After having seen the first rotation of the Met Museum's Celebrating the Arts of Japan exhibit this past winter, I recently returned to view the second rotation. Almost all the objects shown were taken from the collection of the late Mary Griggs Burke who during her lifetime managed to amass the largest collection of Japanese art outside Japan.
Although there were many great works of art on display, I had the feeling that the best of the collection had already been exhibited in the first rotation; there were many works from that earlier selection I would have preferred to have seen a second time. Still, there were a number of pieces worth mentioning.
One of the most fascinating, to a Buddhist at least, is a handscroll from 1278 that shows the Ten Verses on Oxherding. This traditional iconography is one of the most intriguing pictorial representations of the process by which enlightenment is attained. Perhaps the most difficult for the Westerner to comprehend is the verse, illustrated only by an empty circle, in which the boy, the ox and the surrounding world have all disappeared from sight.
Of the hanging scrolls, the most interesting by far is The Chinese Explorer Zhang Qian on a Raft, painted in the mid-sixteenth century and credited to Maejima Sōyū. The subject is a mythical explorer who supposedly lived in the second century B.C. and who, while searching for the source of the Yellow River, drifted off instead into the Milky Way.
There are also a pair of early seventeenth century scrolls by Kano Naizen, each of which depicts a mounted Zen monk. The monk Zheng Huangniu was known for riding a yellow ox laden with books and other belongings and in this work rides the ox backwards. Yushanzhu, in contrast, rides a donkey that also carries his belongings. According to legend, Yushanzhu attained enlightenment when he fell off the donkey while crossing a bridge.
One of the most iconic subjects in Japanese art is that of geese among the reeds on a riverbank. At this exhibit there is a lovely mid-fourteenth century scroll that shows two geese staring upward at their comrades already flying south for the winter.
Another hanging scroll, this from the Edo period, depicts Hotei and was painted by Ogata Kōrin. Hotei is a comical Buddhist figure often known as the "Laughing Buddha." Although sometimes considered a manifestation of the Bodhisattva Maitreya, he is though to have been inspired by an actual Buddhist monk who lived in China in the tenth century. Although Korin is known for his idiosyncratic style, this ink wash painting is more in the form of traditional Zen art.
Also from the Edo period is an exquisite lacquer book cabinet (shodansu) inlaid with gold and silver that was built to house all 41 volumes of A Chronicle of the Great Peace (Taiheiki) with two volumes of the work placed beside it. This fourteenth century historical epic describes the war between the northern and southern imperial courts that resulted in the extinction of the imperial line that was at the time resident in the southern court of Yoshino.
Another important Japanese historical work is the Heiji monogatari that tells the tale of a samurai rebellion that occurred in the years 1159-1160 and was also concerned with imperial succession. On display here is a scene, painted in the early part of the fourteenth century, that depicts the crucial Battle of Rokuhara. This, however, is only a fragment mounted on a handscroll that was taken from an edition of the full work that had been badly damaged in the seventeenth century.
Also on view are various examples of ukiyo-e, most of which take as their subject the daily lives of courtesans, as well as several couture gowns by contemporary designer Hanae Mori that were made to order for use by Ms. Burke.
The exhibit continues through May 14, 2017.