Tang Center Symposia
Friends at a Brushwood Gate
A Symposium on East Asian Art in Honor of Professor Yoshiaki Shimizu
Saturday and Sunday, 18-19 April 2009, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm
Helm Auditorium, McCosh 50, Princeton University
Organized by the P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art and co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Archaeology and the Princeton University Art Museum
symposium Program
White sand, green bamboo,
the fishing village at dusk.
Seeing a friend off at the brushwood gate,
the light of the new moon.
— Du Fu (712—770)
This celebratory symposium honors the scholarship and teaching of Yoshiaki Shimizu, Frederick Marquand Professor of Art and Archaeology. Professor Shimizu has helped define and expand the field of Japanese art history and the exhibition of the arts of Japan over more than twenty-five years of teaching at Princeton University, as the Curator of Japanese Art at the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and as a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. Fifteen of his graduate students, now working at universities, colleges, and museums in North America and Europe, will present papers that introduce aspects of their current research that demonstrate in different ways the incisive visual analysis, philological expertise, and multi-disciplinary inquiry that has distinguished Professor Shimizu's scholarship. Several colleagues will present tributes to Professor Shimizu's accomplishments in Japanese art history and recollections of their friendships and collaborations. This gathering, at one of the great "gates of learning," will be a convivial exchange between mentors, colleagues, and friends that will sustain the legacy of Professor Shimizu.
Registration Closed
7 April 2009. Registration is closed, but walk-ins will be accepted. Symposium materials will be distributed as available.
For inquiries, please call Andrea Stearly at 609-258-1741.
Please note:
Of interest:
Friday, 17 April 2009
The Journey of Chanoyu: An International Symposium on the Tea Culture of Japan, Past and Present
Yale University Art Gallery
For information, please visit Yale's site at
http://artgallery.yale.edu/pages/info/teaculture.html
For the convenience of those wishing to attend both symposia at Yale and Princeton, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Tang Center of Princeton University will arrange for transportation by coach bus from Yale to Princeton on Friday, 17 April 2009, on a first-come first served basis. To make a reservation, please call 203-432-7379.
Special room block for this symposium: Rooms have been reserved at discount rates on a first-come, first-served basis at the Nassau Inn, at participants' expense. To reserve a room, call the Nassau Inn directly at (800) 862-7728 by 16 March 2009, and ask for the "Shimizu Symposium" room block or reference number 12225.
Additional hotels and bed-and-breakfasts within a five-mile radius of Princeton University are listed here. We suggest that you make reservations directly with the hostelries as soon as possible.
symposium schedule
Saturday, 18 April 2009
Registration and Coffee
8:30—9:30 am
Morning Session
9:30 am—12:30 pm
Welcome
Jerome Silbergeld, Princeton University
John Rosenfield, Emeritus, Harvard University
Tsuji Nobuo, Miho Museum
I. Picturing The Tale of Genji
Among the many hallowed traditions of Japanese literary and visual culture, the texts and pictures associated with The Tale of Genji remain fertile ground for inquiry into the processes of representation, revisualization, and inter-pictoriality, as well as the subtle negotiations between word and image. Taking pictorial works of different historical moment as their focus, two papers address in both synchronic and diachronic manners the recurring meshing of cultures that produced and reproduced Genji texts and images.
Chair
Egami Yasushi, Researcher Emeritus, Tokyo National Institute of Research on Cultural Properties
Veiled in Shadow:
Recent Discoveries and Technical Analyses of the Harvard Art Museum Tale of Genji Album
Anne Rose Kitagawa, Harvard Art Museum
A Changing Suma: Varied Illustrations for The Tale of Genji
Bruce A. Coats, Scripps College
Afternoon Session
2:00—5:00 pm
Gennifer Weisenfeld, Duke University
II. Vision/Practice
The status of the image in religious practice in Japan remains to be explored with greater attention to the peculiarities and contingencies of specific communities and conditions of image making and reception. These papers present studies that address the often changing and polyvalent roles of religious images in medieval and late medieval contexts.
Richard Stanley-Baker, Emeritus, University of Hong Kong
The Evidence of Our Eyes: The Epistemology of Vision(s) in Early Medieval Japan
Kevin G. Carr, University of Michigan
Sinead Kehoe, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Aesthetics and Ascetics: Shugendō and Artistic Production in Muromachi Japan
Melissa McCormick, Harvard University
III. The Body
This panel pairs papers that prompt reconsideration of the body, self, and self-fashioning in the Japanese visual tradition, taking issue with conventional expectations for portrait representation and heretofore limited study of the body's evocative adornments or enclosures.
Portrait of Hosokawa Yūsai, Picturing the Embodied Poet
Andrew M. Watsky, Princeton University
Selling Shiseido: The Aesthetics of Health and Beauty in Japanese Cosmetics Advertising
Gennifer Weisenfeld, Duke University
Sunday, 19 April 2009
McCosh 50, Helm Auditorium
Registration and Coffee
8:30—9:30 am
Morning Session
9:30 am—12:15 pm
Welcome and Introduction
Cary Liu, Princeton University Art Museum
Introductory Remarks
Mimi Yiengpruksawan, Yale University
Lothar Ledderose, Heidelberg University
IV. Picturing the World
Landscapes, flower and bird painting, and cityscapes have longstanding and pervasive presences within East Asian art, tasked with particular visual, literary, and even political aims, and subject to near constant intervention and re-conceptualization. These three papers examine and contextualize particular moments of pictorialization in terms of precursors and transformations of established subjects and modes of representing the world.
Richard Okada, Princeton University
New Initiatives in Ink Landscape Painting in Kamakura During the Later Muromachi Period
Eva Havlicova, Independent Scholar
The Perfect Gift: Premodern Japanese Screens Sent Abroad
Janice Katz, Art Institute of Chicago
Seventeenth-Century Korean Bird Paintings at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco
Cheeyun Kwon, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco
Afternoon Session
2:00—5:00 pm
Introduction
Gregory Levine, University of California, Berkeley
V. Combinatory Visual Cultures
The modern categorization and lexicon of art history has tended to obscure the complexly combinatory nature of visual and verbal cultures in East Asia. These papers present case studies that challenge assumed boundaries and divisions and work to uncover the logic and cultural ambitions/expressions of assembled or interrelated objects and cultures.
Ann Yonemura, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
Redeeming Qualities: Absolving the Sin of Secular Art and Literature in Early Medieval Japan
Nicole Fabricand-Person, Independent Scholar
Seer of Sounds: The Muqi Triptych and the Origins of the Composite Scroll set in Japanese Painting
Yukio Lippit, Harvard University
The Innumerable Embodiments of Hotei: The Fusion of Chan/Zen with Literati Painting Conventions
Xiaojin Wu, Princeton University Art Museum
VI. Vision/History
Recent historiographical and methodological ruminations within the discipline of art history have only recently been joined by writings that consider specifically the art history of Japan. Two papers address the relationship of method and critical position in the study of Japanese painting in relation to diachronic changes taking place in the status and reception.
Helmut Brinker, Emeritus, University of Zurich
Mounting Problems: Looking at Connoisseurship in Japanese Art
Hans Thomsen, University of Zurich
On Return: Kano Eitoku’s (1543—1590) Flowers and Birds of the
Four Seasons at the Jukōin and the Digital World
Gregory Levine, University of California, Berkeley
Special Lecture
Yoshiaki Shimizu, Princeton University
Andrew M. Watsky, Princeton University
