Sunrise in Udaipur, ca. 1722–23, The City Palace Museum-Udaipur, Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation (MMCF), Udaipur, 2012.20.0015

A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur,
National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution
November 19, 2022-May 14, 2023

Around 1700, artists in Udaipur (a court in northwest India) began creating immersive paintings that conveyed the mood (bhava) of the city’s palaces, lakes, and mountains. These large paintings and their emphasis on lived experience have never been the focus of an exhibition.

With dazzling paintings on paper and cloth—many on public view for the first time—A Splendid Land reveals how artists conveyed emotions, depicted places, celebrated water resources, and fostered personal bonds over some two hundred years in the rapidly changing political and cultural landscapes of early modern South Asia.

The exhibition is organized as a journey that begins at Udaipur’s center and continues outward: first to the city, then to the countryside, and finally to the cosmos. A soundscape by the renowned filmmaker Amit Dutta invites contemporary audiences to sense—and not just see—the moods of these extraordinary places and paintings.

Seated Ganesha, 14th–15th century, Orissa, ivory, H. 7 1/4 in. (18.4 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. J. Klejman, 1964 (64.102)

Ganesha: Lord of New Beginnings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
November 19, 2022-Feburary 25, 2023

Ganesha, the son of Shiva and Parvati, is a Brahmanical (Hindu) deity known to clear a path to the gods and remove obstacles in everyday life. He is loved by his devotees (bhakti) for his many traits, including his insatiable appetite for sweet cakes and his role as a dispenser of magic, surprise, and laughter. However, Ganesha is also the lord of ganas (nature deities) and can take on a fearsome aspect in this guise.

The seventh- to twenty-first-century works in this exhibition trace his depiction across the Indian subcontinent, the Himalayas, and Southeast Asia. Featuring 24 works across sculptures, paintings, musical instruments, ritual implements, and photography, the exhibition emphasizes the vitality and exuberance of Ganesha as the bringer of new beginnings.

L-R: CFGNY, New Fashion II, 2018, Courtesty of CFGNY. Photograph by David Brandon Geeting and Wataru Tominaga, Untitled from 31st Hyères Mode Festival, 2016, 2015, Courtesy of Wataru Tominaga

Refashioning: CFGNY and Wataru Tominaga, Japan Society
November 18, 2022-February 19, 2023

Japan Society presents the exhibition Refashioning: CFGNY and Wataru Tominaga from November 18, 2022 through February 19, 2023. The first show devoted to the art of contemporary fashion at Japan Society, the exhibition explores the work of CFGNY and Wataru Tominaga, two emerging fashion labels that engage with the intersections between fashion, art, and identity. Featuring garments, accessories, and textile-related works, the exhibition examines the ways in which these two practices—one based in New York, and the other in Tokyo—experiment with artistic mediums beyond conventional forms of dress, while challenging preconceived notions of gender and identity.

Artists in Conversation: CFGNY and Wataru Tominaga
In-person event, November 22 at 6pm

Join fashion and art collective CFGNY and designer Wataru Tominaga for a talk delving into their artistic practices and the works featured in their new exhibition, Refashioning: CFGNY and Wataru Tominaga. Moderated by Dr. Yuniya Kawamura, Professor of Sociology at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, this conversation will highlight the artists’ distinctive, yet shared approaches to exploring fashion as a medium to initiate broader dialogues.

Read more ang register, click here.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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