displaying japan

BY MORGAN PITELKA

The British Museum put most of its pictorial collection online last year, and other three-dimensional objects are expected to be included in the coming months. Now they have added a new service: non-commercial image downloading, which allows users to register and then download image files, between 3-4 MB, for publication purposes.

It is unlikely that small museums will be able to replicate this service anytime soon, but I hope that other major collections, such as the Boston MFA, the Met, the V&A, and LACMA will follow suit. This will make the complicated and expensive process of getting permission to reproduce images of art in scholarly publications much easier.

BY TIM ANDERSON

After more than six years serving curry from nationally celebrated restaurants to hungry visitors in a historicized context, the Yokohama Curry Museum has closed. The museum saw approximately 8.7 million visitors and hosted dozens of curry shops from its opening in 2001 until its closure last year.

The Yokohama Curry Museum, or as it was colloquially known, the YCM or karemyū was originally built as part of Namco’s “Nanja Town” entertainment complex in central Yokohama. The Curry Museum’s main attraction was an all-curry food court situated in a two-story recreation of early twentieth-century Yokohama Harbor, including a large, red lighthouse and the hull of a fake ocean liner. A corridor of educational cabinet-style displays, including Japanese curry-related miscellany and blurbs about the history of curry in Japan, could be found along the perimeter of the park’s mezzanine level.

The Yokohama Curry Museum was an example of the immersive eating environments usually called “food theme parks” that sprang up throughout the country following the success of the Shinyokohama Ramen Museum. Food theme parks sometimes place their foods in historical or cultural settings, as in the Curry Museum, but more often the settings are arbitrary or nonsensical, as in the Fukuoka Dessert Forest and Ikebukuro’s Gyoza Stadium. The Curry Museum adhered to the Ramen Museum’s blueprint more closely than most food theme parks, maintaining an important educational element and venerating curry as a modern national tradition connected to a transformative time in recent Japanese history - in this case, the late Meiji and early Taisho eras.

The Yokohama Curry Museum closed along with the rest of Nanja Town on March 31, 2007.

Cross-posted on I am a viking.

THE GENIUS OF JAPANESE LACQUER: MASTERWORKS BY SHIBATA ZESHIN

March 21 – June 15, 2008

The Genius of Japanese Lacquer: Masterworks by Shibata Zeshin is the finest display of the artist’s lacquer ever exhibited outside Japan.

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I just discovered that Lisa Wynn, a friend from graduate school, participates in a departmental blog about culture and anthropology cleverly titled Culture Matters. Last fall she wrote a post about the display of Chinese terracotta warriors in Germany and more recently published on attempts to copyright Egyptian antiquities. What an interesting idea for displaying departmental scholarship, activities, and keeping students and others interested in the loop!

Murakami Takashi has become the sole representative of all contemporary art in Japan, at least if one gets one’s information from mainstream media sources in English. I can’t help but feel that a lot of other work is being ignored, though I suppose I shouldn’t complain since any serious attention being paid to Japanese art is better than no attention. Murakami is certainly a remarkable artist and intellectual, and the following events look interesting.

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Gallery Talks—Murakami and his Art History: A Special Collaboration with MOCA
Tuesday, January 15 | 7:00 pm
This special two-part collaborative walk-through is co-hosted by LACMA and MOCA in conjunction with MOCA’s special exhibition © Murakami. On Tuesday, January 15, LACMA curator of Japanese art Hollis Goodall and MOCA project coordinator Mika Yoshitake will lead a tour of LACMA’s Pavilion for Japanese Art highlighting art historical elements and icons that have influenced the work of artist Takashi Murakami. On Thursday, January 17, LACMA curator Hollis Goodall and MOCA project coordinator Mika Yoshitake will lead a walk-through of © Murakami discussing how the art historical elements from the previous lecture appear in Murakami’s work.

January 15 | LACMA | Pavilion for Japanese Art | 7:00 pm
January 17 | MOCA | Geffen Contemporary | 7:00 pm
Both Talks | Free, reservations required | Call 213 621-1745 or email education@moca.org to RSVP

BY TIM ANDERSON

Cross-posted on I am a viking.

A few weeks ago, I traveled to a village in rural Kumamoto prefecture to play taiko at a festival there. After our performance we unwound at a community center, where a pair of posters caught my eye:

As an ardent advocate for dietary fiber, I was initially thrilled to see this kind of pro-roughage propaganda, titled Shokumotsu Sen’i de Seijinbyō Yobō 食物繊維で成人病予防 (Prevention of Adult Diseases through Dietary Fiber). The poster on the left mostly enumerates the health benefits of fiber (impedes the absorption of cholesterol, sugars, and toxins; helps prevent high blood pressure, stroke, obesity, diabetes, and colon cancer; and of course, it keeps us nice and regular). The poster on the right discusses the difference between soluble and insoluble fibers and ways to get enough of both kinds.

But I was less pleased when I took a closer look and noticed this:

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99 YEARS OF JAPANESE AVANT-GARDE ART ON THE WALL

Sunday, September 23, 2007, 2 p.m.
Brown Auditorium
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
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Liz Lillehoj sent me the following information about her new edited volume, “Acquisitions: Art and Ownership in Edo-Period Japan,” in response to my question on the JAHF email list about the contents of the volume. She notes “there are two chapters that include in-depth discussion of art works other than painting: Janice Katz’s chapter looks at works in various media including ceramics for tea, and Katsuya Hirano’s chapter deals with two ukiyo-e prints.”

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BY ARMANDA DINGLEDY-RODIE

A visit to the ceramics section of the British Museum’s exhibit Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan, reminded me of my recent experience living with a Japanese family in Kyoto. My host mother’s china cabinet was filled with pottery from famous kilns around Japan. Dinnertime served as an opportunity for me to learn how to recognize the styles of different kilns. In one evening, my host mother may have served tea in arita cups, fish on kutani plates, and sweet beans on bizen style saucers, which filled the table with various colors and textures. I looked forward to seeing what type of ceramics she would pull out next.

Crafting Beauty, which displays pieces from the same kilns as the dinnerware I ate off, prompted me to consider the relationship between the ceramics in my host mother’s home and those displayed in a museum. When I think of pieces of art in a museum, separated from me by glass, my instinct is that the pieces are too beautiful and precious to be touched. This sense is heightened in relation to functional objects. Once ceramics are transported to a museum, I assumed that the preservation of their aesthetic qualities prohibits functional use. However, beyond their life under glass, the ceramics in Crafting Beauty carry out their function. As Nicole Rousmaniere describes, “craftwork is made to be put to use imaginatively in performance, or in assemblages, which extend the creative process further and even serve to redefine the meaning of the piece itself. Such performances might include a whisked tea (matcha) or a steeped tea (sencha) gathering or flower arranging events.”i The ceramics displayed in Crafting Beauty are used as tools in the continuation and further development of elite cultural activities. Elite cultural activities limit access to the pieces, separating them from the general public.

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The new exhibition at the Freer and Sackler Galleries (The National Museum of Asia) focuses on the travels and arts of the Portuguese, the first European power to aim its colonial gaze at Japan.

The exhibit has a nice online component, divided into five sections: Introduction, Christianity, Martyrdom, Trade, and Warfare. The real strength of the online exhibit, though, is in the scope of the materials covered and in the ability to download a module for Google Earth that allows you to trace the routes of Portuguese traders and missionaries.

THE ARTS OF JAPAN: A CELEBRATION
Saturday, October 27, 10:30 am–4:30 pm 
Remis Auditorium, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
MORNING SESSION 
10:30 am–12:30 pm
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Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan - Celebrating Fifty Years of the Japan
Traditional Art Crafts Exhibition

19 July - 21 October 2007
British Museum, London

Exhibition overview
Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan features some of the most beautiful Japanese
art-crafts produced during the past fifty years including ceramics, textiles,
lacquer, metal, wood, bamboo, glass and dolls. Read the rest of this entry »

BY MORGAN PITELKA

In early January I had the chance to visit the British Museum, and I was stunned by the updated Japan galleries, which I had not seen since leaving London in 2001. A Press Release from the British Museum, which I posted here in in October 2006, clearly explained that the refurbished galleries emphasized historical context and East Asian/global connections to Japanese art works that were arranged in chronological order, but I didn’t realize from that blurb how serious the changes were.

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Online Exhibition: 100 Views of Edo
The Brooklyn Museum’s first online exhibition, presenting
Hiroshige’s One Hundred Views of Edo series in its entirety, has
been launched on the Museum website, with new digital photography.

BY TIM ANDERSON

Though it isn’t an official national treasure, Kumamoto Castle is considered one of the three most famous castles in Japan (the other two are Matsumoto Castle in Nagano prefecture, and Himeji Castle, in Hyogo). Almost completely destroyed in 1877 during the Seinan War, most of the castle that stands today, including the main tower, was actually built circa 1960 as part of a full reconstruction. This year, the city of Kumamoto is proudly celebrating the castle’s 400th anniversary by unveiling further renovations and hosting a highly-anticipated festival.
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