Exhibitions

In the year 1600 a Dutch boat was swept onto the coast at Kyushu, with a British navigator named William Adams (d. 1620) on board. Adams remained in Japan as adviser to the Shogun in regard to trade with the West.

This exhibition deals with the boundary between realistic and abstract art in modern Japanese prints.

This year, Japan celebrates four hundred years since the beginning of the Edo era.

Since the dawn of history, Japanese craftsmen and artists have been creating items in a variety of techniques such as ceramic, lacquer, woodcarving, painting, textile dyeing and metalwork, skillfully embellished with their preferred decorative motifs (soshoku no shudai).

Mako Idemitsu (b.1940) is a pioneering video artist, one of the most outstanding in this field in Japan today.

The cries of battle, the neighing horses on the battlefield, and the clanging of swords striking against each other have long faded away. But the sword is one of the three most sacred symbols of the Shinto belief, which is why it holds a special place in Japanese culture.

In 1959, Sam and Betty Dubiner visited Japan for the first time. During that visit they became enchanted by the art and culture that they saw in museums and galleries, and they were chiefly attracted to the works of the artist-poet Yosa no Buson (1716-1784).

Pictures of birds and flowers - in Japanese kacho-e or kacho-ga - were particular favourites of the traditional Japanese artists. Kacho-e is one of the three pictorial motifs deriving from the Chinese classification system.

In ancient Japan, artists, poets and monks were accustomed to travelling about the countryside and recording their experiences in paintings and poems.