Imagined Neighbors: Visions of China in Japanese Art 1680–1980

Title: Imagined Neighbors: Visions of China in Japanese Art 1680–1980
Author List: Frank Feltens (ed.); with contributions by Paul Berry, Michiyo Morioka
Publisher: National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution; in association with Hirmer Publishers
Publication Date: September 19, 2024 (forthcoming)
Publication Type: book
Format: print (hardcover)
Pages: 304
Illustrations: 125
ISBN: 9783777442662
Collection Area(s): Japanese Art
Imagined Neighbors book cover. Cover image: Painting of forested hills next to a body of pale blue water. The trees are formed through delicate brushstrokes and dots of pale and deep green. A tiny figure dressed in white sits in a boat by the shore. Two other figures lounge under a gazebo by the water. In the bottom right corner the title appears in white font:
Description:

Imagined Neighbors: Visions of China in Japanese Art examines Japanese artistic understanding of China from the late 1600s, Japan’s period of seclusion, to its age of modernization after the mid-nineteenth century. It focuses on ways Japanese painters from the late 1600s to the twentieth century pictured China, both as a real place and as an imagined promised land. It features three essays by renowned Japanese art historians in addition to more than fifty catalog entries highlighting unusual artworks revealing Japanese artists’ complex responses to Chinese art, history, and culture. Imagined Neighbors challenges the established narrative of an exclusively Western-inspired modern Japan by offering a more nuanced approach to understanding the country’s struggle with reconciling the old with the new as it reinvented itself into a modern nation-state.

  • A mountainous landscape, painted in ink in a softly abstracted style and accented with muted blue and red hues.

    Imagined Neighbors: Japanese Visions of China, 1680–1980

    March 16–September 15, 2024

    Imagined Neighbors presents Japanese artworks from the Mary and Cheney Cowles Collection, given to the National Museum of Asian Art between 2018 and 2022. The paintings and calligraphy in this exhibition fuse reality with imagination and remain important to understanding the continuing, complex engagement of Japanese artists with China, to them both a real and an imagined place.

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