Culture
The Bride of Boneyard Kitaro
When Nunoe’s uncle told the family he’d found a match for her in a 39 year-old veteran who’d lost his left arm in the war and wrote comic books in Tokyo, Nunoe’s father rubbed his chin and said “make it happen.”
Read MoreThe Lists of a Lady-in-Waiting
A thousand years ago a lady-in-waiting in the imperial court at Heian Kyo (modern-day Kyoto) dipped her brush into the well of her inkstone and watched the bristles swell with ink. She lowered the brush onto the paper spread in front of her and moved her hand rapidly…
Read MoreJapanese Tattoo
I had become entranced with irezumi, more elegantly known as hori-mono, the Japanese tattoo. Yet I had known, from its first vague awakening, that my interest somehow lay deeper than my skin…
Read MoreThe Optimistic Vision of Kitagawa Fram and the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale
The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in the mountainous Niigata region of Japan has become a model, yet an underappreciated one, for expansive social art practices.
Read MoreMeeting With Sanshin: An Interview with Hiah Park, Lover of the Mountain God
Manshin is a title of respect identifying a mudang, a female Korean shaman. For centuries manshin had been openly persecuted, their practices disrupted and shrines destroyed, their artistry desecrated to entertainment…
Read MoreKim Keumhwa’s Everyday Shamanism
Kim Keumhwa, Korea’s renowned charismatic naramansin, “national” shaman, is already awake…preparing to greet the spirits lodged in her small sindang (spirits’ shrine room) next to her bedroom.
Read MoreKaneko Jun: Collaborations with Space
Taking ceramic art into sculptural-pictorial realms, Kaneko Jun is an artist who straddles cultures and in a sense transforms them with his borderless art.
Read MoreThe Nature and Experience of Sumi Arts
“The sense of liberation among participants is almost palpable, there are no expectations, no ‘shoulds,’ no senses of inferiority, the baseline for everyone is the same.”
Read MoreWomen In-Between: Asian Women Artists 1984-2012
What does it mean to connect the fifty women artists of sixteen different Asian countries and regions represented in this exhibition by calling them “Women In-Between”?
Read MoreAn Aesthetic for Toys
If you visit Japan, you are likely to get the feeling the country is obsessed with characters and toys: children and adults play video games on trains, there seems to be a character mascot for every single product, and a Murakami Takashi toy/sculpture may be exhibiting at the local museum. Toys are everywhere.
Read MoreZen & the Art of Rejuvenation
Taizo-in launched its groundbreaking ‘Fusuma-e Project’ in the spring of 2011. The Zen temple is commissioning a young, unknown Kyoto-based artist to compose large sumi-e ink paintings on 64 new sliding doors, or fusuma…
Read MoreThe Epic of Tea: Tea Ceremony as the Mythological Journey of the Hero
TEA
BY DANIEL R. KANE
“Why do you study Tea?” The usual answers perhaps are enough: “It is an aesthetic exercise; a Zen discipline; a unique means of social interaction.” Yet, I have wondered if there might be some other attraction to Tea; something not so apparent…
Read MoreBlessings of the Dragon Gods
The moves of a master calligrapher resemble those of a dragon in flight. The calligraphy is so alive and vigorous that it seems to contain a dragon’s spirit flowing in the brush strokes…
Read MoreHealing Meditation with Shakuhachi
Shakuhachi is often referred to as the “sound of nature.” In Japan, its “original music”(honkyoku) is filled with echoes of forest and sky…
Read MoreHeart
The core of kokoro (the heart) is the search for wa (peace or harmony); this search manifests itself in all areas of life…
Read MoreNature and Culture in Japan
Japanese cultural tradition hides a vast storehouse of notions and practices that may be helpful in establishing a culturally-grounded eco-philosophy…
Read MoreThe Hollow Staff: Western Music and the Silk Road
The Silk Road would have been full of musicians…musicians from a dozen distinct traditions traveling in the same caravans, meeting around the same fires. What did they say to one another when they met…?
Read MoreGeisha Tradition
Hannari — Geisha Modern is a documentary film about the lives and arts of geisha in contemporary Kyoto filmed from the perspective of a Japanese woman.
Read MoreMetabolic Syndrome
These lucid essays discuss Japanese architecture in the aftermath of the Bubble.
Read MoreLanguage goes Two Ways
Language goes two ways: it enables us to have a small window onto an independently existing world, but it also shapes — via its very structures and vocabularies — how we see that world.
Read MoreFujiko Hemming, Deaf Pianist
After Toako showed her how to decipher the squiggles on the scores, Fujiko was enchanted with the magic she could conjure, but she soon shriveled under her mother’s blistering criticism and the relentless repetition…
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