Occasional Papers

For more than six decades, the Freer Occasional Papers series has provided a forum for peer-reviewed scholarly works on a wide range of topics in Asian, ancient Near Eastern, Islamic, and American art related to the collections of the National Museum of Asian Art. The format of the Freer Occasional Papers has varied according to subject and includes monographs, multiauthored treatments of a theme or material, and studies in conservation and scientific research. The original print editions of volumes published before 2008 are now available open access as PDFs.

For inquiries, please contact FreerResearchCenter@si.edu.

New Publication

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

Author List: Frank Feltens (ed.)
Publisher: National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution; in association with Hirmer Publishers
Publication Date: September 19, 2024

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.

Publication Details

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:

cover of Dragon's Roar - four qin zithers on a white background

Dragon’s Roar: Chinese Literati Musical Instruments in the Freer and Sackler Collections

Author List: Yang Yuanzheng
Publisher: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, in association with Hirmer Verlag
Publication Date: October 2020

Occasional Papers

New Publication

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

Dragon’s Roar: Chinese Literati Musical Instruments in the Freer and Sackler Collections

Performing Indonesia

Time and Place Are Nonsense: The Films of Seijun Suzuki

The Look of the Book: Manuscript Production in Shiraz, 1303–1452

James McNeill Whistler in Context Essays from the Whistler Centenary Symposium, University of Glasgow, 2003

Studies Using Scientific Methods: Pigments in Later Japanese Paintings

A Freer Stela Reconsidered

The Jesuits and the Grand Mogul: Renaissance Art at the Imperial Court of India, 1580–1630

Dara-Shikoh Shooting Nilgais: Hunt and Landscape in Mughal Painting

Two Early Chinese Bronze Weapons with Meteoritic Iron Blades

Li Ti

Calligraphers and Painters: A Treatise by Qādī Ahmad, Son of Mir-Munshī, circa A.H. 1015/A.D. 1606

The Lohans and a Bridge to Heaven

Abstracts of Technical Studies in Art and Archaeology, 1943–1952

Fourteenth-Century Blue-and-White: A Group of Chinese Porcelains in the Topkapu Sarayi Müzesi, Istanbul

A Royal Head from Ancient Egypt

The Unicorn

James McNeill Whistler: A Biographical Outline Illustrated from the Collections of the Freer Gallery of Art

Paintings, Pastels, Drawings, Prints, and Copper Plates by and Attributed to American and European Artists, Together with a List of Original Whistleriana in the Freer Gallery of Art

The Grand Empress Dowager Wên Ming and the Northern Wei Necropolis at Fang Shan