Kenji Nakahashi (Japanese, 1947–2017), Time (B), 1980; printed 1985, gelatin silver print, image: 10 in x 13 in; sheet: 10 15/16 in x 14 in, Anonymous gift in memory of Kenji Nakahashi, All rights reserved © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents, permissions needed, 2022.44.12
Kenji Nakahashi: Between Things
November 20, 2025 – November 20, 2026
Japanese photographer Kenji Nakahashi (1947–2017) moved to New York City in 1973, finding in the city the creative inspiration that would sustain his practice for the rest of his life. Both playful and profound, his conceptual approach to photography posed questions about everyday objects, materials, and surfaces. From the mundane, his images raise meaningful questions about the distance or difference between things, and about the relationship between parts of a whole. Alongside Nakahashi’s photographs, a selection of tea bowls by contemporary Japanese ceramicists invites viewers to consider Nakahashi’s questions in another, very different medium. All works featured in this exhibition are new acquisitions, on view for the first time.
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MAKERS: The Culture of Craft
November 20, 2025 – November 20, 2026
Makers illuminates the virtuosity of maker and material in Japan. Looking across time periods, this exhibition explores the porous boundaries between art, craft, design, and labor. Works on display range from Bizen pottery to lacquerware, hanging scroll paintings to bamboo sculpture, and metalwork that straddles the line between craft and fine art. These works invite consideration of materials and technique, as well as questions of identity and mastery—the named artist and the anonymous craftsperson—as well as function and aesthetics, and the emotional power of superbly crafted objects. Featuring many new acquisitions on view for the first time, the exhibition also nods to Portland’s own maker culture, which has long made the city a destination for creatives.
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Word in Flower: Arts of Buddhism
November 20, 2025 – November 20, 2026
This exhibition highlights the Museum’s small collection of Buddhist art, most of which originates from East Asia. Featuring sculpture, calligraphy, painting, photography, and more, the exhibition explores diverse expressions of Buddhist visual culture in this region from the 6th to 21st centuries. Some of the Museum’s rarest works of sacred art, such as precious sutra fragments and representations of the Buddha and bodhisattvas, are joined by secular works on Buddhist themes from the twentieth century and recent work by living artists.
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Cloud Dream of the Nine: Stories of a Painting
November 20, 2025 – November 20, 2026
This exhibition focuses on a newly conserved Korean screen painting of Guunmong, or The Cloud Dream of the Nine, a popular late seventeenth-century novel. One of the best extant examples of this subject, the screen has undergone full-scale conservation treatment in Korea, restoring it to its original appearance. The exhibition explores the various stories this object has to tell: from the painting’s lively narrative to the story of how it came to the Museum, and the discoveries made through the conservation process. Ceramics and furnishings from the Joseon period (1392–1910) provide context for the setting in which genre paintings of this type may have been displayed and enjoyed in the nineteenth century. Made possible by a generous grant from the Overseas Korean Cultural Heritage Foundation, the exhibition highlights the Portland Art Museum’s international collaboration with scholars and conservators in Korea.
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Heaven and Earth: Chinese Art from the Collections
November 20, 2025 – November 20, 2026
Heaven and Earth spotlights powerful works of art in the Museum’s collections, spanning creative practices in China across several millennia. Historic objects and more recent works are brought into conversation, offering different perspectives on how we make meaning of the world and the diversity and creativity of Chinese artists and makers. Highlights include the Museum’s Han dynasty money tree, made of delicately filigreed bronze branches and leaves, and the Warring States period antlered tomb guardian (Zhenmushou), unique to the Chu culture. Among the highlights of more recent work by living artists is the monumental ink painting Heaven and Earth, by contemporary artist Hung Hsien, from which the exhibition takes its title. A rare, fine-line landscape by Shen Zhou (1427–1509), one of the most famous painters of the Ming dynasty, will be displayed in sections, allowing viewers to experience this exceptional, ambitious handscroll in its entirety over successive rotations.
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Matsui Kōsei (Japanese, 1927–2003), Jar with Marbleized Pattern, 1988, stoneware with marbleized (neriage) colors, 11 5/8 in x 11 5/8 in x 11 5/8 in, Museum Purchase: Funds provided by the Asian Art Council, © unknown, research required, 2024.29.1
Conversations in Clay
March 10, 2025 – March 10, 2026
Conversations in Clay presents a glimpse of the diverse range of directions in contemporary ceramics in Japan. Emphasizing natural ash glazes, sculptural forms, and meticulous surface treatments, it explores the shared language linking potters in conversation. Several pioneering women artists are featured, including Kōyama Kiyoko (1936–2023), a trailblazing icon of wood-fired Shigaraki ware, Matsuda Yuriko (b. 1943), known for her irreverent polychrome porcelains, and Kishi Eiko (b. 1948), famed for her laborious, colored clay inlays and geometric forms. The exhibition brings together new acquisitions, most on view for the first time, alongside works loaned from one of the premier private collections in North America.
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PAST EXHIBITION
Yoshida Chizuko (Japanese, 1924–2017), Jama Masjid, 1960, color woodblock print on paper, The Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Graphic Arts Collection. Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon, 83.57.222. © Yoshida Chizuko
Yoshida Chizuko
September 27, 2025 – January 4, 2026
The first major museum retrospective to focus on the groundbreaking 20th-century painter and printmaker Yoshida Chizuko (1924–2017), a pioneering woman modernist in Japan. Opening September 27, 2025, Yoshida Chizuko features over 100 works, many of which have never previously been exhibited, encompassing early oil paintings, rare monotypes, woodblock prints, lithographs, and zinc-plate mixed media prints, in addition to archival material and ephemera. Many works in the exhibition comprise a major planned acquisition from the Yoshida family estate, joining the Museum’s exceptional holdings of 20th-century Japanese prints that are among the most significant in the country.
Yoshida Chizuko traces the evolution of the artist’s full career, from avant-garde abstraction in the late 1940s and 1950s to illusionistic op art and neon-colored photoetchings in the 1960s and 1970s, to her late career, which was heavily influenced by the natural world. The exhibition situates her within the context of international modernist art and 20th-century Japanese printmaking, a medium that experienced enormous global popularity in the postwar era. The presentation also explores the tensions inherent in Chizuko’s role as a woman artist in mid-century Japan and as a member of the well-known Yoshida family into which she married, with a tradition of artistry spanning four generations into the present day. Works on view illustrate the personal influences that shaped Chizuko’s work, including the loss of a beloved brother, formative years as a member of the artist Okamoto Tarō’s radical Night Society collective, and the later interplay between Chizuko’s work and that of her husband, Hodaka.
“We are honored to present this first major museum retrospective of Yoshida Chizuko’s remarkable career, which will offer visitors an in-depth look at her visionary practice and her profound impact on both 20th-century Japanese and modernist art,” said Brian Ferriso, Director. “The upcoming acquisition of her works underscores the Museum’s commitment to spotlighting underrepresented artists and uplifting diverse voices, and will contribute to continued scholarship and research.”
“A reexamination of Yoshida Chizuko’s legacy has been a long time coming,” said exhibition organizer and curator Jeannie Kenmotsu, Ph.D., Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Asian Art. “By bringing Chizuko into focus, we center the untold story of a radical woman artist gifted with a brilliant sense of color and pattern, who was incredibly but quietly prolific over six decades. Widely regarded as the most avant-garde member of the family, her career and legacy have often been overshadowed by the commercial success and recognition of her male relatives, including her father-in-law, Yoshida Hiroshi, and her husband, Yoshida Hodaka. The exhibition and publication will allow audiences for the first time to understand how her work evolved—transforming from the bold explorations of her youth to lyrical and evocative compositions of her later years. I hope visitors see Chizuko not just as a Japanese woman artist, and a member of the Yoshida family, but also as a modernist whose work challenges established ideas about international printmaking in the twentieth century.”
Alongside her creative practice, the exhibition recognizes Chizuko’s significant efforts in supporting fellow women artists, particularly her ten-year engagement with the Joryū Hanga Kai, or the Women’s Print Association, an organization she co-founded in Tokyo in 1956 that provided critical support for women in the graphic arts for a decade. Through this narrative, the exhibition illustrates the ways in which Chizuko established her creativity and innovation as an artist independent from her well-known family, and demonstrates her impact on a younger generation of women printmakers as well as her peers.
Yoshida Chizuko is accompanied by a range of public programs including an opening lecture (September 28) by exhibition curator Jeannie Kenmotsu; a Japanese printmaking demonstration for Free First Thursday (October 2); and a daylong symposium (October 25) offering expanded context for the exhibition and for Yoshida Chizuko’s work during her lifetime. In addition, the Museum offers visitors a free audio guide on the Bloomberg Connects app featuring commentary by curator Jeannie Kenmotsu, guest scholars, and the artist’s daughter Ayomi Yoshida. The guide will reflect on Chizuko’s six-decade career with personal stories, historical context, and artistic insights. It will offer visitors a deeper connection to Yoshida’s journey as a pioneering woman modernist in Japan.
Forthcoming in 2026, the Yoshida Chizuko catalogue will feature essays by exhibition curator Jeannie Kenmotsu; Noriko Kuwahara, Retired Professor at Seitoku University, Chiba, Japan; Hollis Goodall, Retired Curator of Japanese Art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Ayomi Yoshida, the artist’s daughter and practicing contemporary artist.
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PAST RELATED EVENT
Rediscovering Yoshida Chizuko: A Symposium
The Mildred Schnitzer Memorial Program in Asian Art for 2025
October 25, 2025 from 9am-4pm
Fields Sunken Ballroom, Mark Building (1st Floor)
Tickets: $25 | Non-members; $12 | Members; $12 | Students with ID
In this daylong event, scholars, curators, and an artist will explore ideas introduced in the Yoshida Chizuko exhibition and offer an expanded context for her work. Speakers will discuss the inspirations that shaped Chizuko’s practice as well as her art and legacy in the historiography of modern Japanese art. Other topics include gender, postwar oil painting, twentieth-century printmaking, and the Yoshida family of artists.
Symposium registration includes free museum admission Saturday + Sunday, morning coffee with registration, and the concluding reception.
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