19 March – June, 2026
There are times when one is motivated or maybe even compelled to look back, back to where narratives originate and where the substance of memories reside. An escape from the present. Ignoring, sidestepping, eluding the future. We at Kaikodo have been looking back, back to when Howard’s impossible vision became possible through his grit and determination, when the impossible dream became Kaikodo. Looking back to when his indomitable spirit grew the company and grew it some more and looking back to the many limbs he ventured out on—-going out on a limb for him was like breathing—something natural and necessary. Dealer, teacher, scholar; he took pride especially in whatever scholarly contributions he had made to our field. It was natural and appropriate then that he mustered the energy and resolve, after he had lost use of his left hand, to somehow prop up his iPhone and with one finger of his right hand pick out letters one by one, writing a review of an exhibition we had just seen at the Huntington Art Museum, the last he would see. And despite his diminished physical capabilities, he wrote that review as he had written everything throughout the decades…..the first word first, followed by all the others until the last, no revisions, no alterations, no adjustments. His ability to write in such a way had always been a source of mystery and awe and was so until the very end. The review which he titled The Dimensions of “Without Us” reflected his profound understanding and appreciation of the stunning display of diaphanous paintings by our dear friend, the artist Wang Mansheng. Mansheng had created an environment in the Huntington which one was loathed to leave and which was a memory that Howard could not look back upon long enough. Howard’s review is included here as the first entry of our exhibition.
Exhibition –
Looking back as we prepared for this exhibition, we realized that there were works published in past editions of the Kaikodo Journal that were ready for a replay and we thought to bring some of them to the fore. Three such ceramics were horses produced during three early Chinese dynasties—the Han, Northern Wei and Qi. These horses are not only exemplars of the times of their production but also symbols of the present Year of the Horse. Hirai Kensai’s 19th-century “Horse Market in Mountain Village,” after a painting of the same title by Ikeno Taiga, has given us a multitude of horses, an explosion of lucky charms. Perhaps the spirit world is very much with us, as several of the paintings that called out to us are religious in nature, including a monk, an Amida, a Guanyin from China, and a Kannon from Japan. In introducing several 17th-century Chinese paintings we were reminded of the seminal role of the recluse in Chinese painting. The Japanese gentlemen strolling towards their mountain retreats in a number of paintings also presented here might look similar but their motivations so different. Rather than seeking an antidote to the calamitous times in government and society, which was the case for the 17th-century Chinese recluse, for the Japanese, a trek mountainward away from one’s urban life was often a search for solitude, curative nature, rusticity. None of these incentives, neither those of the Chinese nor of the Japanese, are lost on us today.