Description
Sesson Shūkei (ca. 1492–1577) stands out as an anomaly in the history of Japanese art. Among the vast canon of Japanese ink painting, Sesson departed from convention. Inspired by the untamed landscape of the eastern regions of Japan, Sesson led a peripatetic existence caused by a lifetime of warfare and upheaval—yet he created some of the most visually striking images in the history of Japanese ink painting. Drawing on new art historical and sociological insights into Japan's 16th century, Sesson Shūkei: A Zen Monk-Painter in Medieval Japan explores new ways of understanding and interpreting one of Japan's greatest painters and the world that shaped him.
Museum Story
The National Museum of Asian Art is a global resource for understanding Asian arts, cultures, and societies and their intersection with the United States. Opened in 1923 as the country's first national art museum, it now stewards one of the world's best collections of Asian art, which date from antiquity to the present, from China, Japan, Korea, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Ancient Near East, and the Islamic world (including Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa). The museum also holds an important array of 19th- and early 20th-century American art of the Aesthetic Movement.
Details
- Written by Frank Feltens, the Japan Foundation Assistant Curator of Japanese Art at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art
- Hardcover
- 319 pages
- Approximately 125 color illustrations
- 11" x 10"
