UPCOMING EXHIBITION
Takeda Hideo 武田 秀雄, The Death of Yoshitsune (Yoshitsune no saigo 義経の最期), 1999. Screenprint. Princeton University Art Museum. Gift of the artist © Takeda Hideo. Photo: Joseph Hu
Takeda Hideo’s Genpei: Defying Authority
August 30, 2026 – January 3, 2027
Allen Adler & Frances Beatty Adler Gallery
We are pleased to present Takeda Hideo’s Genpei: Defying Authority, an exhibition of 22 screenprints by the Japanese artist Takeda Hideo (b. 1948), on view from August 30, 2026, to January 3, 2027. The exhibition focuses on Takeda’s most celebrated series—Genpei, which was produced between 1985 and 1999. The exhibition offers contemporary audiences a striking reinterpretation of The Tale of the Heike, the medieval epic recounting the twelfth-century Genpei War between the Minamoto and Taira clans. The Tale of the Heike’s romanticization of warfare and portrayal of masculinity would endure in Japan’s national imagination for centuries.
The exhibition brings together all twenty-two prints from this series to the United States for the first time, alongside a focused selection of additional works and contextual materials. Through this presentation, the exhibition repositions Takeda’s work within the cultural, political, and artistic landscape of late twentieth-century Japan and challenges traditional ideas of representation, of the samurai, and of ideals of heroic masculinity.
Rather than illustrating The Tale of the Heike in a conventional manner, Takeda’s Genpei series offers a more humorous and often cynical reinterpretation of the narrative. The prints depict scenes from the war with bold graphic intensity, incorporating stylized patterning, vivid color contrasts—including the symbolic red and white associated with the rival clans—and exaggerated, anachronistically tattooed figures that disrupt expectations based on how the Genpei War is typically portrayed.
Takeda Hideo’s Genpei: Defying Authority is curated by Kit Brooks, curator of Asian art at the Princeton University Art Museum. An accompanying book—the first to be published on the artist in English in several decades—features a major new essay on the artist written by Brooks, an interview with the artist, and an essay by Elizabeth Oyler, a specialist in The Tale of the Heike and noh performance, examining the reinterpretations of the epic from its earliest incarnations into the present.
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ONGOING EXHIBITIONS
Zhang Huan 張洹, Foam, 1998. Princeton University Art Museum. Gift of Larry Warsh / Art Issue Editions. © Zhang Huan 張洹
What Photographs Look Like
June 13, 2026 – December 5, 2026
Photographs today are often thought of as images, not objects—representations that circulate widely and effortlessly, appearing on our devices without clear origins or destinations. For much of the history of photography, however, photographs were physical objects meant to be held, treasured, traded, or displayed in albums.
The phrase “What Photographs Look Like” is borrowed from Peter Bunnell, who was hired by Princeton in 1972 as the first endowed professor of the history of photography in the United States, and who later served twice as director of the Museum. Bunnell used the phrase to upend his students’ expectations of photographs as strictly two-dimensional prints and to invite delight in the expansive nature of the medium, from photographic drawings to malleable photo-sculptures.
Photography continues to adapt and evolve today. The collections-based exhibition “What Photographs Look Like” underscores the medium’s enduring ability to surprise.
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Installation view, Huo Pavillion. Photo: Richard Barnes
Journeys Real and Imagined in East Asian Art
Ongoing
Huo Pavilion of Asian Art
South Asian Art
Ongoing
South Asian Art Gallery
Trade and the Arts of Islam
Ongoing
Art of the Islamic World Gallery
