Hinges: Sakaki Hyakusen and the Birth of Nanga Painting is the first US exhibition focusing on the art of Sakaki Hyakusen (1697-1752), the founding father of the Nanga school of painting in Japan. The exhibition, together with a fully illustrated catalog and extensive public programs, will demonstrate Hyakusen's pivotal role as a key figure in the transformation of Japanese painting of the eighteenth century. Highlighting the recent conservation of Mountain Landscape, a rare pair of six-panel landscape screens by Hyakusen, alongside Chinese landscape paintings by traditional masters and works by influential Nanga school painters, the exhibition promises to add significantly to public understanding of the art of conservation and important crosscultural and artistic connections emerging in Japan in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With an introductory essay by curator Julia M. White, the fully illustrated catalog will include approximately fifty images, and three additional essays. A special chapter on conservation techniques and best practices in East Asian painting adds essential information on a contemporary area of interest.

Published in association with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

Exhibition dates:
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA): October 2, 2019-February 2, 2020
About the Author:

Julia M. White is senior curator for Asian art at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She has organized numerous exhibitions at BAMPFA, including Repentant Monk: Illusion and Disillusion in the Art of Chen Hongshou (2017), and in her previous roles as curator at the Honolulu Academy of Art and the Denver Art Museum.

Felice Fischer is the Luther W. Brady Curator of Japanese Art and senior curator of East Asian art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she has organized groundbreaking exhibitions of Japanese art including Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran: Japanese Masters of the Brush (2007) and Ink and Gold: Art of the Kano (2015). In 2013 she received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays, from the Emperor of Japan for achievement in cultural exchange.

Kyoko Kinoshita is professor of Japanese art history at Tama Art University in Tokyo. She is project associate curator of Japanese art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she has collaborated with Felice Fischer on a number of exhibitions and catalogues, including Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran: Japanese Masters of the Brush (2007).

Tomokatsu Kawazu is president and head conservator of Studio Sogendo. He has over twenty years' experience in restoration, conservation, and traditional mounting of Asian paintings, including National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties. He received his education and conservation training in Japan, working for eight years at Handa Kyuseido Co. Ltd., where he was assigned to the branch studio at the Tokyo National Museum.