Donald Keene Center Special Lecture Series: First, Foremost and Famously Accused: An Etymology of the Decorative in Japanese Art

December 2, 2004

Donald Keene Center Special Lecture Series: First, Foremost and Famously Accused: An Etymology of the Decorative in Japanese Art
Barbara Ford (Curator, Department of Asian Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Dismissed as dazzling to the eye but lacking in truth by eleventh-century Chinese critics and adulated for exemplary fidelity to nature by new admirers in nineteenth-century Europe and America, the decorative character of Japanese art is invariably if variously noted. More recently the Japanese art historian Tsuji Nobuo championed the Japanese propensity toward decoration, dubbing it Kazari, an ancient Japanese term for adornment. His work and others’ highlight the diversity and pervasiveness of decorative expression in Japan and focus on cultural underpinnings peculiar to Japan, studies that culminated in the exhibition “Kazari” held at the Japan Society and the British Museum in 2002. To date, less attention has been given to more distant but profound roots of decorative art in Buddhist practice based on the notion of shôgon that will be explored in this talk.