Exhibition Report: Do Ho Suh “Passage/s”

I went to a gallery, Victoria Miro, to see Do Ho Suh’s art installation entitled “Passage/s.” As this exhibition already ended in the middle of March, I want to write a brief report for those who have missed it. Do Ho Suh is a Korean artist (mainly sculpture and instillation) based in London, New York...

Lawrence Alma-Tadema

In the early summer in London, Leighton House Museum will hold an exhibition of the works of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, entitled “Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity,”( from 7th of July,); and also this year, the British Museum will hold an exhibition of artworks by a Japanese artist, Hokusai Katsushika, entitled “Hokusai Beyond the Great Wave,” (from 25th of...

Exhibition Report and thought : Egon Schiele

The Somerset house has been holding an exciting exhibition, called “Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude.” (from 23rd October 2014 to 18th January 2015) I was initially composing a blog-post in relation to Aubrey Beardsley, but after the exhibition of Schiele, I could not avoid seeing similarities between the works of the two artists, especially with...

The Woman with “No Background” : Mary Cassatt

Women with exotic decorations such as kimono and fans can often be seen in the nineteenth century paintings. Yet little is known about female painters who employ aspects of Japanese arts into their works. Rebecca Solomon, the elder sister of Simon Solomon (I introduced him in the previous post), would be one of the earliest...

“Changes” : Simeon Solomon and Japonism

This is my hypothesis that Japonism and the cultivation of individual autonomy such as that of sexuality after the 1860s could be possibly linked. About a century later when David Bowie created the persona “Ziggy Stardust,” it could have been inevitable that he choose to wear oriental clothing such as the eccentric stage costume designed...

Exhibition Report: Boro

"Oh mother” said Maggie, in a vehemently cross tone, “I don't want to do my patchwork.” “What! Not your pretty patchwork, to make a counterpane for your aunt Glegg?” “It’s foolish work,” said Maggie, with a toss of her mane,--“tearing things to pieces to sew ‘em together again. And I don’t want to do anything...

“Space Oddity”

In this first discussion, I would like to briefly show the delineation of depth “perspective” in western paintings and Japanese prints: Western paintings traditionally prioritize creation of a three-dimensional space using perspective technique. The appreciation of paintings relied on the way in which the painters created a three-dimensional illusion in two dimensional space, without drawing...

To Begin with…

Japonism, coined by French art critic and writer Philippe Burty in 1872, is one of the most interesting western art movements in the second half of the nineteenth century. But why Japan? In 1858, in signing of the Kanagawa Treaty, the country opened up to international trade, after the period of national isolation policy of...