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Barbarians in Yokohama
| Article
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18360 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1990 |
2,572 Words |
| Author
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Scarlet Cheng
Scarlet Cheng, based in Los Angeles, is a contributing editor
to the arts section of The World & I. |
Not long ago East was East and West was West, and barely the twain did meet. That division was especially acute for more than two hundred years in Japan, where the Tokugawa government effectively isolated the country from the year 1639, cutting off nearly all contact with the Western world.
Then Commodore Matthew C. Perry sailed into Edo Bay in 1853 with his threat of American naval might and forced the opening of Japan. A current touring exhibition entitled Yokohama: Prints from Nineteen-Century Japan, which opened last summer at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., vividly captures those early years of mutual discovery. The show is scheduled to travel to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco next month, then to the Los Angeles Country Museums of Art.
The eighty-five prints in the exhibition are arranged thematically - culled by Sackler curator Ann Yonemura from the collection of retired American diplomat William Leonhart and his wife, who served two tours of duty in post-World War II Japan. A beautifully illustrated catalog written by Yonemura and an edition of Asian Art, a lively quarterly produced by the Sackler, accompany the exhibition.
At a time a when “blockbuster” art exhibitions are the vogue, there is an insidious expectation that art must be “great” to be appreciated. But these charming prints are a delight unto themselves, worth studying both as historical record and as anecdotes of cross-cultural exchange, worth appreciating for their graphic design, bold colors, and frequently sly sense of humor.
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