This exhibition explores the connoisseurs, collectors, and dealers of Asian Art in France from 1750 to 1939. Works in the exhibition come from a multitude of sources, including objects from the royal collections of Louis XV and Marie-Antoinette to the commercial and scientific collecting done in Asia from the 1850s to the 1930s. There is also a section of the craze for all things Japanese, that emerged in France, Japonism, in the late 19th century. Over 300 works, including lacquers, porcelains, ivories, bronzes, screens, prints and illustrated books, silk paintings, and theatre masks, explore ..read more

Over the winter, the Guimet Museum, in Paris, is presenting the photographic project Hakanai Sonzai, which means in Japanese ‘I feel like an ephemeral creature myself’. Through the use of colour portraits, landscapes, and black and white still lifes resembling prints, Pierre-Elie de Pibrac recounts the feeling of impermanence that permeates Japanese culture. Continuing anthropological and social photographic work initiated in 2016 in Cuba, Pierre-Elie de Pibrac (b 1983) travelled across Japan between December 2019 and August 2020 to produce the Hakanai Sonzai series. During this immersive inve ..read more

This third chapter from the series of exhibitions called Liquid Frontiers and Entangled Worlds is part of a composite research programme taking place at MAO between 2023 and 2024, which seeks to analyse the artistic trajectories and cultural dynamics that have characterised exchange between Asia and Europe over the centuries. Eurasian Traditions highlights the critical role of Asia and the Mediterranean as a fulcrum of cross-cultural interaction and as site of connection, negotiation and constant re-emergence. This exploration of cultural translation, transposition, and interpretation is done ..read more

The act of coming together to partake of a meal is a practice shared by all cultures. Food defines us – we are what we eat. Dining with the Sultan is the first exhibition to present Islamic art in the context of its associated culinary traditions. This novel exhibition includes over 250 works of art related to the sourcing, preparation, serving, and consumption of food, from 30 public and private collections in the US, Europe, and the Middle East. The catalogue has been arranged like a menu for an elaborate feast, divided into multiple courses or sections with long and short essays a ..read more

Toshiko Takaezu (1922-2011) was a technically masterful and innovative artist best known for her ceramic sculptures, which she treated as abstract paintings in the round. Her gestural style, distinctive palettes, and complex layering of glazes align with the practices of Abstract Expressionists who were her contemporaries. Yet Takaezu added an element of chance as her pieces revealed their final colours only after firing. She often showed her ceramics in groups, sometimes with her equally innovative paintings and textiles, in carefully constructed arrangements that responded to their environme ..read more

Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan celebrates the first 50 years of the Japanese Art Society of America (JASA). Founded by a small group of print collectors in New York in 1973 as the Ukiyo-e Society of America, JASA has expanded into a national and international organisation with the mission to promote the study and appreciation of Japanese art broadly through public programmes, guided collections visits, and a peer-reviewed journal Impressions. The Meiji era, which lasted from 1868 until 1912, was a tumultuous period of unprecedented cultural and technological transformation. the fall of ..read more

This Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) exhibition, which is a version of the exhibition that originated at the British Museum in 2017, is now on show in California at the Bowers Museum. The highlight of the show is, of course, the print popularly called The Great Wave (Under the Wave Off Kanagawa). However, this exhibition offers much more than a chance to see the iconic prints by Hokusai that are instantly recognised around the world and have appeared on everything from cushions to pencil cases. They are also as depicted in living art – as seen in the rice paddy visual creations (tombo) that are ..read more

The show features works in porcelain and stoneware made by the Kyoto-based studio of Seifu Yohei from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. These works by members of the Seifu family reflect the Kyoto ceramic culture, in the former capital of Japan. The artists’ engagement with Chinese forms and techniques showcased an alternative way to bring Japanese porcelain into the modern era at a time when Western cultures were leaving a major mark in Japan. The exhibition is the first in North America to comprehensively examine the studio’s output from the time of its founder, Seifu Yohei I (1801-1861 ..read more

Exploring the links between contemporary and traditional South Asian miniature painting and South Asian manuscripts, Beyond the Page at MK Gallery in the UK is showing 180 works by artists from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia, Netherlands, UK and the US. Artists from different generations working in dialogue with the miniature tradition in the exhibition include Hamra Abbas, David Alesworth, Nandalal Bose, Noor Ali Chagani, Lubna Chowdhary, Adbur Rahman Chughtai, Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin, N S Harsha, Howard Hodgkin, Ali Kazim, Bhupen Khakhar, Jess MacNeil, Imran Qureshi, Nusra La ..read more

This exhibition examines Korean contemporary art after 1989 featuring 28 South Korean artists all born between 1960 and 1986. The rise in popularity of Korean culture, through film, dramas and pop music has also driven an interest in the country’s contemporary and modern art with a clutch of exhibitions opening on contemporary Korean art and culture in the West in last few years. The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 not only explores South Korea’s growing influence in ‘cultural diplomacy’ and the fascination of the rest of the world with its rapid rise as being one of the leading trendsett ..read more