Behind-the-Scenes – Kotobuki: Auspicious Celebrations of Japanese Art from New York Private Collections
Kotobuki: Auspicious Celebrations of Japanese Art from New York Private Collections is on view at Japan Society Gallery March 13-May 11, 2025. To learn more about this gorgeous and inspirational exhibition that is the perfect harbinger of spring, let’s go behind the scenes for a conversation with Senior Gallery Director Michele Bambling and Senior Research Associate Naomi Kuromiya.
Kotobuki means both celebration and longevity—what is this exhibition celebrating and how does that manifest in art?
Michele:
That’s a great question! Kotobuki means celebration, but it’s also an expansive term that embraces happiness and good luck. Applied to this exhibition, it’s a celebration of the joy we experience encountering Japanese art. It is also a celebration of the life and scholarship of guest curator Miyeko Murase, Takeo and Itsuko Atsumi Professor Emerita of Japanese Art History at Columbia University, who passed away at the age of 100 on February 12, 2025. It was Dr. Murase’s idea to bring long-time collectors of Japanese art together at Japan Society, and to reinvigorate interest in exhibiting pre-modern Japanese art. Dr. Murase advised Mary Griggs Burke for many years as she put together her extensive, world-renowned collection of Japanese art that is now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Minneapolis Institute of Art. The works on view in Kotobuki and the collectors who have lent them illuminate the depth of Dr. Murase’s knowledge and friendships over the course of her long and illustrious academic and curatorial career.
The inspiration for the title of the exhibition came from a calligraphic inscription of kotobuki by Buddhist master Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769) that was shown in our spring 2024 exhibition None Whatsoever: Zen Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection. Kotobuki is a theme that can be loosely interpreted through auspicious symbolism, the cycle of seasons, and the journey of life. This Kotobuki exhibition coinciding with Dr. Murase’s centennial year is also a shared celebration of our collective appreciation of Japanese art. With works spanning the 12th through the 21st centuries, the exhibition inherently expresses the essence of longevity.
While Dr. Murase selected the works on view, the choices of the lenders are also present. The exhibition is a combination of Dr. Murase’s curation with that of the collectors, who built their individual collections in accordance with their own interests, taste, and circumstances. Together the beautiful works selected from various private collections instill the exhibition with a celebratory spirit.
What are some of the stories behind the objects?
Michele:
One important work comes to mind, Phoenix and Peacock in a Landscape, a pair of 16th-century screens from the School of Kano Motonobu, where, as the title suggests, a phoenix is juxtaposed with a peacock. We’re all familiar with peacocks, which are guardians and symbols of wisdom in Buddhism and representative of wealth and prosperity. Few, if any of us, have seen the mythical phoenix that is endowed with auspicious symbolism—it is said to foretell the reign of a just ruler, and because the phoenix is reborn from the ashes of the fire in which it died, it evokes eternity. What fascinates me about these two screens is that the real peacock and imaginary phoenix are set in a landscape depicting all four seasons at their peak. The four seasons are, of course, familiar. But none of us have experienced them all simultaneously, as represented in this panoramic view of a paradise garden. Phoenix and Peacock in a Landscape is on loan to Japan Society from Rosemarie Longhi in memory of her husband, Leighton Longhi. The screens are a promised gift to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting has traveled from the Longhi residence to Japan Society. After the exhibition closes, the screens will join other treasures at the Met, many of them contributions from private collections, where a new story will begin.
Naomi:
There are a lot of works in the exhibition by artists who are very well known in Japan and the U.S., but there are others who may be less familiar. My favorite work in the show is Musashino in Autumn, a set of screens depicting fall leaves by Tanaka Isson (1908-1977), originally a pair of two-panel sliding doors (fusuma) dating from 1945-1946. Isson, who was classically trained in traditional Japanese painting, had a very difficult career, ultimately moving to a remote island in Okinawa at the end of his life where he painted tropical landscapes. The screens in this show were painted right after the end of World War II, and the autumn leaves manage to look both traditionally painted but also hyper-realistic as Tanaka used photography and scientific observation to hone his depictions of the natural world.
Michele:
Musashino in Autumn, from the collection of Joan B. Mirviss and Robert J. Levine, has never been exhibited publicly, however other lenders may have seen these screens—in a private dining room in New York! The Kotobuki exhibition is about showing what is happening behind the scenes, just as we did in our previous exhibitions Bunraku Backstage and Acky Bright: Studio Infinity when visitors were invited to go backstage or step into the private studio of an artist. All of these works are coming to us from private places, and many are making their public appearances in Japan Society Gallery, for the first time.
Could you talk about your personal history with Dr. Murase and the process of curating the exhibition with her?
Michele:
It’s not just my own history, it’s a shared history, one that is part of a lineage. Dr. Murase was a very important professor and mentor for generations of students before and after me. Her influence is felt throughout the world of Japanese art. Here at Japan Society, for example, Naomi Kuromiya, who works with me, studied at Columbia University, where she took courses with Matthew McKelway, Takeo and Itsuko Atsumi Professor of Japanese Art History, who succeeded Dr. Murase. Dr. McKelway curated our 2018 exhibition A Giant Leap: The Transformation of Hasegawa Tōhaku.
There’s a vast network of people whom Dr. Murase taught and mentored that goes beyond the classroom to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was a Special Consultant for Japanese Art. After I defended my dissertation under Dr. Murase, I held a postdoc fellowship at the Met when Dr. Murase was advising the department of Japanese art. I continued to work with Dr. Murase during the time when she curated Turning Point: Oribe and the Arts of Sixteenth-Century Japan. My relationship with Dr. Murase as a student, then research assistant, shifted over nearly 40 years into a special friendship. It was a privilege to have studied under Dr. Murase; I feel very blessed to have known her for so long. Dr. Murase appreciated all the works in the Kotobuki exhibition, and the presentation of them together reflects her refined aesthetic sensibility. Indeed, it will be an exquisite exhibition and a celebratory tribute to Dr. Murase. The show opens in the spring, and cherry blossoms permeate the works in the Gallery, illustrating the beauty in evanescence that is such a poignant part of Japanese aesthetics.
If you were viewing the exhibition without much background on Japanese art, how would you approach the experience?
Michele:
This exhibition, more than any other since I joined Japan Society is readily accessible because it is based on what we all experience: the cycle of life. We’re all human, and we can use this understanding to guide our own personal readings of the works on view. Moreover, the works are inspiring for their sheer beauty.
Naomi:
It’s a very beautiful, very sensory show that starts with works having a close connection to the New Year and is then loosely laid out in a seasonal progression. By following the seasons as they flow through the art, visitors can experience all different kinds of artwork from diverse time periods and learn a lot about the history of Japanese art—which is deeply tied to seasons and the passage of time—in the process.
Michele:
Another conceptual aspect of Kotobuki is that visitors may view the works as if walking through a Japanese garden path—where artworks showing scenic views are arranged along the way. The exhibition is meant not only to be seen, but to be experienced as an immersive journey. As with our exhibitions last autumn, Bunraku Backstageand Acky Bright: Studio Infinity, Kotobuki offers visitors a rare glimpse at works held in private collections. While those exhibitions considered the underlying processes of making art, Kotobuki is sharply focused on the process of collecting. Usually in a museum, works are arranged chronologically or by theme or medium, but here the artworks are grouped by collector. We’re deliberately emphasizing the process of collecting as well as the curatorial process of bringing the collections themselves together, in a very conscious way that both informs and inspires.