798 District Blog

Date: Apr 29–Aug 31, 2010

Venue: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa, Japan

‘Alternative Humanities’ is a large-scale exhibition devoted to Jan Fabre and Katsura Funakoshi – two of today’s most influential artists.

Born in Belgium, Fabre remains attuned to the religious paintings of 15th and 16th century Flanders, while exposing the contradictions of human existence through pictures drawn with his own blood and sculptures employing stuffed animals, animal bones, and other organic materials.

The figurative sculptures that Funakoshi carves from camphor wood speak eloquently of the interior landscape of people in our times. They also resonate with the complex emotions visible in images of the Kannon Bodhisattva of the late Edo/early Meiji period – a major turning point in Japanese culture.

Gathering some 190 works in a meeting of East and West, past and present, the exhibition will transcend time and place to inquire into state of the human spirit today.

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NEW YORK, NY.- An exceptionally broad range of pre-modern Japanese art will go on view this March during New York City’s Asia Week in two exhibitions held by JADA, the Japanese Art Dealers Association.

The works of art range from a 12th century Buddhist sculpture to satirical ephemera of the 18th century and a four-foot tall model of pagoda once owned by New York railroad baron E. H. Harriman and later in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition, the exhibitions will present a complete suit of armor formerly in the collection of Japan’s leading Hokosawa clan (one of three works of art once in the possession of the millennia-old ruling family to be presented). Also in the exhibitions will be goldleaf screens, sculptures, prints, lacquers, and hanging scrolls that illustrate a reverence for nature as well as those that illuminate Japanese artists’ love of humor.

JADA 2010: An Exhibition by the Japanese Art Dealers Association
Among the earliest works in JADA 2010, an episodic survey of traditional Japanese art, is a Standing Jizō Bosatsu (Skt. Ksitigarbha), a wood sculpture that dates from the Heian period, 12th century. The delicate hands, facial features, and the shallow carving of the drapery mark this work as stylistically related to the work of Jōchō, whose famous image of the Buddha Amida is worshipped at the temple Byōdō’in near Kyoto. Jizō, a merciful protector of abandoned souls, appears again in a 16th or 17th century elaborate, intact traveling shrine. Decorated with a robe with cut gold, the figure holds both a crystal jewel and staff, Jizō stands on a lotus and cloud base within a shrine that features interior gilding.

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