Explore Japan’s capital city through the vibrant arts it has generated over 400 years as you enjoy a virtual behind-the-scenes tour of the Ashmolean’s 2021 Tokyo: Art & Photography exhibition with curators Lena Fritsch and Clare Pollard. The film also features a conversation with visual artist Enrico Isamu Oyama, who was commissioned to create a work for the exhibition. Tokyo is one of the world’s most creative, dynamic and thrilling cities. This major exhibition features a wide variety of artworks created in a metropolis that has constantly reinvented itself. Highlights include historic folding screens and iconic woodblock prints, video works, pop art, and contemporary photographs by Moriyama Daido and Ninagawa Mika. With new commissions by contemporary artists, loans from Japan and treasures from the Ashmolean’s own collections, the show provides a fascinating insight into the development of Tokyo into one of the world’s most important cultural hotspots. Tokyo: Art & Photography is open at the Ashmolean Museum until 3 January 2022 http://www.ashmolean.org/tokyo
Tag Archives: Edo
Top Exhibitions: “Painting Edo: Japanese Art from the Feinberg Collection”
Painting Edo — the largest exhibition ever presented at the Harvard Art Museums — offers a window onto the supremely rich visual culture of Japan’s early modern era. Selected from the unparalleled collection of Robert S. and Betsy G. Feinberg, the more than 120 works in the exhibition connect visitors with a seminal moment in the history of Japan, as the country settled into an era of peace under the warrior government of the shoguns and opened its doors to greater engagement with the outside world. The dizzying array of artistic lineages and studios active during the Edo period (1615–1868) fueled an immense expansion of Japanese pictorial culture that reverberated not only at home, but subsequently in the history of painting in the West.
By the early 18th century, the new shogunal capital of Edo (present-day Tokyo) was the largest city in the world. After centuries of conflict and unrest, the growing stability and affluence of the period encouraged an efflorescence in the arts. Artists creatively juxtaposed past and present, eternal and contingent, elegant and vulgar in a wide range of formats and styles, from brilliant polychrome compositions to monochromatic inkwork. Painting Edo explores how the period, and the city, articulated itself by showcasing paintings in all the major formats—including hanging scrolls, folding screens, sliding doors, fan paintings, and woodblock-printed books—from virtually every stylistic lineage of the era, to tell a comprehensive story of Edo painting on its own terms.
Boomers Daily 