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• On the East Asian Art invasion

“The Krannert Art Museum collection of Asian art is idiosyncratic,” says professor and guest curator Anne Burkus-Chasson. “Idiosyncrasy was embedded in the collection from its beginnings in 1908. What we tried to do in the re-installation was to present a more coherent view of China.” The Chinese works on exhibit range from Neolithic through the 18th century. “The objective was not to provide a survey — which we cannot do with the works in the collection,” Burkus-Chasson says, “but rather to show highlights of a rich and idiosyncratic collection. And to complement the Lee Wonsik collection.”

“Collecting East Asia” is the inaugural exhibition of the collection in question, an assortment of Chinese paintings and works of calligraphy — always historically intertwined, not unlike the two historic powers of East Asia. “It demonstrates all sorts of connections between Japan and China in particular,” says Burkus-Chasson.

The collection illustrates East Asian history, as Professor Burkus-Chasson explains, “Although trade was restricted by the Tokugawa shogunate during the Edo period (the beginning of the early modern period of Japan), Chinese merchants and the Dutch were still allowed to visit the port of Nagasaki to conduct business,” referring to the southwestern port city of Japan, a melting pot of culture at the time. “Through Nagasaki came paintings, printed books, and artists from Europe and China that prompted many Japanese artists — painters and woodblock artists — to re-conceive their artistic endeavors,” Bukus-Chasson says. “The Japanese always altered (sometimes quite dramatically) what they saw, but without the trade through Nagasaki the art of Edo Japan would have been a very different phenomenon,” and so would be the museum’s collections.