japan

The first edition of this book was published five months before the writer, Lafcadio Hearn’s, death in September 1904. Kwaidan was part of a group of publications about the culture of Japan that began to appear in the West in the late 19th century. These publications helped to introduce the riches of Japanese aesthetic and artistic heritage to artists and designers in the United States and Europe and fueled public interest in all things Japanese.

Kinrande (金襴手) refers to a Chinese porcelain known as “gold brocade type,” which was highly prized by Japanese tea masters and collectors. Today, many fine examples of this type of ware are found in private Japanese collections. This book remains the only important English-language work on this porcelain type.

The author of this booklet, Dr. Robert Miller Spaulding, Jr., aka “Dr. Bob,” was a 90-year-old professor of Japanese history at Oklahoma State University. Originally from Alabama and Mississippi, he briefly served as an Army Officer (like the librarian at the National Postal Museum, where this book is housed). The Army sent him to school to learn Japanese, and then sent him to Japan in 1946. Dr. Spaulding published many professional books on Japanese history. He was also a philatelist, and was an active member of The International Society for Japanese Philately.

Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831-1889) is considered to be an important successor to artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Kyōsai was also Japan’s first political caricaturist. He was imprisoned a number of times by the shogunate for his disrespectful art. When not painting caricatures he often chose subjects from folklore, nature, religion, and the Nô drama. Harold Stern, former director of the Freer Gallery of Art, proposed mounting the first major exhibition of Kyōsai’s work but that plan was dropped with Stern’s untimely death in 1976.

The late-16th century was the golden age of Japanese screen painting, both literally and figuratively. The Momoyama period (1573-1615) was also an age of monumental architecture, with feudal lords building forts and castles of a size unprecedented in Japan. The great masters of the art of screen painting who were called upon to decorate the interiors of these large buildings filled them with screens of bold and innovative aesthetics, some with gold leaf covering their entire surfaces. Japan had a well-established tradition of incorporating gold leaf into art and decorative work.

Dejima, or Deshima, was a small fan-shaped artificial island in the bay of Nagasaki, Japan. During the Edo period (1615-1868), Dejima was the only place in which foreign traders were allowed to conduct business with Japan. It was originally built for Portuguese traders but was later used by the Dutch East India Company. In 1858, when Japan concluded the Treaty of Kanagawa with the United States, Dejima’s role as the only port of entry for the West was over. The island was expanded by reclaiming land, and it was merged into Nagasaki, thus obscuring the island’s original borders.

"'Yumechigae.' According to the dictionary, this means: A charm to divert misfortune after experiencing a nightmare." Thus opens the essay to this exquisite exhibition catalog for a solo show of Japanese artist Tabaimo’s work at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, in the summer of 2003. Tabaimo is a contemporary Japanese artist whose immersive video installations evoke Japanese woodblock prints (Ukiyo-e), manga, and anime to express the anxieties underpinning Japanese society in an age of globalization.

This 50-page book is copy number 160 of only 500 in a limited-edition printing. Number six of the Pacific History Series, this book's cover features a handsome 1867 image of the wooden side-paddle wheel steamer "China." This ship was manufactured to transport mail across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Japan. One side effect of the California Gold Rush was the increase of California's commercial ties with Asia.

This hardcover catalog features work from Yayoi Kusama’s critically acclaimed 2013 solo exhibition at David Zwirner, a celebrated contemporary art gallery in London. The exhibit marked the debut of the artist’s large-scale square-format acrylic on canvas paintings, which demonstrate her supreme talent as a colorist. This book features stunning, full color plates of this series of brightly colored paintings.

An attractive, slipcased catalog for a collaborative exhibition of sculptor Isamu Noguchi, painter Genichiro Inokuma, and designer Issey Miyake at the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA), Japan, highlighting the mutual influence of the three friends and their hybrid Japanese and American cultures.

Shunkyū Higi Zukan [勝川春章肉筆春宮秘戯図巻 (Secret erotic play)] is a set of erotic paintings produced by Katsushika Shunshō (1726-1793), one of the most important ukiyo-e painters of the Edo period (1600-1868).