporary personalisation of mobile phones, predominantly by women and girls, resurrects the 17th-century customisation of hand-fans in Europe. “Covers that can be changed, stickers and imaginative carry cases—together with the aural attraction of idiosyncratic ringtones—convert mobile phones into symbolic attractors resembling the fans of earlier centuries” (Huhtamo, 2011, p. 32). It is noteworthy that while hand-fans were popular for both genders in Asia, albeit in different ways, in Europe, and with the exception of pre-Revolution France, fans were accessorised almost exclusively by women (Chalus, 2012).

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Figure 2.

Left: Japanese folding fan known as an Ougi (扇).

In the 18th century, European fans reached a high degree of artistry among specialised craftsmen. Folded fans of silk or parchment were decorated and painted by renowned artists. These fans took on national, regional, and even individual customisation. Woolliscroft Rhead’s extensive treatise History of the Fan (1910) discusses the diverse menagerie of fans found among Italian women at the turn of the century.

The noble Venetian matron carried a tuft fan with a mirror in the centre garnished with pearls. The plumed fan is seen in the hands of the noble demoiselles of Milan, or married Genoese ladies, or the noble matron of Sienna, the latter of whom, together with the ladies of Venice, Perugia, and other cities, also carried the black-fan. The smaller fan with long thin handle, surmounted with five or seven feathers set symmetrically, was carried by the Parmese, Ferrarese, and Florentine ladies, and by the noble matrons of Genoa. Milanese ladies carried a fan made apparently of feathers, rigid and bound round in five sections. The married Ladies of Naples and Bologna carried rigid screens designed in the form of a cartouche of the strap-back so usual in the XVI century Renaissance ornament. (Rhead, 1910, p. 332)

Fans conveyed wealth and class, and were used to flirt discreetly in public settings. In a time when women were considered “better seen than heard,” fans offered a means by which women could project a range of views. For the 18th-century woman, the surface of the hand-fan ensured that to be seen was to be heard.

In a chapter entitled Fanning the Flames, Chalus (2012) explores fashion strategies employed by French women intent on expressing political opinions in the lead-up to, during, and following the French Revolution. Throughout this tumultuous period, Chalus writes, “women’s fans served as statement accessories and talking points. The images on women’s fans served as effective non-verbal claims to character, fashionable sentiments, and cultural taste, as well as to patriotism and political opinion” (2012, pp. 99–100). Chalus surveys a range of fans manufactured by Parisian fan makers expressing a variety of opinions on political matters. Double-sided fans, floral on one side and political on the other, allowed women to control the projection of these messages in potentially dangerous settings. Of course, commercially shrewd fan makers were only too happy to oblige demand, and countless topical fans were produced. These fans, according to Rhead, represented “a curious purveyor of history, a kind of running commentary on affairs of the hour. It was the fan of the people, the poor relation of the more aristocratic painted fan” (Rhead, 1910, p. 207). Many of the most opulent fans emerged in the Palace of Versailles. The fall of Versailles, the French Revolution and, most notably, Napoleon’s planned invasion of England were documented in illustrated fans.

As emphasised by Chalus, these fans were more than broadcasting devices. They were also deeply intimate objects allowing for the expression of personal styles, values, politics, and beliefs. “As women carried their fans visiting, shopping, socialising or promenading, they personalised women’s appearance and politicised their personal space” (2012, p. 100). As an intimate and expressive communications device, the hand-fan presents an exemplary instance of what Turkle describes as “intimate machines” (2007, p. 9): identity technologies that are “experienced as both part of the self and of the external world” (2007, p. 5), especially when they are handheld and pocket-sized. This corresponds with Fysh’s observation that “a fan is, after all, a very personal object—carried on and close to the person, used for personal comfort as well as for personal expression and intimate communication” (1997, p. 77).

A practical use stemming from the portability of folding fans was expressing maps (Chiba, 1962). The ease with which a fan could be unfurled and stowed in a belt or sleeve made it an ideal locative technology for travellers in Japan, both for business travel and religious pilgrimages (Casal, 1960). Fans could communicate how many miles to a given place, and could also recommend and detail charges for lodgings.

The Europe Collections website records that, during the 18th century, “Italy adopted the trend offering ‘Grand Tour’ fans,” painted with images of urban landscapes, archaeological sites, and natural views for aristocrat travellers, thereby representing a vital precursor to the postcard (“History of the Hand Fan,” 2015). Huhtamo reports that a folding souvenir from the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris featured “a birds-eye-view of the grounds on one side and a clearly marked map of the principle gate on the other; the temptation to name it as the 19th century GPS device is great” (2011, p. 31).

Nunn (2004) observes that in the period between the 1860s to the 1920s the European fan waned in social popularity and shifted from popular culture into the realm of fine arts. Artists including Whistler, as well as members of both the Impressionists and Les Nabis took up the fan as a motif of a modern aesthetic, yet the fan simultaneously appeared in the repertoire of fin-de-siècle arts, connoting decadence rather than modernity. Previously associated with personal adornment, feminine cultural status, and intimate communication, the hand-fan ascended into high aesthetics at around the time the fashion for postcards swept the Western world (Rogan, 2005). We might conclude that while postcards usurped the role of hand-fans as popular communicative surfaces, hand-fans returned to their high station as symbols of class and rarity recalling their place as royal objects in previous centuries.

Yet this ascent was brief. Through the 20th century, with new production materials and techniques, fans were mass-produced to be branded for advertising and promotional purposes. These cheaply fabricated fans with plastic ribbing were entirely devoid of the couture style and sophistication of their predecessors. Disposable fans emerged as menus, catalogues, and recital programmes, their new function as gimmick pamphlets ending their role as personal objects of fashion. While this new function saw the use of hand-fans almost completely expire in Europe, in China and Japan they remain prolific, coexisting with many of the devices that they have secretly influenced (Casal, 1960). Fans appear not just in advertising, publicity, and even political propaganda, but remain in use in religious rituals, wedding nuptials, as kitchen and fashion accessories, as works of art, and of course, as air-conditioning appliances (Chiba, 1962). They epitomise the convergence device with countless applications, but also represent a foundational technology of handheld screen and communication.

Extensions of the hand

For Marshall McLuhan, all technologies are extensions of the body created to amplify its abilities (McLuhan, 1964). Following McLuhan, we should, before embarking on a history of the hand-fan, first seek to understand the human appendage that it seeks to extend: the hand. In form and function, the hand-fan resembles and extends that hand, and seeks to replicate its complexity. With an eye to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy (1962), Sudnow’s Ways of the Hand (2001) explores the graceful manner in which hands become “wayfully oriented,” observing how hands become almost explorative and improvisational—able to “make it up as they go along” (Sudnow, 2001, p. 69). Moores (2014) connects Sudnow’s wayfinding fingers with mobile devices, noting how fingers “find their way about and have come to feel at home in a setting of touch-pad and keys” (2014, p. 205). These haptic movements, he observes, are “intimately caught up with the habitual movement of human hands, involving deft movements of the fingers or digits on keyboards and various touch-sensitive devices” (2014, p. 205). Morley Cohen (2016) observes that media consumers have developed a profound level of intimacy with their hand-held devices, while Turkle (2011) concurs, noting that our phones are such an extension of ourselves that “the technology has become like a phantom limb” (2011, pp. 16–17). In this way, the nonverbal mobile aspects of mobile phones—like hand-fans—are extensions of the human hand with its semiotics of signs, signals, salutations, and expressions. While ancient gestures of this manual vernacular survive, often augmenting everyday conversation, more complex dialects of hand language proliferate in television recording, scuba diving, stealth military combat, deaf communities, and the global stock exchange.

The importance of hand gestures in mobile communication has been underscored in earlier studies such as Richardson’s (2010) investigation of the role of haptic (touch) screens in feelings of embodiment to examine how theories of the hand can inform how we understand the experience of mobile media use. Following Richardson’s work, Pink, Sinanan, Hjorth, and Horst (2016) explore the ways in which contemporary mobile apps are touched, opened, and habitually operated through the hand, to bring further understandings of how everyday intimacy, privacy, and connection are experienced through embodied interaction with mobile media. Confirming their assertions with grounded ethnographic investigation, Hjorth and Richardson (2014) and Pink et al. (2016) approach mobile media as material and bodily phenomena that users manage through gesture, touch, and manipulation. Specifically, they note that portable and handheld screens can be carried in hands, pockets, or bags, serving to mobilise an intimate body–screen relationship in a variety of different contexts. Furthermore, while fixed screens tend only to be looked at, portable screens are highly interactive and haptically inviting, encouraging swiping, flipping, pinching, and other gestural flourishes. These gestures all have histories.

Such histories of presmartphone articulations of fingers and hands are evoked in the web project by media scholars Lisa Gye and Darren Tofts (2011), titled The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices. This research site draws attention to the “acts of intuitive prehensile dexterity that foreshadow the contemporary mobile telephonic and teletextual communications as unavoidably associated with the spectacle of intimate bodily gestures” (2011). These bodily gestures of intimacy now invested in mobile devices, we are reminded, have a past, “a psychopathology of unconscious gesture in search of a purpose” (2011). As will be unfolded here, hand-fans offer a crucial and untold past as gestural and intimate mobile communication apparatuses. This is principally so in the instance of Japanese folding fans, screen objects which not only possess a binary state (open/closed) but also present a series of intermediate positions. This is a function that became crucial in fan-signalling dialects, which emerged across Japanese and European cultures.

The hand-fan as a gestural language in Asia

In Japan, two basic types of folding fans have endured since the Heian period: fans made entirely from Japanese cypress called hiougi (檜扇); and wooden-ribbed fans covered with heavy paper or silk called kawahoriougi (蝙蝠扇; Kawashima, 1999; see Figure 3, for examples of each). While the former is a purely ceremonial fan for use in winter, the latter is practical, used for cooling in summer. The name of the latter kawahoriougi directly translates as “bats wing fan” (Kawashima, 1999).

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Figure 3.

Left: Japanese wooden fan hiougi (檜扇).

Rhead relays the apocryphal tale shedding light on the hand-ness of the kawahoriougi folding fan. Set during the reign of Emperor Jen-ji (AD 670) at Tamba, in southern Kyoto, the story tells of a fan maker molested by a bat in the night. In a scuffle to remove the creature from his home at the insistence of his wife, the bat collides with a lamp and falls limp to the floor. No longer a threat, the man handles the helpless animal, noticing how its wings fold open and shut. During this brief anatomical study, the fan maker must have recognised elongated fingers supporting the thin sheets of papery skin of the bat’s wing and, musing that a fan might be fashioned the same way, comprehended the potential gestural languages that might take flight.

Certainly, the dynamic operations of the folding fan emulate and extend the hand by offering a range of signals and gestural flourishes that have become incorporated in theatre and dance (Kawashima, 1999), civilian life (Yasuka, 2014), and warfare (Chiba, 1962; Mol, 2003). Fan signals could dictate the progress of a romance or the actions of troop battalions. Their potency was such that, in Japan, folding fans were to remain closed unless absolutely necessary (Yasuka, 2014).

In her paper “Fan: Design Characteristics of Japanese Culture,” Sonoko Kawashima asserts that from the utilisation of the Japanese folding fan from communication with the gods, to performance in theatre, to practical everyday use, a sacredness emanates within it as both a design motif and a set of movements. The very shape of the folding fan, she notes, of lines extending from a central point—suehirogari (末広がり)—signifies multiple pathways from the present, representing a celebratory symbol of hope, possibility, and success. Kawashima contrasts non-Japanese theatre where the hand-fan is predominantly used to amplify hand gestures to traditional Japanese fan use within which resides a distinct vocabulary of ideal forms and movements or Kata (型 or 形) with meanings that are largely impenetrable to outsiders. The gestural languages of the folding fan trace distinct cultural contours that are not always easily translated.

Casal has attempted to do so in his study titled The Lore of the Japanese Fan (1960) beginning with the high romance of 10th- and 11th-century Japan and China, and the powerful role of the hand-fan in its expression. These fan languages were not known to be codified and diffused, but were instead subjectively and expressively conceived, such that “every woman would be as inventive, and their men would quickly understand and follow the lead” (Casal, 1960, p. 95). The importance of the Japanese fan far exceeded its ability to keep people cool, becoming a crucial symbolic tool in an extensive range of social, court, and religious activities. Casal asserts that, even at the time of writing (1960), everybody in Japan carries a folding fan, and claims that the Japanese do not talk with their hands as do other Asian cultures—but with their fans. Casal provides abundant examples and details of Japanese hand-fan gesticulation. “A closed folding-fan is best adapted to respectfully point at things; while one may also do so with a ‘relaxed’ hand, the stiff index is vulgar. The fan is ‘pure’ enough to act as a pointer in a temple” (1960, p. 95). Detailing Japanese 20th-century gestural language of the fan, Casal continues:

Lighter taps will call somebody’s attention, and if repeated at a high frequency rate are quite expressive of impatience. A rap over the head with the closed fan acts as danger-signal to a naughty child without actually hurting it. Moving the closed fan up and down, or planting it on one’s knee, pointing it towards one’s chest or against the interlocutor, knocking it into the left palm or against one’s skull or teeth, will give emphasis to one’s words in a dramatic manner automatically understood by everybody. Ordinarily the fan is lightly held by the stem; if grasped in the middle it will suggest force or anger; if turned around, its point will have quite an accusing aspect. The fan will be partly opened for one inflexion, more for another, “thrown open” with a down-ward sweep when choleric, snapped close with a click as a full stop to any further discussion. One of the commonest sights, especially among men, is to see them open and close a rib or two with index and thumb only-endlessly, as an accompaniment to whatever else they may do, and particularly as an accompaniment to quiet reflection. (Casal, 1960, p. 96)

The pervasiveness of hand-fans, their gestures and uses in ancient and contemporary Japan naturally result in varying levels of fan literacy and expertise. Casal observes that, “In the hands of a group of girls, fans will look like giddy butterflies mistaking the bright kimono for a flowery meadow” (Casal, 1960, p. 116). In contrast, the fan in the hands of an expert operator can conjure arresting and almost supernatural power and magnetism. Such persuasive fan interaction is found across the honoured disciplines of traditional Japanese theatre. Kawashima (1999) lists Bugaku (舞楽, “court dance and music”), Kagura (神楽, かぐら, “god entertainment”), Rakugo (落語, “Japanese storytelling”), Noh theatre, Kabuki, and Geisha dancing in which the fan is expertly used. Theatre scholar Diego Pellecchia conveys how, in Noh performance, “The act of opening the fan is not a mechanical preparation for the dance, but a symbolically and emotionally charged moment of passage between the ordinary presence of the actor and the extra-ordinary presence of the character” (Pellecchia, 2008, p. 6). Corroborating Pellecchia’s observations, Casal testifies to the formidable capacity of Japanese theatricians “whether of the Noh or Kabuki stage” to skilfully manipulate the fan and through it, the attending audience.

With an incredibly calm mimic, wielding his fan he can “outline” any kind of object, suggest the thatched roofs of a village, the floating of a boat, the rising of smoke or the pouring of a liquid, even the appearance of some supernatural, weird being. By the clever manipulation of his fan, he can underscore his pensiveness, sorrow, jollity, or drunkenness. (Casal, 1960, p. 96)

Fans were not only formidable implements in theatre, but in warfare too. Mol divulges the varied use, shape, and materiality of Japanese war fans, which are broadly divided into two types: Gunsen (軍扇) and Gunbai (軍配) (Mol, 2003; see Figure 4, for examples of each). The Gunbai is a solid open fan made from metal and/or wood. These heavy implements were brandished as shields against arrows and to signal in battle. The semaphore of Gunbai endures today among referees of sumo wrestling bouts. The second type, the Gunsen, is a folding fan constructed with wood or metal ribs supporting lacquered paper and a steel outer cover. For a trained swordsman, lowly opponents encountered on the road were not worthy of a death by sword and would be dispatched by Gunsen (Mol, 2003). More than weapons, each of these fans also served vital functions in military signalling. When, for example, Osaka was forcibly opened to foreign trade in 1868, U.S. Marine James B. Lawrence witnessed volatile groups of pro-Mikado Japanese assembling against the U.S. incursion. Lawrence recalls a Japanese military officer quelling hostilities as being “simple in the extreme.” “A mere wave of his fan was sufficient to produce silence among more than a hundred people, many of which bore two swords” (Lawrence cited in Casal, 1960, p. 97).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Left: Gunsen fan with sharpened metal ribs.

The hand-fan as a gestural language in Europe

The Portuguese traders who opened up the sea route to China and Japan in the 15th century were the first to import folding fans and much of their attendant semiotic culture to Europe en masse (Blum, 1988; Nakatani, 2013; Sofer, 2003). By the end of the 17th century, Spain, Portugal, and Italy boasted flourishing industries in hand-fans. By the 18th century, hand-fans had advanced north across Europe, and were used in winter and summer as memory aids, political propaganda, parlour games, and masks as well as flirting tools, at least among women of the wealthier social classes (Rhead, 1910). Women purportedly deployed hand-fan gestures into a secret language of courtship that would be called the “ladies telegraph” (Wilker, 2014). Separate and distinct fan vernaculars were said to have appeared in Portuguese, French, Spanish, Viennese, Venetian, Dutch, and English contexts. According to literature of the late 1700s, gestural languages of the fan evolved to such sophistication that entire conversations could be conducted without having spoken at all (Armstrong, 1974).

In his 2003 book, The Stage Life of Props, Sofer dedicates a chapter to the “sexual semaphore” of the hand-fan in early 18th-century English theatre, declaring hand-fans the “archetypal female prop on the restoration stage.” The hand-fan as prop reflected broader European society in the 18th century, in which, according to Sofer:

[T]he fan became a ubiquitous female accouterment, a prosthetic extension of the woman’s arm and hand. Able to alter physical form, to expand and contract with a single motion, the folding fan paradoxically served as both shield and resonance chamber. The fan hid blushes and covert glances, but also drew attention to them, even as it magnified the slightest movement of the arm and wrist thereby betrayed inner perturbation or arousal. (2003, p. 121)

Surveying the sexual politics of the fan, Sofer notes that when wielded as a flirtation device, the fan placed “a degree of sexual power (or at least signification) directly in the hands of women” (2003, p. 122). In response to the purported expressive potential of fans when brandished by women, journalists satirised the erotic dangers and manuals were written purporting to reveal their secret lexicon. Today, these manuals have been largely debunked. Not only were these decodes of women’s secret fan languages authored by men, but by men fan makers, no less: individuals with a vested interest in promoting their wares with invented histories and applications. Notable examples include Charles Francis Badini, who created a fan titled “Fanology” or the “Ladies Conversation Fan,” and Robert Rowe who named his fan “The Ladies Telegraph for Corresponding at a Distance.” Both claimed to chart existing languages of the fan (Ryan, 2004). Rhead also refers to a fan gestural vocabulary popularised by fan maker Jean-Pierre Duvelleroy, who in 1820 produced a pamphlet purporting to be translated from German and Spanish. It was generally agreed that Duvelleroy’s decoded fan language was plainly devised as a commercial ruse to sell more fans.

Suspicious of the recurring anecdotes of the “language of the fan” in popular literature, J. P. Ryan undertook an exhaustive investigation into the matter. Her 2004 study convincingly debunks the notion of a formalised fan code in the 18th century. She finds, “the 23 gestures and messages that we see today in the Book of Fans by Nancy Armstrong often appear under the heading of ‘18th century Fan Language’ but are from the 19th century” (Ryan, 2004, p. 18). Additionally, she points out that an article in the 1711 publication of Spectator regarding a new “Academy for the training up of young Women in the Exercise of the Fan,” is clearly written with satirical intent. An extract of the article reads: “Woman are armed with Fans as Men with Swords, and sometimes do more Execution with them . . . There is an infinite Variety of Motions to be made use of in the Flutter of a Fan” (Addison & Steele, 1853, p. 150). Ultimately, Ryan surmises that such languages were invented from the 19th century onward as both a strategy to sell fans and “on the tide of rampant Romanticism” (Ryan, 2004, p. 18). But while Ryan concludes that no formalised hand-fan language existed in the 18th century, only parlour games, I would argue that these parlour games also constitute a formalised mode of communication, albeit of a very different register. Furthermore, substantial evidence provided thus far and hereon demonstrates that a gestural communication through fans—although not formalised—proliferated through the 1700s and 1800s. For example, in reflecting on the subject of the women’s hand-fan in 18th-century communication, the renowned political and intellectual French woman of letters Madame de Staël (1766–1817) writes:

What graces does not a fan place at a woman’s disposal if she only knows how to use it properly! It waves, it flutters, it closes, it expands, it is raised or lowered according to circumstances. Oh! I will wager that in all the paraphernalia of the loveliest and best-dressed women in the world, there is no ornament with which she can produce so great an effect. (de Staël cited in Flory, 1895, p. 35)

In a semiautobiography titled Contarini Fleming: A Psychological Romance, Benjamin Disraeli refers to fans extensively and cites the example of Spanish women for whom the fan would play an important role in communicating emotion or mood through gesture. Writing a quarter of century before he would become British prime minister, he remarks:

A Spanish lady with her fan might shame the tactics of a troop horse. Now she unfurls it with the slow pomp and conscious elegance of the bird Juno, now she flutters it with all the languor of listless beauty, now with all the liveliness of a vivacious one. Now in the midst of a very tornado she closes it with a whirr, which makes you start. Pop! In the midst of your confusion, Dolores taps you on the elbow; you turn round to listen, and Catalina pokes you in your side. Magical instrument! In this land it speaks a particular language, and gallantry requires no other mode to express its most subtle conceits or its most unreasonable demands than this delicate machine. (Disraeli, 1846, p. 303)

Fans also feature in English 18th-century poetry about courtship, including in The Art of Dancing, a Poem in Three Cantos, by Soame Jenyn (1729/1978), in three works in John Winstanley’s volume Poems Written Occasionally (1742/2010), and in the poem The Fan (Anonymous, 1749/2011). While these literary instances do not evince any formalised vocabulary or language accompanying the popularity of the fan, as Ryan has previously shown, accounts of the dexterous manipulation of these mobile screens in public settings attest to subtext of language that was individually improvised and subjectively expressed across European polite society.

Conclusion

This article has traced the haptic and optic aspects of the hand-fan through select moments of history and culture, but what appears here can only serve as an introduction. There remains much more to be written on the fan as a prehistoric hand-held device. Relevant, for example, but not covered here are the numerous activities of play found across multiple cultures in which hand-fans constitute nascent hand-held game consoles. Likewise, details of the technologies of the fan—how it has transformed, its materiality, and resulting affordances—have, for the sake of clarity and brevity, been omitted. Finally, although this study has taken a broad overview of the hand-fan as portable communicative device, it has only touched briefly and broadly on Chinese, Japanese, and European cultures. A casual thumb through Rhead’s History of the Fan will quickly astound any reader as to how culturally and historically pervasive the hand-fan is, and its diversity of uses and forms. It truly emerges as an object embedded in human thought. We might anticipate a new strain of scholarship that deals with the hand-fan and related portable objects of the past in order to better grasp our relationship with today’s electronic mobile devices.