Just Published: Imagined Neighbors
Noro Kaiseki (1747–1828) / Landscape, Japan, Edo period, 1823, handscroll, ink and light color on paper, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art Collection, The Mary and Cheney Cowles Collection, Gift of Mary and Cheney Cowles, F2022.2.43a–c
Did you ever dream about a place you’ve never been to? Delve into the ways Japanese artists imagined China, and explore complex transregional relationships with our newest publication from the Freer Occasional Papers series, Imagined Neighbors: Visions of China in Japanese Art 1680–1980. Frank Feltens, our curator of Japanese art, edited this volume, with contributions by art historians Paul Berry and Michiyo Morioka.
In this new publication, the authors trace Japanese artists’ changing perceptions of China, both as a real place and as an imagined promised land. Japanese literati painting, a genre comprising artists who sought inspiration from the newest importations of Chinese arts and culture, has long been overlooked by Western collectors—including museum founder Charles Lang Freer. Imagined Neighbors challenges the established narrative of an exclusively Western-inspired modern Japan by offering a nuanced approach to understanding the country’s history and its transition to a modern nation-state.
Five intriguing themes organize this catalogue: reclusion, friendship, obsessions, heroes, and philosophies. The selected works range from the late seventeenth century, Japan’s period of seclusion, to after the mid-nineteenth century, its period of modernization. Across this time span, you’ll encounter literati painters such as Gion Nankai (1676–1751), Sakaki Hyakusen (1697–1752), Yosa Buson (1716–1784), Ike Taiga (1723–1776), and Aoki Mokubei (1767–1833). This book also considers artists outside the literati tradition, such as Hashimoto Kansetsu (1883–1945) and Kosugi Hōan (1881–1964).
Learn more about Imagined Neighbors.
An exhibition featuring these works was on view from March 16 through September 15, 2024.
Want to see these dynamics for yourself? Directly compare paintings by Chinese and Japanese literati through our digital interactive. We provide details about each work so you can make connections as you shift back and forth between images.
-
Imagined Neighbors: Japanese Visions of China, 1680–1980
View the Exhibition(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.
