Seattle Art Museum Exhibits Japanese Cultural Treasures

Organized by the Seattle Art Museum in collaboration with Kobe City Museum, the exhibition provides an intriguing window on the early interaction between Japan and the West during the period of the 16th to 19th centuries.

Japan Envisions the West will include 142 cultural treasures from the Kobe City Museum, many of which have never traveled outside of Japan before. The exhibition features rare and exquisite paintings, prints, maps, ceramics, lacquer ware, metal ware, glass ware, leather ware and textiles. Demonstrating not only how Japanese and Westerners comprehended and appreciated each others’ cultures, the exhibition also raises important contemporary questions about how we perceive people and cultures different from our own.

“It is our hope that this exhibition will advance knowledge of the rich art and culture of Japan, and offer keen insight into the history of cross-cultural exchange,” said Seattle Art Museum Director Mimi Gates. “We are very honored to partner with the Kobe City Museum and offer a rare opportunity to see these superb works of art outside of Japan.”

“Many of the objects are the beautiful fruits of the curiosity and progressive attitudes of those Japanese artists who sought to envision the strange, exotic world that lay beyond their borders,” says Yukiko Shirahara, curator of the exhibition and SAM’s John A. McCone Foundation Curator of Asian Art.

Western European culture was first introduced to Japan in the 1540’s with the arrival of Portuguese and Spanish traders and missionaries. The stark contrast between the foreign art, culture, and religion and traditional Japanese values and aesthetics resulted in culture shock. Japan Envisions the West includes rare works such as Depiction of the Island of Japan, (1595) by Luis Teixeira (Portuguese, 1564-1604), which is the first map of Japan published in Europe, and a four panel screen Foreign Emperors and Kings on Horseback (c. 1610s) by an unknown Japanese artist created under the direction of a Jesuit missionary.

Later, namban (lit. ‘southern barbarian”) art, or Japanese art made in response to the contact with Portugal and Spain, reflects Japan’s eagerness to adopt new techniques and add to their expanding world perspective. Europeans, in turn, readily learned and adopted techniques and images of Japanese exoticism in their ceramics and lacquer ware. Japanese craftsmen learned to bridge both worlds by creating Western style art for the domestic market while exporting Japanese style art to new European markets.

The exhibition highlights the period of seclusion from 1639 to 1853, when only the Dutch and Chinese were permitted to reside and trade at the port of Nagasaki. During this period, European perspective, motif, and design were assimilated so as to suit Japanese taste, and these syncretic styles co-existed with Japanese conventional artistic styles, creating a rich variety of decorative sense on Japanese art.

Japan’s seclusion ended in 1853 when American Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Edo (today’s Tokyo), and soon after Japan signed its first treaty with the United States. In a fascinating process of acceptance, synthesis, and transformation, the exhibition vividly demonstrates how Japanese artists assimilated Western conventions into traditional Japanese aesthetics.

Japan Envisions the West, featuring three centuries of Japanese art and its engagement with the West, also celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Seattle-Kobe sister city relationship. Facing each other across the Pacific Ocean, the ports of Seattle and Kobe have had an especially intimate relationship and have long engaged in vibrant intellectual, educational, and cultural exchanges.

Halfway through the exhibition there will be a changeover in works on paper which includes all the prints and maps. Exhibited works in part I and II can be checked in the website: www.seattleartmusrum.org. Accompanying the exhibition will be a handsome 224 page scholarly catalogue published by the University of Washington Press and devoted to the influence of Western art and culture in Japan. -- www.seattleartmuseum.org