Boston, MA

Here’s another awesome suggestion from my friend at Asian Boston Magazine for those of you who like to do the “finer” cultural things in life.

A message from our friends at the MFA…

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston celebrates Japanese art this summer and fall with three exciting exhibitions:

Contemporary Outlook: Japan (July 2, 2007 – February 10, 2008) This exhibition features a selection of about 30 works created by Japanese artists between World War II and the present. Spanning a variety of media, by artists such as Takashi Murakami and Yayoi Kusama, many of the works reflect the presence in Japan society of kawaii, or the quality of being “cute.” Western styles such as pop, minimalism, and feminist art are visible in the works, but the results are also uniquely Japanese in interests and approach. Contemporary Outlook:Japan highlights a particularly fertile period of artistic experimentation in Japan, one that generated a unique blend of ideas
and forms from East and West.

Drama and Desire: Japanese Paintings from the Floating World 1690-1850 (August 28 – December 16, 2007) Drama and Desire explores the “floating world” of Edo-period Japan – a place of fantasy, where drama and desire unfolded in the theaters and brothels of the region’s pleasure districts. It was here that the ukiyo-e painting was born, now the subject of this landmark, MFA-organized exhibition. Drama and Desire will include more than 80 works by such artists as Hokusai, Moronobu, Kiyonaga and Utamaro, showcased in the screens, scrolls, banners and theatrical signboards they created. The exhibition marks the first viewing in Boston since the 1890s of the Museum’s vast ukiyo-e collection (see attached available images).

Arts of Japan: The John C. Weber Collection (September 22, 2007 – January 13, 2008 ): This exhibition, from one of the finest private holdings of Japanese art outside Japan, is the largest loan of its kind ever shown at the MFA, and will give visitors the chance to experience aspects of classic Japanese art not usually accessible to American museum-goers. Arts of Japan, which features approximately eighty masterworks ranging in date from the early twelfth to the mid-twentieth century, encompasses paintings in both scroll and screen format, lacquers, textiles, and ceramics. The exhibition complements
Drama and Desire, and includes some ukiyo-e masterworks, but will also feature works not in the Museum’s collection including men’s and women’s garments, sacred and secular calligraphy, tea ceramics and lacquers.

Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, MFA, Japanese art, Japanese exhibition