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good evening here on the east coast here in new york i'm joshua walker of japan society i'm particularly excited tonight to welcome you to painting edo early modern masterworks from the feinberg collection i want to thank the talks plus season sponsor mitsubishi ufj financial group as well as an anonymous donor the sandy heck lecture fund and laurel gonzalez this program is part of the richard j wood art curator series which is generously supported in part by an award from the national association of japan american societies with funds from the japan united states friendship commission so let me introduce the main speaker for tonight before i turn it over to a special guest we have dr rachel saunders joining us from cambridge she is the abbey aldrick's rockefeller curator of asian art at the harvard art museum she earned her phd from harvard university in 2015 and is a specialist in medieval narrative and sacred painting in addition to painting edo japanese art from the feinberg collection you're gonna experience today she also recently curated the exhibit uh prince shotoku the secrets within uh given that this talk focuses on artwork from the collection of robert and betsy feinberg here at japan society we also have had the privilege of displaying these pieces from the feinberg's outstanding collection at some of our past exhibits in fact we were just talking uh with the the group about this and so we are incredibly grateful uh for their support and obviously that this is named after a former president here at japan society i'm sitting in the japan house that was donated by john d rockefeller iii there's a lot of strands of connection tonight and makes us feel like we have that kizuna or deep connection bond of family so before welcoming dr sanders to the floor or to the your screen and good morning in ohio to all those in japan that are joining as well i'd like to welcome peter kelly our fearless president and leader of the national association of japan american societies of which we are a proud member to say a few words particularly about richard j wood and the art curator series that niges has peter over to you thank you joshua and and welcome everyone who's joining we have a big crowd i understand tonight and we're very pleased uh to have that i'm peter kelly from the national association of japan america societies we're located in washington d.c there are 38 japan america societies all around the country and the japan society in new york is the fourth oldest dating from 1907 i think uh joshua the the work of the national association of japan american societies is to help provide good japan related programming to our members which they wouldn't otherwise be able to arrange themselves we began the national with the what's called the richard j woodard curator series with that idea in 2015. the idea was to highlight the importance of art in the american u.s japan relationship beginning in the 19th century and continuing right to now and we do that by inviting curators of collections of japanese art and american museums to speak in cities apart from their home museums to talk about the collections and also about the collectors why are there such good collections of japanese art in american museums and how important is that in the u.s japan relationship the series is named for richard j wood for dick wood many of you who are familiar with the japan society will remember dick he was a wonderful man and he was president of the japan society in addition to many other accomplishments he's also chairman of the japanese friendship commission which helps us the national association of japan american societies give this grant dick was the brains behind this series he was a he was a uh it was a lover of ours and he knew a lot of collectives and it was he who said focus on the collections the collections are the important aspect of the of uh of art in the us of japanese art in american museums to date in the uh richard j woodard curator series we've done uh 17 presentations this year there are four the presentations that have taken place so far this year rachel gave this presentation in with the japan american society of houston and the museum of fine arts houston andreas marks of the minneapolis institute of art talked about the murray collection of textiles and he did that with the support of the japan america society of northwest florida and xiao jin wu of the seattle asian art museum spoke with at the japan america society of chicago and the art institute of chicago about the remodeling of the seattle asian art museum and the richard fuller collection the lost in this series after rachel's presentation tonight will be monica binksick of the metropolitan museum of art and she'll be speaking under a sponsorship of the japan america society of georgia and the high art museum in atlanta on november 19th so this is a this this year will be a good series of collections from different museums different parts of the country and different kinds of japanese art we're all very excited to hear what rachel will have to say about the the feinberg collection at the havana museums we wish you all could have seen it and i wish i could have too but it's been closed for most of the most of the its time is an exhibition so with that let me welcome you all and turn it back to joshua to introduce rachel thank you for participating thank you peterson let me turn it right over to dr sanders so we can get into what we're uh saunders i apologize make sure we turn right over to you uh to get into the amazing and studying collection that you have for us and i am just so grateful that you have taken the time and that we have this technology to do this so this is able to enhance the relationship in all areas so rachel over to you great well thank you joshua for that generous introduction and i'd first like to express my thanks to you and to the japan society for this kind invitation to be with you tonight my special thanks are also due to tomo misakiya who's director of talks and programs and to her team for their persistence and flexibility in bringing this event to fruition in our new circumstances i'd also like to thank peter kelly who we've just heard from president of the national association of japan america societies and the japan united states friendship commission for making this program possible now although we're here gathered here together in zoom and i'm in fact in providence rhode island i'd like to start by saying that the harvard art museum acknowledges that harvard university is situated on the traditional and ancestral territory of the massachusetts people and that we strive to honor this relationship now as joshua said my name is rachel saunders and i'm the curator of japanese art at the harvard art museums and i'm the co-curator with professor yukiya lippett of the current the special exhibition painting edo japanese art from the feinberg collection which is the cause of our coming together tonight and although i regret it's not in person it's really wonderful to be here with a much larger group than would otherwise have been possible which is one of those zoom silver linings that we're perhaps getting a little bit used to after seven months or so when so many things including this exhibition look different in this extended moment of both isolation and change and i've been increasingly asking myself over this time for example how was it that in the edo period which was itself so scarred by multiple epidemics earthquakes volcanic eruptions famines and poor governance that such an enormous wealth of beautiful paintings was produced and what do they have to say to us today in this moment in 21st century north america and perhaps something we might come back to in the question and answer portion of evenings i'd certainly like to hear your thoughts now painting the erdo is the largest exhibition in the history of the harvard art museums and it opened after five intensive weeks of installation on february 13 2020 and it's now temporarily closed of course but you can access its digital avatars through our webpage and our social media and these now include nine video tours and a series of events in collaboration with botanists at harvard's museum of trees the arnold arboretum that we've nicknamed planting eddo and i'll come back to those at the end of this presentation we also have an online exhibition down here which was produced on google's platform and if you enter that exhibition it looks something like this it's divided into four parts and you can actually walk through almost the entire exhibition this way online it looks a little bit like this now in the galleries themselves we have over 120 works of art from japan's early modern edo period which is usually designated 1615 to 1868 and which was named for the new shogunal capital of edo the city that we know today as tokyo now while the exhibition does offer a history of early modern japanese painting in 10 rich chapters as we came to think of them the more important aim was to attempt to offer an immersive experience of seeing differently a painting eddo is also a milestone moment in the sharing of a truly remarkable collection of early modern japanese art and the paintings in the collection are drawn exclusively from the collection of robert and betsy feinberg during almost 50 years of collecting the feinbergs have always made a point of welcoming scholars and students from all over the world to study their growing collection and in an act of exceptional generosity they have now promised their collection to the harvard art museums making it one of the largest and most significant promised gifts of art ever to be made to this institution and it's in part for this reason that the exhibition opens with this magnificent painting by tany buncho titled grasses and moon this enormous window-like ink painting commemorates the harvest moon viewing party that took place on the banks of edo's sumida river on the 15th day of the eighth month just over 200 years ago in 1817 as recorded in the inscription here on a beautiful night in mid-autumn the 15th day of the eighth month of 1817 as i wandered the banks of the sumida river a clear moon shone as brilliantly as the sun the scene is rendered here in this true view painted seven days later now as this audience is well well aware viewing the harvest moon amidst converging gatherings of friends is a venerable east asian tradition marked by mary making and the composition of poetry and it's associated with fellowship for the idea that no matter how far we may be separated from those dear to us distance alone cannot prevent us all viewing the same moon in the same sky on the same evening in the painting the radical proximity of the river reeds which are rising right out of the very front of the picture plane and one of which reaches up to just caress the bottom edge of the moon conveys a powerful sense of fairness there are no figures painted here rather the vantage point conveys the essence of the experience of being at this gathering and places you the viewer on the riverbank gazing up at the moon yeah the ink image and the oversized painter seal and the inscription weave this one specific occasion into a communal historical fabric of every other preceding moon viewing party so that not just the 1817 gathering but also our own unique experience of this painting converge as a shared memory that echoes across centuries of human experience and this is certainly a painting whose resonances i at least have felt even more deeply at this year's mid-autumn festival now by 1800 edo was the largest city in the world dwarfing contemporary london or paris with more than a million inhabitants and the early modern era brought an extraordinary wave of urbanization and innovation stimulating an immense appetite for intellectual and pictorial culture and a dizzying array of painting schools and lineages was established to meet the demands of traditional aristocratic patrons as well as the more newly affluent in the 20th century scholars have attempted to deal with the pictorial wealth of edo painting by taxonomizing and evolving a comfortable model for dealing with this abundance through the use of scholarly categories and labels but over time this model has been offering gradually diminishing returns the nature of the feinberg collection has made it possible for us to begin a re-examination of these categories and to present it instead as far as possible on its own terms to do so we return to edo period conceptions of painterly lineage or uh in japanese since it seemed to us that it was through membership of school-like lineages which mirrored the pervasive semi-feudal organization of the japanese warrior household that area edo period artists understood their own subjectivity and it's primarily to these lineages that we have looked in organizing the 10 chapters of the exhibition the physical layout of the exhibition is designed to welcome and orient the newcomer to edo art among a representative selection of paintings in an initial lineage gallery but beyond this there was no perspective no prescriptive route and the exhibition expanded outward from this central area in nine additional sections several of which we're going to visit on our brief tour this evening now the first of these is the floating world section of the exhibition here we encounter paintings that encapsulate not so much the new and closely regulated urban world of the military city of edo is experienced day by day by its inhabitants but paintings of the new urban fantasy worlds that grew up as spaces for leisure and released within the city namely the licensed pleasure quarters which were effectively cities within cities where theaters restaurants and bordellos were located and it was here in these so-called floating worlds or the ukiyo that class restrictions could be temporarily restricted now their celebrities were pictured as elegantly dressed fashion leaders painted against blank backgrounds that invite the viewer to supply the missing narrative the who and the why and the where increasing your sense of engagement with the fantasy that's pictured here for example we have a painting of a beautifully dressed woman sitting alone leaning against some lacquer boxes and her hair is pinned up in this complex style and she casually wears several layers of beautifully decorated silk robes that are sort of spilling around her she holds in one hand a narrow slip of paper the type of paper that was made especially for writing poems on and in her other hand she holds the tip of her writing brush pressed to her lips so she seems to be thinking about what to write above her floats a poem which is written in two characters are two columns of chinese characters and it can be translated something like this thinking of you compelled to compose a verse under the lamp light riding through the night of our lost years now it's not clear whether this is a poem from an absent lover to which she's about to respond or whether this might in fact be her response and the moment before she brushes it on the paper the poem is playing with the trope of the absent lover who's usually a scholar official who's been posted to some distant region but in fact we can see that this beauty isn't quite alone if we look carefully you can see that there's an enormous cop just here swimming in the lively waters of her outermost robe looking up at her with these golden eyes such paintings of isolated figures evolved out of busy genre paintings like these screens in which many figures are featured now this pair of screens depicts the arrival of the first foreigners in japan the portuguese in 1543 and a great deal of attention is given to the details of the ship and its crew as well as its cargo of exotic trading goods and here we see the procession of the ship's captain into town with japanese townspeople inside the storefronts here peering out at foreigners with their pinkish collection complexions their high noses and their fantastic baggy trousers in the school of cord in section we have works in the globally influential mode of colorful painting often called nimpa which is produced by painters who followed in the footsteps of the 17th century painter named ogata cordin it was works like these that when they arrived in europe in the late 19th century spurred the development of movements like art nouveau for example the school of cordin painting is distinctive for its extravagant use of beautiful mineral pigments and precious metals to expand delicate classical literary motifs into often impressively immersive new images this pair of folding screens depicting flowering plants of the four seasons arranged from spring at the right through summer fall and winter as we move through to the left for example in fact also offers the viewer several notional pathways through which to move in this virtual garden in the mind of the educated edo period viewer each plant would also have conjured up a whole range of seasonal poetic associations as they metaphorically walked through the garden and this remarkable screen of autumn maples is one of my very favorites in the exhibition again the cut-off tops of the trees beg you to complete the picture in your mind's eye transporting you to the grove and channeling your vision along an inward leading path that really kind of conveys a subtle sense of depth even in a painting which is executed upon a flattening reflective surface of gold foil now while the painting style is not what we would describe as botanically realistic again we do find that the essence of the plant is captured uh in the top left corner for example here these two tiny leaves that just seem to flicker at the corner of your vision in the top left-hand corner of the screen here and also in the like and like texture of the tree trunks which is produced by dripping wet ink into wet ink to achieve this this puddling effect here moving on into our eccentricity section here we feature the works of painters considered to be brilliantly eccentric or strange in the true edo period sense of the word or key as well as powerful works by painters who were dubbed eccentric by 20th century scholars so here we have a really remarkable screen painting depicting an incident from the 14th century war epic the tale of a heike in which the warriors kage who's on the left in red and takatsuna who's on the right in green compete to be the first to cross the river uji after enemy minamoto warriors have abandoned their position and wrecked the bridge on their way out although kagesue is initially in the lead takatsuna tricks him by telling him that his horse's girth strap appears to be loose whereupon kagesue looks down to check and takazuna overtakes him now this extraordinary rendering of this well-known incident is by the painter soga who's one of several overlooked edo painters who perhaps because they did not belong to a particular lineage never quite made it into the canon until they were written into it in the 20th century as eccentrics or kijin and you can see why the grotesque musculature and fangs of the horses and the mask-like faces of the warriors the wild waveforms and the really extreme use of color all feed very easily into a narrative of eccentricity in which eccentricity is understood as a personal psychological state as we in the 21st century understand it however this is in fact somewhat anachronistic the cons concept of key was very well established and in edo japan was much closer to something like the affect of genius or being so accomplished and so natural that one failed to observe mundane norms ike no tiger the painter of the other pair of screens in this gallery was celebrated as one who was filled with the true essence of ki and in this pair of screens he paints two chinese parts who were also considered to embody ki the first showing you here is mangja a fourth century chinese poet who failed to notice when his cap was blown off by a gust of wind at a formal gathering one day and when a colleague criticized his appearance he replied with a beautifully phrased poem composed on the spot and you can see his uh boy attendant in the left hand corner of the screen here so chasing after his lost hat right here the other is sushi an 11th century scholar about whom many anecdotes survive including this one in which the eminent scarlet courtier is caught out one day on a walk by a sudden rainstorm and so what to do with utter disregard for etiquette sue knocks on the door of a peasant farmer's home and borrows a pair of rustic high clogs to get him through the mud and a broad brimmed farmer's hat to protect him from the rain and so here he is at the height of ridiculousness ridiculousness for a sun courtier happily dressed in farmer's clothing now the painting itself is made to appear as if it were painted quickly or eccentrically if you will with fast wide brushstrokes and it's spattered with taisha which is a red brown pigment here and there but in fact the composition is very carefully planned and balanced with one poet facing us and the other facing away one poet wearing a hat and the other unhated one poet in the company of a deciduous tree while the other is with a conifer and by juxtaposing these two examples of eccentricity in the gallery what we were really trying to do was to make visible one of the starting points for the rationale of the exhibition um in our revisiting of the categories of edo painting and something this this is something that really was only made possible by the breadth and depth of the feinberg collection now there are two sections in the exhibition that are devoted to supposedly amateur painting in the mode of the scholarly gentleman who painted not for money but as part of a lifestyle that shunned the benefits and comforts of the mercantile world for the integrity of reclusion away from the world these men or often called literati would instead devote their time entirely to self-cultivation through reading writing poetry practicing calligraphy and painting as amateurs their materials were meant to be modest usually just ink and paper and their subjects idealize chinese landscapes and symbolic plants for example were ideal for contemplation their paintings were not officially for sale and instead circulated as gifts between friends that's of course the mode of history a mode of painting with a venerable history in china that was adapted in japan to the archipelago's different social conditions more as an aesthetic style than as a political position now the term literati painting which is a translation from the word bunjinga has most often been applied to describe the work of both first wave and early first wave of early edo painters in this mode and their later followers the term however obscures the quite distinctive differences between what we might call the vanguard first gen generation of painters in this mode and their later followers in the exhibition we decided to try and highlight that that development by separating painters often grouped together under the term literati into two groups with earlier practitioners gathered in a section called pictorial culture and later practitioners many of whom were in fact more or less openly painting in exchange for money in a second section which we titled professional amateurism to reflect the idea that although they espouse the aesthetics of supposedly amadeus painting they painted professionally in exchange for money so in the pictorial cultivation section of the exhibition we have juxtaposed for example the work of father and son painters who are both relatively early experience of chinese style literati ink painting in japan yokudo's microcosmic landscape here is um let's take a closer look because it's really composed out of a frenzy of fast-moving dry brush strokes that create a landscape in which the element that you would expect to be moving let's take a even closer look the element you'd like to be moving would be the traveler the figure of this male traveler here is in fact still while it's the landscape around him that shimmers yokudo's son chunking by contrast expands his extraterrestrial landscapes to monumental scale to inhabit this immersive format the japanese japanese folding screen here and despite the difference of scale again expectations are confounded as it's not the placid water really that's moving here it's the towering rocks which appear to be cresting and almost overwhelming the viewer it's good to remember while we're in zoom that if you were viewing this in person it's about um five foot five tall and um you would be seated on the ground so you would feel almost as if you were in this landscape now included among the later professional amateurs who produce literati style paintings on commission are painters like yamamoto who began depicting domestic japanese landscapes and adding color and precious metals to these very popular works as in the case of this pair of screens which depict two japanese beauty spots near the city of kyoto arashiyama on the right famous for its riverside cherry blossoms in spring and mount takao on the left famous for its autumn maples and while the sights have been celebrated as timeless beauty spots in japanese poetry for centuries edo period painters like bites who began to invest them with familiar contemporary vignettes like these scholarly men here who are sitting outdoors enjoying a picnic and an attendant right here who's busily collecting autumn mushrooms the final gallery of the exhibition is devoted to fan paintings which are represented unusually strongly in the feinberg collection and as you can see there were folding fans on ribs which were used for a variety of purposes including as accessories as gifts and in dances and rituals of various kinds particularly precious painted fans might be removed from these ribs and preserved as hanging scroll paintings as you can see at the bays at each end of this wall here and there are also fan paintings which were never destined for utilitarian use but which remained flat so that they could be pasted to decorative folding screens and on this wall we arranged two sets of fans painted with seasonal flowering plants together in an arrangement that runs from spring to winter from right to left in a contemporary analog of a traditional ogi nagashi or floating fans composition something like this uh and the idea is that the floating fans format is is it's rumored to have had its own origins in the practice of gathering on a bridge to celebrate the end of the heavy heat of summer and the relief of the beginning of autumn by elegantly disposing of one summer fan by tossing it from the bridge so that these beautiful objects might float away together in an exquisitely poignant cluster and so we were trying to present a contemporary analog of that that practice now before we close i just wanted to say a little bit about teaching in the museums which integral as they are to harvard's campus is a vital part of our practice as a university museum there are a whole range of things that we do which go on both within and beyond the walls of the museum and that could be the subject of a different talk but for starters a good deal of specialized teaching goes on here in our purpose-built art study center on the fourth floor of the museums which is a suite of five classroom spaces for teaching with original works of art in the last year we had almost 35 000 works of art go through that space which is many times the number we could ever show in the galleries but instead the works are actually an action here in the art study center of course those operations are currently temporarily suspended but in relation to uh this exhibition in particular teaching was integral to its planning and its execution yukio lipid and i began with a seminar on edo painting which was dedicated to works in the feinberg collection in the fall of 2017 and this really allowed us to focus on the collection and key questions that we wanted to address to begin to work through the exhibition catalog which is the publication at the top here with the peacock on the cover it was also here that graduate student participants began researching and drafting entries for the catalog resume of the collection which is a separate publication below with the maples on the cover here which covers the entire collection of over 300 works and this is scheduled for publication at the very end of this year in the seminar uh in the course of the seminar we made a number of visits to the feinberg's home to study the paintings in person here and here are a couple of snapshots of that happening several graduate students then work with me on parts of the exhibition and the planning process helen swift who has a particular interest in fan paintings worked with us to create the fan wall that you've just seen and leah justin hinic who's particularly debt with movie making software managed to turn her in person tours of the exhibition into online video tours following the shutdown in march and you can now see these tours on our website or on our vimeo channel additionally while there is of course no replacement for time with the actual objects we've been very fortunate since we shut down to have been able to work with some of our campus partners on some new initiatives one of which has been to present some joint programs with stuff from harvard's museum of trees the arnold arboretum now in these programs we've been able to bring together some other ways of seeing differently bringing to bear the idea the the eyes of a botanist and a curator on both painted and planted trees and flowering plants that are represented both in the exhibition and in the grounds of the arboretum now physically located five miles apart these are programs that would have been impossible on a person but which the covert era has hastened into being and the results have been something of a surprise hit with hundreds of participants from around the globe each time and i wonder perhaps one of the draws is that each time we do this it's the curators just as much as the audiences who get to see differently these programs are really underlying the importance of bringing multiple perspectives to prayer to bear on our looking ex and experiences in what is after all an art museum and not an art history museum and the path-breaking botanist robin wall kimmera captures in her 2013 book braiding sweetgrass an imaginary conversation that has been on my mind recently now that conversation is between nana bozo the anishinaabe culture's original man and the 18th century swedish botanist linnaeus in which she she pictures them walking together and naming all the living beings and as they do this linnaeus lends nana bozo a magnifying glass so that he can see the tiny floral pla parts of the plants and in return nana bozo gives linnaeus a song so that he can see their spirits and in that exchange neither of them are lonely any longer now if in these joint programs we could be capturing even just a little of that sort of synergy it feels as though we could be making a contra positive contribution towards seeing differently in ways that we certainly hadn't seen uh prior to march 2020 and if you care to you can follow those events on our various instagram and social media accounts like this i hope you will join us for some of those as they come up in the future so thank you for your company uh on this virtual tour today i hope it's given you at least a taste of the exhibition while the physical doors remain closed and in the meantime if you're so moved the exhibition catalog is available uh you can order it if you would like from yale university press and please do look out for new new information further information on uh upcoming events and online content on our webpage to help you access the museums and the exhibition from home thank you well thank you dr sanders for your wonderful presentation and thank you all to who join who is joining us for this virtual program i'm thomas akiya director of the talks plus program at japan society at this point we would like to take some questions from the audience we've been compiling questions from the chair so we will start with those and some questions we received in advance so if you have anything you would like to ask dr sanders please enter your question in the chat now and look the sanders the first question for you is the original exhibition had to close only a few weeks after opening but you have said that it will be open when things return to normally what will the exhibition look like when it reopens that is such a good question and it sounds like a simple question uh and it of course is very much not a simple question in this this change moment that we find ourselves in so the exhibition was open for about just over three weeks um and then we had to close in the middle of march and um although we don't have a pre uh a hard date for reopening it's projected that we may be able to reopen in january and the exhibition will be extended so we will reopen with this exhibition um in terms of what it will look like the installation itself was an entirely custom installation designed to be as sympathetic as possible to the paintings and their um particular needs and as as you're very well aware i know um the japan society amounts wonderful exhibitions beautiful exhibitions yourself so knowing uh what that takes in a museum setting is it's it's quite an undertaking and our designer in fact i took him to japan so that we could really understand he could really understand what these paintings needed and how uh how best practice in japan what that looked like so we had an entirely custom made installation for this exhibition it was really pretty extraordinary that was the upside the downside of having a custom made installation is that it's it's immovable so um although a lot a long period of time has elapsed since we closed we're not actually able to make physical changes to the exhibition so that leaves us in a position where the changes that we would want to make the things that we'd want to see the way that we might want to reframe the exhibition slightly differently now that we have passed through these many months of covert and turbulence in many parts of society that means that it will not be in the physical installation it will be in the programming that we have to make our changes that we make our interventions and how the exhibition looks now and so we've re-planned programs for the upcoming spring to just sort of really um change the emphasis a little to reflect the fact that things do look different now so we are for example retooling our symposium so that it won't be an impressive event anymore but it will be spread out over a longer period of time and we'll be able to invite colleagues from japan to join us in zoom which we would have been unable to do previously so that's an important addition to um to our programming we're also releasing um we've been making we've been busy making some um behind-the-scenes videos to really sort of increase the transparency around the show what it was that we were thinking and how we went about doing it um and one of those uh is a it's a video that's been made by our designer really going into the design process and his thinking process uh in putting together the installation for the exhibition installation design is something that often doesn't really it gets it gets talked about and i mean the minute anybody walks into a museum you everybody becomes an architecture critic i'm sure you're familiar with that sort of sensation but it's something that often is just taken as a given and we don't hear a lot about the design decisions that are made but designers really are interfaced with the world so it's incredibly important to be able to be transparent about what we were trying to achieve with our particular installation so we've created a video that really sort of details that kind of process we're planning some uh new events some different kinds of talks and some tours with other types of uh emphasis than we might have we might have made previously i'm keen to talk about ink painting as a mode of resistance and resilience for example and really to have a look at edo's globalism its relative globalism as opposed to the feeling that's often often sort of perpetuated that it's an isolated region and it's this sort of peaceful era in fact as i said at the very opening of my presentation there were many famines and uprisings and um earthquakes and all kinds of events that people faced and really one of the questions that haunts me is you know against that kind of a background how was it and why was it that such diversity and rich masses of paintings such as those that have survived into the feinberg collection were created at this time so that's something that i am keen to think about now yeah it's such a shame and so devastating you know that happened to all the art community but it's great to hear that you guys are trying to make the best of it and doing like a zoo with seminars and everything inviting japanese guests and i'm very looking forward to the reopening next question for someone interested in building a collection of traditional japanese art how do you recommend storing and displaying pieces such as hanging scrolls and folding screens great question um so i think um there's there are a lot of different ways of thinking about this and um museum climate control in the west is is one way of thinking about it climate controlled storage is is definitely one philosophy but often um conservatives will say that when it comes to japanese paintings the important thing is not so much that having that sort of state of the art storage of course you want proper and safe storage but the important thing is to maintain um consistency in the levels of humidity and heat and cool uh dryness wetness this this kind of thing so having a consistent atmosphere is the important thing in terms of storage japanese paintings um go go go with their native mode of storage i mean they're creative with these um often custom-made boxes boxes within boxes even that create these incredible microclimates that are really the safest places for for these paintings to to live and even even to travel um screens uh generally to be kept to be stored at least to be stored um folded up and standing so i hope i hope that's helpful and one of the wonderful things about japanese paintings hanging school paintings is how compact they become when they're rolled up and they're placed in their boxes it's it's always shocks my colleagues in european and american art how how many paintings we are able to store in one place well that's an interesting question and answer thank you and the next question is what was the relationship between the creation of poetry and the paintings in the edo period great question great question big question very big question um there are a lot of ways you could go about answering that um i think that one of the really interesting things about that relationship is that japanese poetry and japanese painting so the making of images using making visual images using verbal images and vice versa has an incredibly long history a very well established history and you start to see a really interesting shift in that in the editor period with the advent of the popularity of haiku poetry so so this kind of relationship was established uh you know 11th 12th century perhaps even earlier with the relationship between uh waka or classical poetry and um images that sort of arise out of um the practice of worker poetry but by the time we're moving into the edo period we're starting to see the popularity the very sort of short format haiku poem which i've heard like into the taking of a selfie in some ways that just sort of catching that little moment of something and um that's a very different mode of perception than sort of drawn out storied historied over-determined waka poetry and you start to see a different poetic vocabulary coming out of that new dynamic as long as the haiku poetry the invention of hyperpoetry and its and its practice uh produces a new vocabulary that makes its way back into painting as well so it's not always the case that poems are in literally inscribed on paintings although they often are but one of the very interesting things that i do think happens is you start to see this new vocabulary appearing in japanese paintings even without its uh it's poetic uh even without poetic inscriptions so in the exhibition we have a cycle of twelve paintings by the painter sakai hoitsu which are paintings of the breads and flowers of the twelve months which is a very very old uh classical theme um goes way way back to the 13th century or so when uh established pairings of birds and flowers were were set out in a group of waka poems by fujiwarateka and those birds and those flowers were forever associated with those months going forward but by the time we get to sakai hoitsu painting birds and flowers at 12 months in the 1820s he's not using those birds and flowers anymore he has sort of evolved his vocabulary and his birds and flowers are the birds and flowers that are native to haiku poetry so they're often actually much more familiar and every day and um in that context they're very surprising to come across in painting so they're very fresh and they're in a way you could read them as painted poems as much as you can read them as observations of of the way that plants grow and the way that birds and insects behave is that interesting i've never heard anybody referring it as like selfie in the edo period maybe it was like an instagrammer there's a little bit like instagram it's just that little little moment that you want to convey and then somebody else you know grabs on to it and and you get a sort of whole chain reaction of new images that say something maybe not using words but just using just using images very visual mode of communication that actually makes a lot of sense the next question okay to this day the changing of seasons is still celebrated in japan what was distinctive about how japanese people interacted with nature and why was it a focal topic for japanese artists during this time another great question um i i hesitate to make generalizations about this but uh natural subjects uh it's not just the edo period that is dominated by the painting of natural subjects so that's something that goes back a very very long way and in fact bird and flower painting is one of the three major genres of of east asian painting and the others being landscape and then figures really sort of coming in last i would say which is for a western audience that so that's an interesting and striking phenomenon because often when we think about western painting we're thinking about a very sort of human-centric world where we tend to see especially well in pre-modern painting we we tend to see reflections of what we think we should be seeing uh a sort of um attempt at um representation of photorealistic um depiction whereas that's definitely not the baseline for uh japanese paintings certainly not in the edo period we get multiple sort of roving perspectives and the perspectives that have led people to speculate as to whether they might actually be not human perspectives but um god's eye perspective sometimes or or or you know other other other phenomenon like that to sort of explain why we're not seeing what we think we should see as as as human beings um in terms of why these things might have been painted i especially think about this during the you know the difficulties of the edo period when people were facing incredible hardships and difficulties and i wonder in this moment where we're also sort of uh unusually isolated and restricted whether they may have magnified the meaning of the natural world and man's place within it in some way that was um comforting in a sense of order or some sense of being ordained in some way or other maybe man is seen as just being part of the natural world rather than um in a sort of controlling role that's something that people have speculated about i i don't know how i feel about making a generalization like that but i think more comfortable i would be thinking about the role of auspicious imagery and the role of paintings in bringing auspicious imagery into a space um when you think about folding screens for example they're you they're so enormous and they're used as kind of temporary walls to reconstruct spaces not only reconstruct space but to influence the atmosphere and the environment and change that space for for whatever purpose you might need whether it's a social gathering or a ritual for example and i can't help wondering whether that um that desire to bring in auspiciousness through imagery isn't one of the things that influences the real sort of preponderance that we see in surviving edo painting of what we call natural natural subjects um does that answer the question yes i believe so okay the next question i find the topic professional amateurism interesting does this indicate that painting was already a realm limited to quasi elite experts in the edo era hmm yes i think so i think the idea of the amateur is is very um deceptive from sort of point of view of 21st century um human beings um if we think about where it comes from it's a sort of self-deprecating mode of saying that i'm i'm an amateur because i'm not a professional and that doesn't mean that i'm not good at something it just means that i'm not doing it for a living and so it's coming out of this um ultimately sort of a history that you can chase back to continental china of um political resistance in a way sort of a refusal of the qualified um refined scholar official to serve his government when he deems his government to be corrupt or lacking the move is to withdraw yourself from service to sacrifice your living and to to take yourself away to be a recluse to study to paint to write poetry and to preserve your integrity until the time is such that a righteous ruler returns and you can you can um return to service so that's the sort of the trope that's coming from from china um that's that's where the amateur comes in it's a man who does other things too in terms of um painting in japan that well the situation in china and the situation in edo japan was so vastly different that the big difference is that um japan did not have a an official scholar official class so there were people there were no people who fell into that social class to make that move but there were people who wanted to paint um in this so-called amateur or southern style and so it comes in more as a as an aesthetic mode and we looked at a couple of paintings by uh the origami yokudo and shinkin the father and son team and they're some of the earlier painters and they're perhaps more affiliated with the with the chinese trope of the reclusive ink painting gentleman in that um yokudo was supposed to have given up his official position at the age of about 50. he was a he was a bureaucrat gives it up gives up his salary and takes his two sons and and goes on the road with his chinese zither and places zither and paints in return for uh hospitality so say um so that's that's if you know that's a story we we have to take with perhaps a grain of salt but it's certainly a projection of someone who's behaving very much as a as an amateur gentleman painter but by the time we get to people like yamamoto and um uh you know his his his group um we're seeing that this kind of amateur painting this aesthetic has become so desirable that people want to commission it and people who are not in these circles people who are not living as these so-called gentlemen recluses and so they they want to pay for these paintings and um there's this you know there becomes a space for the for people to become professional amateurs and for sure um they are at this point absolutely specialized um baitsu and um his french door uh supposedly um traded off uh subjects even um baitsu was supposed to do the birds and the flowers and the insects and chicks was supposed to do the landscapes and and again it's it's an apocryphal story probably but the the interesting thing is that you know um a story an anecdote like that was was um perpetuated and has persisted to this day so certainly i think we could we could think about these these painters um as being quasi elite experts as the person asking the question yes thank you for the question that the answer is yes it is i think so yeah very long yes okay the next question does the feinberg collection have any works that had to be moved from a screen because the screen was falling apart for example from screen to hanging scroll not that i'm aware of the one of the remarkable things about the collection is the incredible condition that it is in so um if any of those works have been transplanted across across media it's happened either it's happened before they have come into the collection we do know there's a couple of works in the collection that appear to be prep with sketches or preliminary scratches that were prepared uh prior to a full painting being produced and those sketches have been conserved one of them is by maruyama orcio it's a very large waterfall sketch very lifelike waterfall and it looks from the the type of paper that has been painted on and the joins of the paper the sort of size of the paper that this is actually a sketch that was then um that was later mounted on a two-panel folding screen and had some gold dust added to it as well so there are a few works like that but we haven't had any we don't have we don't know of any works in the collection that um have been trans translated more recently great great yes and as dr walker mentioned in the beginning we have you know borrowed some of the collections for our exhibitions too so you know it's really well known how wonderful their collections are i have to say i remember seeing the um the the portuguese ship arriving um in in the harbor at the japan society during the sugiyama exhibition and it really uh exhibition really really was wonderful okay the next question oh was the peacock painting influenced by western art or culture oh it's a good question um the peacock painting uh because of its subject i guess um to me still looks very exotic but it's often the question that people ask about that um painting is you know is a western influence on it and i think that the answer is is certainly yes in that although we have this very sort of typically traditional um polychrome background with with the amazing peonies very luscious peonies here and then we have this sort of um also very standard rock formation it's got some ink texture strokes and some moss dots and things that are very distinctive to asian painting the peacock itself has a sense of lifelikeness that is uh unusual and um i would think would have been very novel at the time you see it's um its neck for example twists in such a way that it implies a musculature underneath those feathers and a sense of depth as well and i think it's less about capturing the superficial uh the superficial appearance of the bird in massive detail although the painting is very detailed i think it's more about capturing that sense of lifelikeness which comes in with this very sort of delicate balance between between the surface detail and something that's more ineffable something that um is more difficult to describe it's maybe more about the experience of looking what you imagine looking at a real peacock might be like and and having the feeling that that's coming back out of the painting at you in some way um it's a very sort of subtle distinction but there is there's definitely something that's extremely arresting it's very difficult to tell from the from the photograph but actually in the tail feathers around the eyes of each of the peacock feathers there are these little tassels trailing tassels um filaments of feathers that are in gold and that's something you really really see when you get close to the painting and you move um one of the one of the questions earlier on i didn't quite address this was how would you recommend displaying paintings like this and i would say firstly um occasionally so not all the time um they're not meant to be left up for long periods of time but um the other thing is that daylight although it's something that um museums avoid uh because of its it's it's damaging nature moving daylight will change the way you see your painting um in a way that you you just can't really achieve in a gallery setting where um the light is very homogenous and very stable and so if you are moving or if the light is moving and you are face to face with this painting and there's no glass between you and the painting you're going to see things that you definitely will not experience in a photograph in a zoom presentation or even in a museum gallery with the best will in the world um those things are still uh slightly ineffable i suppose that's a perk working in the museum it's a great privilege indeed yeah yes yeah um okay uh i will have to make this the last question where can i get the painting edo and the feinberg collection catalogs oh um that's a great i love that question um they are so the exhibition catalog is available and that that's uh you can order that from yale university press they have a website or um you can go to the other place that we we all know about and it should be available there too the um collection catalog will be available i hope uh at the very end of this year or possibly in january depending on the circumstances but that is uh it's in uh it's actually it's we've just signed off on the final proofs so that is on its way out to us um soon and again it's coming from yale university press so if you're particularly keen you can you can go and take a look there and place your orders there thank you for the question great great well thank you dr sanders for your answers to those questions and thank you again to everyone who has joined us from all over the world and we apologize if you didn't have time to get to your question um and if you're interested in edo period art we encourage you to watch edo avant-garde documentary this is streaming on japan society's website through january and dr sanders will also join the director for q a sessions i believe we will post a link to the event page on the chat and if you have a moment please fill out a short survey about this program you can find the link in the description as well as in the chat we appreciate your feedbacks and i hope to see you again at future japan society programs thank you and good night you