Celebrating Asian Art

Earthly Agendas

The exhibition, Earthly Agendas, is a compilation primarily of Chinese and Japanese paintings and ceramics with some metalware included, a good number of which celebrate the Year of the Ox. The show's title was inspired by images of beasts of burden and animals of the wild, by landscape paintings, Japanese Neolithic pottery and the wares of Chinese kilns represented in the exhibition. In its own way each artistic endeavor is deeply rooted in terra firma, in the earth’s soil, sand, loam and terrain, while each also went beyond, anticipating the future of the art.

Online 11 March – 31 May 2021

Wintertide

The seasons during this year of the pandemic seem, for us, to have lost their identity. Spring, summer and fall crawled by without their usual impact, or did they race by? Time itself has been hard to grasp, measure, corral, and then it is gone. Our minds and feelings have been, and are, so otherwise occupied that the depths and nuances of the seasons, their gifts and challenges, have evaded us. Wintertide is our attempt to awaken ourselves to the magic of the current season. Our former exhibitions celebrating winter—Let it Snow and The Silent Season—were gatherings of Chinese and Japanese paintings produced under the spell of a season that spans an old year and a new, landscape on the one hand caught in a straitjacket of ice and snow, as pine and bamboo struggle to be seen and plum blossoms open to the future. In the present exhibition paintings inspired by biting winds, sleet and snow are joined by other works of art that suggest through their color a season cloaked in white. The final work in the exhibition is a painting by Suda Kokuta, a portrait of the Japanese character ichi or, in Chinese, yi, “one,” the white plain, a clean slate, representing for us here the first month of a New Year, where our hopes for better times reside.