ASIA WEEK

Tea-leaf Storage Jar and Tea Filling Ceremony 2022
Saturday, July 30, 11:30am-2pm
In conjunction with the previous tea lecture, Ippodo Gallery continues their collaboration with tea master Yoshitsugu Nagano. During this upcoming event, tea masters Yoshiki Mizoguchi and Mr. Nagano will teach you how to fill the tea urn with sencha, and get hands-on experience! Later, Mr. Nagano will do the tea ceremony and serve you tea with fresh unmatured tea.

To register, click here.

Yau Wing Fung, Riding Mist XXI, 2022, ink and color on paper, 70 1/2 x 38 in. (179 x 96.5 cm)

Summer Group Show: The Rain Freshens, Fu Qiumeng Fine Arts
Chen Duxi, Yau Wing Fung, Zhang Xiaoli, Zhang Yirong
July 29-September 3, 2022
Opening reception, July 29, 6-8pm

Fu Qiumeng Fine Art is pleased to present Summer Group Show: The Rain Freshens from July 29th to September 3rd, 2022, featuring the works of four new-generation ink painters who explore and reinterpret classical aesthetic paradigms and practices from both Eastern and Western tradition. The artists include Chen Duxi (b. 1983), Yau Wing Fung (b. 1990), Zhang Xiaoli (b. 1989), and Zhang Yirong (b. 1979).

The title of the exhibition, “The Rain Freshens,” is derived from the English translation of 空山新雨后 – “an empty mountain after freshly fallen rain” written by the Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei 王維 (699-751) in Autumn Twilight, Dwelling Among Mountains《山居秋瞑》. This poetic scene is uncannily parallel to the term “petrichor,” with its ancient Greek root, describing the earthy and pleasant scent that permeates the air when rain first falls on dry soil. Although Wang’s writings and the concept of petrichor originate from different cultures and contexts, both use literary synesthesia as a rhetorical device to transcend the boundaries between the visual and olfactory senses and capture the artistic form of the throb of new life in nature. Despite the perceived cultural differences, art strives to explore human life and nature. This exhibition bridges across cultures to represent a new generation of contemporary ink painters who practice and create art in a newly interconnected and globalized world.

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Henry Singleton (1766-1839), The Last Effort and Fall of Tippoo Sultaun, ca. 1802, oil on canvas,
40 x 50 in. (101.6 x 127 cm.)

Tipu Sultan: Image and Distance, DAG New Delhi
The Claridges, New Delhi
Opens July 26, 2022
An extraordinary exhibition of paintings, prints, maps and other objects recount a visual history of the Mysore Wars between the East India Company and Tipu Sultan. Collected from around the world and now housed permanently in India, this DAG exhibition explores how the narrative might have changed 222 years after the siege of Seringapatnam of 1799 that culminated with the death of Tipu Sultan.

DAG’s historic exhibition consists of a large body of works—paintings, prints, maps and other objects, mostly by British artists—crafts a story of the Mysore Wars between the East India Company and Tipu Sultan and his father Haider Ali. The images, based on the British view of the time, are critically examined by curator Giles Tillotson to reflect changing perceptions and Indian views on this epic battle and its political and social fallouts. The reviewing of this visual material with the benefit of distance in the exhibition Tipu Sultan: Image & Distance follows the recent acquisition of a major painting by Henry Singleton depicting The Last Effort and Fall of Tippoo Sultaun’ among others, bringing this primary material permanently to India. Made by a British artist for British audiences, the painting had remained in Britain since the time of its making, shortly after the event that it depicts that occurred in 1799.

Tipu Sultan: Image & Distance surveys paintings and engravings illustrating key episodes and events from the Mysore Wars fought between 1767 and 1799, and places them in the context of history painting in Britain and France in the late eighteenth century. Leading artists such as Mather Brown, Henry Singleton and Robert Ker Porter produced and displayed many large canvases depicting such turning points as the surrender of two of Tipu’s sons to Lord Cornwallis as hostages in 1792, the siege of Srirangapatna and the death of Tipu Sultan in 1799 at the close of the siege, without ever having visited India. Painted based on British records and through imagination, they appealed to the voyeuristic interest the British had in stories of British triumphalism, greatly enhancing the artists’ reputations and incomes. To put these views and objects in a wider context, the exhibition includes some works by Indian artists made around the same time.

Read more, click here.

M.S. Morgan, engraved by T.H. Sheratt, Storming of Delhi, 1859, engraving on paper

MARCH to FREEDOM, DAG Kolkata
Reflections on India's Independence on its Thirty-Fifth Anniversary
Indian Museum
July 23-September 18, 2022
Consisting of 159 works of art and historical artifacts, the exhibition re-interprets the well known story of the Indian freedom struggle and anti-colonial movement. It draws on DAG's extensive collection of modern and early modern Indian art, and ranges from eighteenth and nineteenth century European paintings and prints, to unknown works by Indian artists that merit greater recognition, as well as several iconic pieces by celebrated modern artists. Particularly noteworthy are the seldom seen before historical maps, travel and cinema posters from pop culture and collectible figures that add to the diversity of material being showcased in this grand-scale collaboration. Daily activities and special events will be organized throughout the run of the show to engage audiences of all ages.

Along Dr. Venkateswaran, specialists have contributed to the accompanying book and the making of the exhibition. Instead of following a chronological order of historical events, the narrative of the exhibition has been divided into eight distinct thematic sections. They are as follows:
Battles for Freedom investigates the significance of the myriad wars scattered through India's past.
The Traffic of Trade situates India and South Asia's colonial histories within a global history of trade, and refocuses attention on the individuals with the broad-brush narratives we construct.
See India considers the role of travel and seeing India, both literally and through circulating images, in conceiving a nation.
Reclaiming the Past is about the power endowed in the simple act of being able to tell one's own story.
Exhibit India is about being able to showcase one's culture.
From Colonial to National focuses on the different places and institutional spaces in which the anti-colonial struggle took place.
Shaping the Nation emphasizes historical individuals who led those efforts over the decades.
Independence explores the moment of the nation's independence and the aftermath of the joys, sorrows, and multitude of experiences of freedom.

Read more, click here.

Honma Hideaki (born 1959), Current-2021, 2021, madake bamboo, menya, nemagari, rattan,
22.5 x 29.5 x 19.5 in.

Honma Hideaki, TAI Modern
July 29-August 27, 2022
Opening reception, July 29, 5-7pm
Virtual Artist's Talk, August 4, 6pm MDT/8pm EDT

This solo exhibition of works by Honma Hideaki, his generation's leading bamboo master, celebrates his 35th year working as an artist.

Honma Hideaki’s uncle, the pioneering bamboo artist Honma Kazuaki, had no children, so he adopted Hideaki (who loved to draw and work with his hands) as his son, student, and heir to the family’s bamboo business. The family business was booming at the time, so Honma did not go through a traditional apprenticeship but was immediately put to work harvesting bamboo and preparing material for older employees. Honma now considers himself fortunate not to have undergone formal training before he started creating works of his own because it freed him from the traditional thinking process around how bamboo art is “supposed” to be made.

Born in 1959 in Hatano-cho, Sado-gun, Niigata prefecture, Hideaki draws inspiration for his creations from nature on Sado Island, where he lives, and uses men’yadake, a local variety of bamboo that is soft and flexible. Honma’s process involves (1) sketching out ideas; (2) testing out his ideas using maquettes; (3) making an armature out of wood; (4) constructing the basic structure of the sculpture out of bent bamboo; and (5) filling in this frame with woven bamboo to complete the piece. This process may seem logical to the Western audience, but it is rather unique among bamboo artists in Japan.

Read more about the exhibition, click here.

To register for the artist’s talk on August 4th, click here.

View of stone pillar bases of the West Image Hall, Mireuksa temple site, Korea, 1917, original image dry plate photograph. National Museum of Korea, pan 23141

Ancient Korean Architecture in Context,
National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution
Online webinar, July 26, 8:30-10:30am EDT

This webinar, inspired by the current exhibition Once Upon a Roof: Vanished Korean Architecture, examines recent research findings on ancient Korean architecture and ceramic roof tiles created more than one thousand years ago during the Three Kingdoms and Unified Silla kingdoms. Although no buildings from these periods survive, archaeological surveys reveal the advent of distinct regional styles on the peninsula that contributed to the complex cultural exchanges taking place in East Asia from the fifth through the ninth centuries. The four featured scholars from Korea and the United States will place Korea's earliest wooden architectural traditions in a broader East Asian context. Special emphasis is placed on roof tiles— the subject of the current exhibition—and two speakers will address the original design and fabrication of a special type of ornamented roof tile, called chimi in Korean, that crowned both ends of the main roof ridge of prominent buildings. Using examples excavated at important historical sites, specialists will address their discovery and reconstruction.
Speakers include:
Nancy S. Steinhardt, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Lee Byongho, Gongju National University of Education, Gongju
Jeong Hyun, National Museum of Korea, Seoul
Hwang Hyun Sung, National Museum of Korea, Seoul

Read more and register, click here

Tripod Incense Burner with the Shahada, late 1700s, cloisonné enamel on copper. Partial gift of Farrokh Faripour and museum purchase with funds from Bj Averitt and Mr. and Mrs. Todger Anderson, 1989.22

Made in China: Islamic Art for Chinese Muslims, Denver Art Museum
Dr. Qamar Adamjee
In person lecture July 26, 2022, 6–7pm

Dr. Qamar Adamjee, a lecturer at Rutgers University, New Jersey and a former curator of Islamic and Indian art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, will share her findings on a new research subject that explores objects made in China for local Muslim users. Adamjee's research interests revolve around artworks produced in the interstices of cultural traditions and in the artistic and intellectual worlds of the people who made or used them. She received a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and has organized exhibitions and published on a range of subjects and artistic mediums, including Islamic, Hindu and Sikh art; Indian paintings and sculpture; 19th-century photography, painting, and prints.

Read more and buy tickets, click here

Kawase Hasui (1883-1957), Magome no tsuki (Moon at Magome), from the series
Tōkyō nijūkei (Twenty Views of Tokyo), ōban tate-e, 15 3/8 x 10 1/4 in. (39 x 26 cm), Lot 77,
Estimate: $1,000-1,500

Iron and Ink: Prints and Paintings, featuring Tetsubin from
the Crawford Collection
Bonhams New York
Online auction, July 18-26, 2022

As indicated by the title of this online sale, woodblock prints, paintings, and iron tea kettles and the focus. The prints include works by many noted artists from the Edo to the modern period depicting landscapes, figures, animals, and geometric images. Paintings and calligraphy by a wide range of artists are also featured. Closing the sale is a striking collection of distinctive iron tea kettles (tetsubin) from the collection of Jill and Byron Crawford, who enthusiastically assembled a distinctive collection in Malibu.

Read more, click here.

Courtesy of the artist and Zürcher Gallery, New York/Paris

Kazuko Miyamoto: To perform a line, Japan Society
Concludes July 24, 2022

This solo exhibition will be the first institutional survey of Kazuko Miyamoto (b.1942, Tokyo), a relatively little-known but significant artist, and will provide a long overdue examination of this singular artist’s career. This exhibition reclaims Miyamoto’s contributions to the development of Minimalism, challenging its general understanding as male dominated, and embraces her highly individual artistic pursuit to reveal a sustained interest in the body through evocative conceptual experiments and investigations in performance and textiles.

Kazuko Miyamoto provides an overview of the artist’s work, moving from her contributions to the Minimalism movement through early paintings and drawings from the 1960s, and her increasingly spatial string constructions in the 1970s, to her conceptual experiments in performance, culminating in her kimono series from 1987 through the 1990s. A number of works that will be on view have never been shown publicly, offering a crucial opportunity for the public to encounter Miyamoto’s rich oeuvre for the first time.

Read more, click here

Chuan Shinko, Portrait of Gaofeng Yuanmiao, 1238-1295, hanging scroll, ink on paper.
Gift of Charles Lang Freer.

Mind Over Matter: Zen in Medieval Japan, National Museum of Asian Art
Concludes July 24, 2022

This exhibition showcases the breadth of the museum’s medieval Zen collections, highlighting rare and striking works from Japan and China to illustrate the visual, spiritual, and philosophical power of Zen. Rooted in the culture of medieval Japan, the lessons of Zen have become an important part of contemporary American life, as applicable today as they were in premodern times.

Monastic Zen painting in medieval Japan (ca. 1200–1600) is one of the great artistic traditions of East Asia and of the world. The abbreviated, seemingly impromptu paintings in monochrome ink have influenced artists and enthusiasts for centuries. Many of the most accomplished artists of this era—Mokuan, Ryōzen, Shūbun, Sesshū, Sesson, and many others—were Zen monks credited by later generations as the creators of a unique and remarkable legacy of ink painting. Indeed, Zen monk-painters inspired a number of the most important professional painting lineages of Japan’s early modern period (ca. 1600–1868) and formed a thematic backbone of Japanese art and cultural identity in modern times.

To learn more about some of the key aspects of Zen, an online interactive experience Voices of Zen: Contemporary Voices accompanies the exhibition. The interactive features three artworks from the exhibition—a splashed-ink landscape by the sixteenth-century artist Sōen, dynamic calligraphy by the rebellious monk Ikkyū, and an early sixteenth-century tea bowl fixed using kintsugi repair.

Read more, click here