Between the Lines: Hokusai in His Letters

Caa Reviews, 2006

2017

There are some artworks that are simply part of our lives. We can’t imagine being without them. These artworks fascinate, are seemingly easy to understand. The themes are always whittled down to the essentials — like a logo! “The Wave” is one of them. “Under the Great Wave off Kanagawa” (H-7) from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku Sanjūrokkei) by Katsushika Hokusai is one of the most famous artworks in the world. It belongs to the whole world; it transcends place and time. We feel no initial need to categorize or explain. Why does Hokusai concentrate on this gigantic wave crashing down, seemingly devouring everything? Is the overpowering force of nature alone the aspects he wishes to convey to us? This is one possibility perhaps for understanding the picture: a sudden, precipitous force of nature, and we — symbolized by the people in the boats — are helplessly exposed to it. It is not only the clarity of the composition, but also our possible involvement, which makes...

2020

The collection of Japanese prints, albums and illustrated books (ehon) in the Museum of Oriental Art in Venice is the result of the last stop in Japan of a journey to the Far East of Prince Henry Bourbon-Parma, Count of Bardi and his wife Adelgunde of Bragança, during the years 1887-1889. The gathering of more than thirty thousand objects became the core of the present collection. Among these there are about 500 illustrated books of famous ukiyoe masters, surimono, and colour prints nishikie. The creation of catalogue entries in Japanese and Italian and the analysis of each print reveals an amazing quantity of unpublished ukiyoe masterpieces and allows a division into different groups according to the subject matter. At the same time, this distinction into different genres shows an interesting tendency in the formation of the collection together with a possible new classification of the prints themselves. This study aims to shed a new light on this particular collection while focusi...

Monumenta Nipponica, 2016

Manuscript of the Month, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg, 2014

Famed for his calligraphic talent, Mi Fu 米芾 (1051–1107), a scholar-official in 11th-century China, wrote to a friend to offer some precious objects in exchange for an ancient piece of calligraphic artwork that he adored. The outcome was a short letter that still remains today. Although the letter only contains 85 Chinese characters, it is rich in cultural significance, and the style in which it was written demonstrates the writer’s marvelous artistic talent. How are content and form interconnected in such a Chinese letter, or in other words, what was the relationship between the epistolary and the calligraphic in the manuscript?

Hokusai Manga (HM) is the biggest and the best known work of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) which consists of ca. 900 pp. published in 15 volumes from 1814 to 1875. This publication discusses the phenomenon of HM and its place in the context of Japanese picture books. Was it a drawing manual or comic cartoons or perhaps a pictorial encyclopedia? What are the historical meanings and etymology of the word manga? The special attention is devoted to the principles of compilation of HM and to the ways of organization of the compositional unity of its volumes. This research offers a major revision of the textual nature of this famous, yet insufficiently studied, masterpiece. Contrary to the common belief that HM is a chaotic jumble of random disjointed pictures, every volume is actually composed as a sophisticated whole with the help of elaborate schemata deeply imbedded in the traditional Japanese ways of textual organization. JEL Classification: Z Keywords: Hokusai, manga, Japanese art, illustrated books, woodblock prints

Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honor of Professor Wen C. Fong, 2011

Reassessing the Dating of Chinese Jade Forked Blades zhixin jason sun Regionalism in Han Dynasty Stone Carving and Lacquer Painting 259 anthony barbieri-low Contents part three out in the world : the public figure Pedagogue on the Go: Portraits of Confucius as an Itinerant Teacher julia k. murr ay The Ming Imperial Image: The Transformation from Hongwu to Hongzhi dor a c.y. ching An Analytical Reading of Portraits of Emperor Qianlong and His Consorts chen pao-chen The Making of Royal Portraits during the Chosŏn Dynasty: What the Ŭigwe Books Reveal yi sŏng-mi A Group of Anonymous Northern Figure Paintings from the Qianlong Period james cahill Josetsu's Catching a Catfish with a Gourd: Cultural Agendas and the Early Fifteenth-Century Shogunal Academy richard stanley-baker volume two part four working on faith : buddhist and daoist arts A Tale of Two Scrolls: The Luo Nymph Rhapsody in Peking and London roderick whitfield Visualizing Paradise and Configuring Conventions: Cave 334, Dunhuang jennifer noering m c intire The Three Purities Grotto at Nanshan, Dazu 495 anning jing A Change of Clothes: The Selective Japanization of Female Buddhist Images in the Late Heian and Kamakura Periods nicole fabricand-person part five le arning from nature : the l andsc ape and the garden Multipanel Landscape Screens as Spatial Simulacra at the Mogao Caves, Dunhuang foong ping Commentary on the Rock lothar ledderose Strange Pictures: Images Made by Chance and Pictorial Representation in an Album by Xuezhuang robert e. harrist, jr. Beyond the Representation of Streams and Mountains: The Development of Chinese Landscape Painting from the Tenth to the Mid-Eleventh Century shih shou-chien Reconfirming the Attribution of Snow-Capped Peaks to the Early Qing Painter Zhang Jisu shen c.y. fu Northern Song Landscape Styles in the Seikadō Ten Kings of Hell Paintings cheeyun kwon A Handscroll of Orchid and Bamboo by Zhao Mengfu and Guan Daosheng chu-tsing li The Lion Grove in Space and Time david ake sensabaugh Brushwork Behavior from Song to Qing joan stanley-baker part six collection and appreciation : the arts on displ ay Seeking Delight in the Arts: Literary Gathering by Ikeda Koson helmut brinker Practices of Display: The Significance of Stands for Chinese Art Objects jan stuart Imaging Oriental Art in Late Nineteenth-Century America: The Walters Collection Catalogue hui-wen lu part se ven tr ansmit ting the image : inscriptions and copy work, print and photogr aphic media Calligraphy and a Changing World: A Study of Yang Weizhen's Inscription for the Collection of Ancient Coins hui-liang chu Copying in Japanese Art: Calligraphy, Painting, and Architecture yoshiaki shimizu A Study of the Xinjuan hainei qiguan, a Ming Dynasty Book of Famous Sites lin li-chiang Chinese Print Culture and the Proliferation of "One Hundred Beauties" Imagery christine c.y. tan