Japanese Art Society of America – Asia Week New York

UPCOMING EVENTS

Zoom Webinar: Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road

Thursday, July 294, 2025 at 5pm (EST)
Online

Join us online for a live Zoom Webinar on Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road, the British Museum’s exhibition on view through September 7. This talk will include not the lead curator, Alfred Haft, but also one of its featured lenders, U.S. Hiroshige-print collector Alan Medaugh.

To learn more and register, click here.

In-Person Tour of The Three Perfections: Japanese Poetry, Painting and Calligraphy

Tuesday, July 29, 2025 at 3pm (EST)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave.
Tickets: $20, advance registration required

JASA members will have another opportunity for an in-person tour of the current Met exhibition The Three Perfections: Japanese Poetry, Painting, and Calligraphy, led by curator John T. Carpenter. The majority of the works are among the more than 250 examples of Japanese painting and calligraphy donated or promised to The Met by Mary and Cheney Cowles, whose collection is one of the finest and most comprehensive assemblages of Japanese art outside Japan.

Please note that after The Three Perfections closes on August 3, the Arts of Japan Galleries will be undergoing renovation and won’t reopen until December.

The deadline to sign up is July 22. Group size is limited to 20 members. Please contact Cheryl Gall, membership coordinator, at [email protected] or (978) 600-8128 with any questions.

To learn more and register, click here.

RECENT ZOOM WEBINARS NOW ONLINE

In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan

Monday, June 9, 2025 at 5pm (EST)
Online

For those who missed our June 6 webinar—a talk by Alicia Volk, Professor of Japanese Art at the University of Maryland, on her new book, In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan—we have posted the video on our site.

This publication unearths an immensely creative yet almost entirely overlooked body of Japanese art. Introducing captivating but little-known paintings, prints, and sculpture made during the US occupation (1945-1952), her talk will show how the forgotten art of a country in the shadow of the Japanese and American empires variously accommodated and resisted the Cold War global realignment that followed on the heels of World War II.

To watch the lecture , click here.

The Three Perfections: Japanese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting

Tuesday, May 20, 2025 at 5pm (ET)
Online

On May 20, 2025, John T. Carpenter, Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gave an overview of the themes covered in the recently published book The Three Perfections: Japanese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting, co-authored with Tim T. Zhang, research associate in the Department of Asian Art. This volume and the exhibition it accompanies—co-curated with Mr. Zhang and Monika Bincsik, Diane and Arthur Abbey Curator of Japanese Decorative Arts—serve to commemorate the extraordinary gift of more than 300 Japanese paintings and calligraphies to The Met from Seattle-based collectors Mary and Cheney Cowles.

The five primary areas addressed in the book include: kana calligraphy of the 11th to 14th centuries; bokuseki, or Zen monks’ calligraphies of medieval times; courtly styles of calligraphy and paintings of the early modern period; Ōbaku Zen calligraphy of the 17th century; and literati painting of the 18th and 19th centuries. By way of background, please see the in-depth interview with Cheney Cowles published in Impressions 41 (2020), “Cheney Cowles: A Seattle Collector Makes a Statement.”

To watch the lecture , click here.

ASIA WEEK NEW YORK EVENT NOW ONLINE

Birds, Diplomacy and Painting in 16th-Century Japan

Friday, March 14, 2025 from 5-6pm (EST)
Japan Society Auditorium, 333 E. 47th St.
In-person and Online (kindly register in advance)

If you missed our recent Asia Week New York event, you can now watch the full talk online! Dr. Matthew McKelway—Takeo and Itsuko Atsumi Professor of Japanese Art History in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University—delivered a captivating lecture titled Birds, Diplomacy, and Painting in 16th-Century Japan.

To watch the lecture, click 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.