Japanese Art Dealers Exhibit

I went on Saturday to the annual exhibit given by New York City's Japanese Art Dealers Association (JADA) at the Ukrainian Center on Fifth Avenue.  Although the show took up only three galleries, it was an excellent opportunity to view masterworks of Japanese art in a tastefully arranged setting.

A good portion of the exhibit was given over to the display of ceramics and lacquerware.  Of the former, one of the more interesting pieces was not actually Japanese at all but rather an import from seventeenth century China.  Shaped in the form of a pouch, this hanging flower vase was an example of kosometsuke, a type of porcelain with cobalt blue underglaze that was manufactured in the town of Jingdezhen specifically for a Japanese market.  Also known as tenkei for the late Ming dynasty Emperor Tanqi, kosometsuke was fired in unofficial kilns as government regulation broke down in the unsettled times preceding the fall of the Ming to the Manchu conquerors of the successor Qing dynasty.  Perhaps due to the lack of government oversight as well as the fact that it was intended for export, kosometsuke was atypical of Chinese ceramics in its homely informality, an attribute that makes it much more accessible to the modern viewer.  

Of the lacquerware, the piece I found most intriguing was a fan shaped stacked box from the Meiji era.  Consisting of black and gold lacquer on a wood base with gold and silver trimming, the box was all the more elegant for the simplicity of its design.  

For me, the most interesting objects at the exhibit were the paintings, including several on large folding screens.  Certainly the most arresting of these artworks was The Fury of Priest Raigō (c. 1875-1885) by Kobayashi Kiyochika, a ukiyo-e artist who normally specialized in works that depicted the ever increasing Westernization of Japan.  In this hanging scroll done in ink and color on silk, however, he painted a scene from a classic legend of the Heian period in which a proud monk became enraged when the Emperor Shirakawa refused to grant a request; the monk then unleashed a terrible curse upon the unfortunate ruler.  Kiyochika's fellow Meiji ukiyo-e artist Yoshitoshi also illustrated this same tale in an 1891 woodblock print but chose to show the curse itself in the form of an army of rats, led by Raigō in semi-human form, infesting Mii Temple and devouring its prized collection of sacred scrolls.  In contrast, Kiyochika chose to depict the dramatic moment Raigō uttered his fateful curse.  The viewer's attention is captured as much by the flowing strokes that make up the painting as by the terrifying expression worn by the nearly deranged monk.

There were two other paintings I thought worth special mention.  The first was The Illustrated Life of Shinran (1699), the Heian era monk who founded the Jōdo Shinshū school of Pure Land Buddhsim, by an unknown Edo artist in the form of four large hanging scrolls.  This was an intricate and highly detailed work that illustrated one after the other all the major episodes of Shinran's life.  The second painting was a huge hanging scroll by Mochizuki Gyokkei entitled Sparrows and Waterfall (1851).  In this work, the monochromatic grey rendering of the water falling at the base of the falls contrasted strongly with the bright coloring of the birds flying before it.

Several large folding screens dominated the walls of one gallery.  Scattered Fans by an unknown Edo artist was a delightful rendering of handheld fans thrown randomly against a black background.  Bright gold fans mixed easily with those that seemed to reproduce scenes from antique monochromatic Chinese paintings.  Another screen was much more modern in design but just as compelling.  This was Hokuetsu no ama ("Divers of Hokuetsu") painted in 1940 by Shinsui Tanaka.  It was described in a mailing from the Erik Thomsen Gallery as "an over-sized folding screen measuring over seven feet in height, depicting a group of hardy female free-divers on Japan's northwestern coast, the monumental, life-size composition emphasizing the women's famous toughness and independent spirit."  The colorful modern rendering was quite striking when applied to the traditional folding screen format.

Unfortunately, the exhibit only lasts three days and is scheduled to close today, March 13, 2017.