RECENT ZOOM WEBINAR
New Horizons for Japanese Art at the Princeton University Art Museum
Zoom Webinar
December 17, 2024 at 5pm EST
Our annual holiday program for JASA members will be a live Zoom webinar New Horizons for Japanese Art at the Princeton University Art Museum. Reopening in fall 2025 after a multi-year closure, the new Princeton University Art Museum will feature a suite of galleries devoted to the display of Asian Art. As guest speaker Dr. Kit Brooks notes, “The new Museum—double the size of its previous incarnation—will include over 60,000 square feet of gallery space. One of the seven ‘pavilions’ will be devoted to Asian Art, drawing from a collection well known for its Chinese paintings and calligraphy. The Japanese collection has been growing since the establishment of the Museum in the 1880s, ranging from Neolithic to contemporary, and includes sculpture, paintings, prints, and ceramics.”
Dr. Brooks is Curator of Asian Art at the Princeton University Art Museum. Earning their PhD from Harvard University (2017), they previously held positions at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art and the British Museum. Their recent projects include the exhibitions Staging the Supernatural: Ghosts and the Theater in Japanese Prints (2024) and Ay-Ō’s Happy Rainbow Hell (2023), the first U.S. museum exhibition dedicated to the psychedelic Japanese Fluxus artist Ay-Ō (b. 1931).
To learn more and register, click here.
ONLINE LECTURE VIDEOS
Recorded Zoom Webinar An Introduction to Bunraku: The Puppet Theater of Japan (Dr. Claudia Orenstein) Now Online
Zoom Webinar
October 22 at 5 pm EDT
On October 22, 204, Claudia Orenstein, Professor of Theatre at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, presented this live webinar on bunraku, also known as ningyō jōruri, a multidimensional art that marries exquisitely carved puppet figures, operated by teams of performers, with dramatic narration to shamisen accompaniment. Drawing from early ritual practices and the work of medieval itinerant bards, in the Edo period, bunraku became a popular entertainment appealing to restless urban audiences with tales of love, war and personal sacrifice. Contributions of great dramatic writers like Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724), and novelties in puppet construction, not only supported the form’s past success, but have continued to make it a unique art form admired throughout the world.
Professor Orenstein offers insights into various aspects of the tradition and the history and development of this art that is both an Important Intangible Cultural Property of Japan and listed as a UNESCO Intangible Culture Heritage of Humanity.
To view the recorded discussion, click here.
Recorded Zoom Webinar Paul Binnie: Pigments of the Imagination Now Online
Zoom Webinar
September 25 at 5 pm EDT
On September 25, 2024, we hosted a webinar with Scottish multidisciplinary artist Paul Binnie, who works in the tradition of Japanese woodblock printing, particularly shin-hanga. Paul speaks about his early training as a painter in Scotland and then as a woodblock printmaker in Japan in the 1990s. He discusses the influences on his work, the changes that have taken place and the direction his work has followed over a career of more than thirty years. The presentation shows illustrations of many of his woodblock prints and a number of oil paintings to show the progress of his work from the 1990s until today.
Paul Binnie was born in Scotland in 1967, and studied art history at the University of Edinburgh and painting and etching at Edinburgh College of Art from 1985 to 1990. After taking his Master’s degree (with honors) in 1990, he moved to Paris and then in 1993 went on to Tokyo to study woodblock printmaking for almost six years. In 1998, Paul moved to London, where he set up his studio and worked for twenty years. At the end of 2018 he relocated to San Diego. Paul’s work is held in many public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum, New York; The National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, DC; The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; The British Museum, London, and The National Library of Australia, Canberra, among others.
To view the recorded discussion, click here.
Recorded Zoom Webinar and Lecture: Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo Now Online
On the occasion of the Brooklyn Museum’s recent exhibition, Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo (feat. Takashi Murakami), there were discussions about the significance of Utagawa Hiroshige’s monumental landscape series. Below are two recorded sessions from April 3rd and May 3rd:
This first panel discussion includes catalog author and historian Henry Smith, Professor Emeritus, Columbia University; Joan Cummins, Senior Curator, Asian Art, Brooklyn Museum and exhibition curator; and Ȧlex Bueno, Project Assistant and Professor, Centre for Global Education, Tokyo, who discusses photographic images in the exhibition.
Click here to view the recorded discussion online.
The second was a Zoom webinar with noted curator and author, Dr. Andreas Marks, Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese and Korean Art and Director of the Clark Center at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where they discussed his newly published book, Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo: The Definitive Collector’s Edition. With 700 images, the book is a definitive guide to understanding the complexity of Hiroshige’s great work as well as the dynamics of the Japanese print market during this period.
Click here to view the recorded discussion online.
When Zen Becomes Political: Zen and Soft/Hard Power with Frank Feltens
The video of our March 20 annual meeting special lecture is now available to view here.
Help Us Celebrate 50 Years of JASA!
The exhibition Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan, celebrating 50 years of the Japanese Art Society of America, opened at Asia Society Museum, New York, on October 3, 2023. One review called Meiji Modern a “perfect exhibition,” engaging both scholars and non-specialist visitors who are “thrilled to discover beautiful art they didn’t know and to learn its history in labels that are both clear and serious.”
JASA’s beautiful 272-page full-color catalog for the exhibition (cover above) takes a fresh look at the art of the Meiji period (1868-1912) through a selection of approximately 200 objects drawn from public and private collections across the United States, including newly discovered prints, photographs, textiles, paintings, and craft objects. Copies of the catalog can be ordered through the JASA Store or our online Publications Order Form.
To learn more about the catalog, click here. To order a copy online, click here.
