Kaikodo Journal XX Autumn 2001

Worlds of Wonder

Corresponding to the exhibition held between September 15 and October 15, 2001. 49 Chinese, Korean and Japanese paintings; 41 Chinese objects (90 color plates). Preface by Howard Rogers. 379 pages.
Includes the essays:
Wai-kam Ho:
    “The Trubner Stele”
Chih-hung Yen:
    “Representations of the Bhaisajyaguru
    Sutra at Tun-huang”
Howard Rogers:
    “Third Man Theory”
Patricia J. Graham:
    “Okubo Shibutsu, Vagabond Poet of Edo,
    and His Nanga Painter-friends”

This issue of the Kaikodo Journal corresponds 
to a sale exhibition held in our gallery in New 
York between September 15 and October 15, 
2001. The journal begins with a tribute to the extraordinary 
Maria-Gaetana (Tana) Matisse by her friend and specialist and dealer supreme of old European masterworks, Deborah Gage.  The second section consists of tributes to the sadly demolished Buddhas 
of Bamiyan. The first is by Roya Tsuchiya, daughter of the 
art-historian Haruko Tsuchiya, a specialist in the 
art of northern India and Central Asia, and 
Ahmad Ali Motamedi, former director of the 
Archaeological Museum in Kabul. Roya was 
born in Afghanistan and, given the interests of 
her parents, grew up in close proximity to the 
monuments others of us have admired only in 
photographs and slides. The second is by the world-renowned photographers John Bigelow Taylor and 
Dianne Dubler, who count among their numerous projects photography for Kaikodo Journal.  Roya, 
Dianne, and John met the Buddhas of Bamiyan 
during approximately the same period of time, 
and share here 
their first-hand experiences at the site.

Four essays are included in this issue of the journals. First is that by Wai-kam Ho, notable for being one of very few essays that 
have .been published by one of the foremost 
scholars of our day. Member of the last 
generation to receive a traditional classical 
education at the National University in Beijing, 
Wai-kam subsequently did graduate work in 
art-history and religious art at Harvard 
University before joining Director Sherman E. 
Lee at the Cleveland Museum of Art as Curator 
of Chinese Art and participating in the glorious 
period during which the museum acquired many 
of the Asian works of art that are now famed throughout the world. Subsequently brought by 
Director Marc F Wilson to the Nelson-Atkins 
Museum of Art in Kansas City, Wai-kam made 
significant contributions to that institution as 
well, most notably the seminal exhibition The 
Century of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1555-1636) .The essay by 
Wai- kam Ho offered here is concerned with 
connoisseurship at its deepest and most basic 
level. Readers should take special note of the range of disciplines brought to bear on the subject, a stele in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, for the procedures followed are as important to our education as the conclusions reached in the essay.

The second essay if by Professor Chih-hung Yen, a specialist in Buddhist art who, at the time of this journal’s publication, was assistant professor in the graduate school at National Chi-nan University and a research fellow at the Academia Sinica.  In this essay Professor Yen traces the evolution of a particular theme—representations of the Pure Crystal Realm of the Medicine Buddha—in the cave paintings at Dunhuang. 

Howard Rogers’s essay is concerned with the painting known as “The Riverbank” and attributed to the 10th-century artist Dong Yuan, in an attempt to identify the subject of the painting then to discuss the possible implications of that identification.

The final essay is by Dr. Patricia Graham, a well-known scholar of and writer on Japanese art-history. In her article she views Japanese 
literati culture from an unusual 
viewpoint, that of the Chinese-style poetry 
composed by Okubo Shibutsu for paintings done 
by his Nanga painter-friends, leading to greater 
illumination of the web of ideals, cultural 
assumptions, and needs that bound these talents 
together.