Jamini Roy, Untitled (detail), gouache and natural pigment on paper

The City as a Museum, DAG
November 18-27, 2022

DAG announces their annual art and heritage festival returns to Kolkata-to explore the city’s rich history of artistic practices and exchanges through 9 events in 8 locations over a period of 10 days. Traveling across the city and beyond, this festival opens up special access to heritage spaces, artists’ homes, and rare collections through unique walks, workshops, performances, talks, and more.

Just in time for the season, Onishi Gallery announces the launch of their store on Onishi Gallery’s website. Visit the site to find something really special for the ones you love….or even for yourself!

To visit Onishi's online store, click here.

The Making of a Japanese Tea House in New York, Fu Qiumeng Fine Art
In person event, Friday, November 18, 6:30pm
Yoshitsugu Nagano in conversation with artist Hisao Hanafusa

Hisao Hanafusa, the contemporary artist and a superb craftsman of traditional Japanese carpentry, will talk with Yoshitsugu Nagano, a tea master and Professor of the Ueda Soko school, about Hanafusa's design and construction of the Globus Chashitsu in Union Square, New York.

On the occasion of Hisao Hanafusa’s solo exhibition Borrowing Nature’s Power, Chanoyu Week NYC collaborates with the gallery to present this lecture on historic tea houses in Japan and the conversation with Hanafusa.

Read more and register, click here

Available on the website of Charles B. Wang Center at Stony Brook University is a rich variety of videos about Asian art topics. The most recent production, created in collaboration with Dartmouth College, is The Story of Modern Korean Art | Modern Girls, produced on October 24th. This video essay takes a groundbreaking look at cultural history and the legacies of modern Korean girls who challenged gender, social roles, and identity issues.

A few of the many other subjects featured on video include Miao Girl Kiab and the Silver Needle: A Live Musical and Shadow Puppet Performance; Power, Protection, Prestige: Tribal Blankets of Southern China; and The Art of Folding: Basic Zig Zag Fold.

Read more, click here

Global Groove (still), 1973, by Nam June Paik (1932–2006) and John Godfrey (born 1945).
© Nam June Paik Estate. © John Godfrey. Image courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Nam June Paik & John Godfrey: Global Groove, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Through November 27

Global Groove remixes pop culture and the avant-garde, envisioning a future media landscape saturated with a wide array of content. Sampling a vast audiovisual archive pieced together through lively editing and propelled by an upbeat soundtrack, Nam June Paik and John Godfrey generate a cross-cultural collage. Experimental performances by American artists Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Charlotte Moorman, as well as by Korean artist Sun Ock Lee and Diné (Navajo) artist Cecilia Sandoval, are intercut and interspersed with Japanese commercials and US news broadcasts.

Through technological interventions into sound, video, and performance art, Paik envisioned a world in which art and culture travel across national borders as well as mediums and media. At a time when television was rapidly becoming a critical means of spreading messages and ideas, Global Groove was publicly broadcast on New York station WNET—where Godfrey was the head engineer—foreshadowing the potential of screen-based media to take over everyday life.

Read more, click here

Kiyohara Yukinobu, The Goddess Benzaiten and Her Lute (Biwa), 1660s-1680s, hanging scroll, ink, gold, and color on silk, gift of Drs. John Fong and Colin Johnstone, 2018.150

Her Brush: Japanese Women Artists from the Fong-Johnstone Collection,
Denver Art Museum
November 13, 2022-May 13, 2023

Her Brush: Japanese Women Artists from the Fong-Johnstone Collection takes a nuanced approach to questions of artistic voice, gender, and agency through more than 100 works of painting, calligraphy, and ceramics from 1600s to 1900s Japan.

Many of the artworks will be on view for the first time to the public. Her Brush traces the pathways women artists forged for themselves in their pursuit of art and explores the universal human drive of artistic expression as self-realization, while navigating cultural barriers during times marked by strict gender roles and societal regulations. These social restrictions served as both impediment and impetus to women pursuing artmaking in Japan at the time.

Her Brush showcases works by renowned artists such as Kiyohara Yukinobu 清原雪信 (1643–1682), Ōtagaki Rengetsu 太田垣蓮月 (1791–1875), and Okuhara Seiko 奥原晴湖 (1837–1913), as well as relatively unknown yet equally remarkable artists like Ōishi Junkyō 大石順教 (1888–1968), Yamamoto Shōtō 山本緗桃 (1757–1831), and Katō Seikō 加藤青湖 (fl. 1800s). These works bring forward the subjects of autonomy, legacy, and a person’s ownership of their individual story.

Interactive components facilitate a personal, intimate connection between the visitor, the artwork, and the artist. Paintings, calligraphy, and ceramic works of art are presented through the lens of the exceptional individuals behind them, with biographical focuses that tell the stories of their makers interspersed throughout the galleries.

Her Brush: New Approaches to Gender and Agency in Japanese Art
February 25, 2022, one-day symposium
This international symposium brings together foremost scholars and specialists from various disciplines in order to reflect on the state of the field—past, present, and future—reconsidering the art historical cannon through the lens of gender and agency. In this scholarly event, we aim to add to and advance the discourse on approaches and methodologies in the study, connoisseurship, and exhibition of artwork by this group of artists.

Art for Breakfast with Magnus Renfrew, Co-Founder, Tokyo Gendai,
Asia Society Japan
In person and online talk, November 15 at 8am Tokyo/November 14 at 6pm EST

It is an exciting time for the art industry in Japan as we see a positive trajectory even in times of this pandemic. Tokyo Gendai, a new international art fair will be launched in July 2023 featuring over 80 leading global galleries from Japan, Asia-Pacific, and the world. With existing art fairs in Japan, what will this new art fair mean to us and the art industry? How are the domestic galleries reacting? What effects will it have on Japanese artists who tend to be insular and for them to think out of the box?

Magnus Renfrew is the Co-Founder of Tokyo Gendai with a wealth of experience in the global art space. Particularly in Asia, he’s launched, ART HK: Hong Kong International Art Fair and Art Basel in Hong Kong, Taipei Dangdai, and ART SG to name a few. He’s made these art fairs a destination, bringing together the global art world and creating a cultural moment on the art calendar. With our friend and past speaker Eri Takane as the fair director, he has the backing of the Japan Tourism Agency, prominent local advisors, and global art leaders in the Selection Committee to make Tokyo Gendai a high point for the Tokyo art scene.

Read more, click here

Akar Prakar is presenting two exhibitions of the work of Ganesh Haloi, along with launches for their new book about the artist, Ganesh Haloi: A Rhythm Surfaces in the Mind, edited by Natasha Ginwala and Jesal Thacker and in association with Mapin Publishing.

Ganesh Haloi: A Space Left Behind
November 4, 2022-January 14, 2023
Opening Reception, November 13, 2022, 6pm
Including a Book Launch & Conversation: Jesal Thacker, Roobina Karode, and Soumik Nandy Majumdar in conversation with Ganesh Haloi

Re-citing Land | Ganesh Haloi: six decades of painting
The Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation
Exhibition: November 11, 2022-January 11, 2023
Opening: Friday, November 11, 2022, 6:30pm
Curated by Roobina Karode, in collaboration with Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi
At the CSMVS Museum Amphitheatre, Mumbai
The exhibition opening at the Amphitheatre will be followed by the launch of a monograph and conversation with Natasha Ginwala, Roobina Karode, Jesal Thacker & Ganesh Haloi.

Ganesh Haloi (born 1936) is a Kolkata-based artist, born in Jamalpur, Mymensingh (now in Bangladesh). He moved to Calcutta in 1950, following the Partition of India. The trauma of displacement left its mark on his work, as it did on that of other painters of his generation. Since then, his art has exhibited an innate lyricism coupled with a sense of nostalgia for a lost world. In 1956, he graduated from the Government College of Art and Craft, Calcutta. In the next year, he was appointed by the Archaeological Survey of India to make copies of Ajanta murals. Seven years later, Haloi returned to Calcutta. From 1963 until his retirement, he taught at the Government College of Art and Crafts. He has been a Member of The Society of Contemporary Artists, Calcutta since 1971.

He participated in several group exhibitions in India, Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece & Kassel, Germany; Architecture of Life at Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley, California; 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art in Berlin; A Special Arrow Was Shot in the Neck at David Roberts Art Foundation in London; and over the edge, crossing the line five artists from Bengal at KNMA in Delhi. He is represented by Akar Prakar Kolkata and New Delhi, and has had various solo exhibitions in Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Dhaka, and New York.

Clockwise from top left: Susumu Shingu, courtesy of Ippodo Gallery; Dr. Xu Tingting and Hisao Hanafusa, courtesy of Fu Qiumeng Fine Art; Gift of Charles Lang Freer, Charles Lang Freer Papers, National Museum of Asian Art Archives, FSA_A.01_12.01.2.3, Photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn; and A still from Miao Ying's Surplus Intelligence, courtesy of the artist, Asia Society

Asia Week New York gallery and museum specialists have been busy writing and taping informative and engaging essays and recordings that offer insights and details about Asian art currently on view. Below are just a few examples of stories well worth checking out.

Fu Qiumeng Fine Art:
Fu Qiumeng is dedicated to sharing news and in-depth information through lectures, essays, online postings, and specially curated exhibitions by emerging scholars. Most recently in the gallery's online News section, Dr. Tingting Xu, exhibition curator and Arnaldo Momigliano Postdoctoral Scholar in the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago, published Interview | Hisao Hanafusa: “I Do It with Nature!”. This detailed and personal exploration of the artist's history, influences, and artistic goals, replete with a variety of illustrations, sheds revealing light on his artworks now on view in the gallery. To read this informative conversation, click here.

Ippodo Gallery:
Available in Ippodo Gallery's online Journal, Ippodo staff member Jesse Gross surveys the biography, career, and art of Susumu Shingu, whose kinetic sculptures are now on view in the gallery. To read Gross's illustrated essay, Artist Retrospective: Susumu Shingu, Sculpting with Wind, which was published just yesterday, click here.

Also in Ippodo Gallery's online Journal and complementing Gross's overview is a closer look by Ippodo Director Shoko Aono at some of Susumu's large sculptural installations . Featuring several impressive photographs, this essay Kinetic Sculptor: Susumu Shingu was published last month and can be found, click here.

Asia Society:
Published in Asia Society's online Magazine and in Wired, Jennifer Conrad, Brooklyn-based writer and a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, interviews artist Miao Ying in Artificial Intelligence; Real Art. Their exchange explores Miao's half-hour animated film Surplus Intelligence, on view at Asia Society New York through the end of the year, and springs into larger questions about AI and technology. To read this discussion, click here.

National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution
To assemble a world-class and comprehensive art collection requires a platoon of dealers, advisors, museum specialists, and facilitators. Charles Lang Freer, whose collection forms the foundation of the NMAA, relied on the preeminent figures of his day. Accompanying the current ongoing exhibition Freer’s Global Network: Artists, Collectors, and Dealers, the online essay Freer's Global Network investigates the specialists around the world that made Freer's storied collection possible. Particularly useful are the links to additional resources that make further deep dives possible. To read this report, click here

L-R: Fujio Yoshida (1887-1987), Flowering Kale (Habotan), 1953, woodblock print, oban tate-e
15 3/4 x 10 5/8 in. (40.1 x 27 cm.); Chizuko Yoshida (1924-2017), Butterfly B, 1953, oban tate-e
15 7/8 x 10 1/2 in. (40.3 x 26.6 cm.); and Hodaka Yoshida (1926-1995), Black Flower, 1952, woodblock print, 16 1/8 x 11 in. (41 x 28 cm.)

HODAKA YOSHIDA (1926-1995) & Yoshida Family Abstracts, Scholten Japanese Art

Scholten Japanese Art is currently offering a special presentation of works by the 20th century print artist, Hodaka Yoshida (1926-1995), accompanied by a selection of complimentary abstract prints by members of his extraordinarily talented family, including his wife, Chizuko Yoshida (1924-2017), his brother, Toshi Yoshida (1911-1995), and his mother, Fujio Yoshida (1887-1987). While this show was presented at the recent IFPDA Print Fair last week, the entire collection is still available in an Online Exhibition.

For those who expressed interest in works that have already been sold (or are on reserve), Scholten Japanese Art is currently putting together a “request list” to send to the family so they can send more impressions from Japan, if available.

For more details and for the online exhibition, click here