The Beauty of Wayō Shodō
Did you known that the Japanese did not have a written language up until the 400s CE? I find cursive Japanese so incredibly beautiful. The story behind its development is very interesting, and I bet y ...
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Curator's Corner
The Essence of Essence
I’ve been reading manifestos by several early modernist artists from Europe recently (Kandinsky, Boccioni, Doesburg), and a recurring thought comes out in all of their writings. It is the idea t ...
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Curator's Corner
A Neglected Japanese Printmaker: Gosōtei Hirosada
I’m pretty sure there’s generally a misconception about the ukiyo-e phenomenon in Japanese art. It is certainly one I had until I recently came across hundreds of gorgeous woodblock prints ...
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Curator's Corner
Architecture or Sculpture? You Decide: Javanese Temples
I have been stunned recently by the overwhelming beauty of Hindu-Buddhist temples in Java. I think they rival the beauty of any architecture anywhere else in the world. It is interesting to compare th ...
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Curator's Corner
Survey No. 12: Abstraction
In our art history survey, we are now at the end with the 1900s. The big “revelation” in Western art starting very late in the 1800s and flowering in the early 1900s was abstraction. Abstr ...
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Curator's Corner
Survey No. 11: Unknown Impressionists
Art in the 1800s brought us the terms Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Realism, covered in my New Slant on Art History. The second half of the century saw a major shift in how artists used art to portr ...
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Curator's Corner
Survey No. 10: Ubiquitous Real
So far we have taken a look at Classicism and Romanticism around the world in the 1800s. Now let’s look at “realism,” which—like every other style—has been a trend somewh ...
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Curator's Corner
Survey No. 5: 1400s/1500s II
Sometimes I wonder if, unfortunately, most Westerners only know about Korea in relation to that unfortunate war in the 1950s or because of contemporary politics in North Korea. This is yet anothe ...
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Curator's Corner
Survey No. 3: Middle Ages
I’m not quite sure when the historical/art historical/cultural/religious term “Medieval” (the confluence of the Latin “medius,” middle, and “aevum,” age) came ...
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Curator's Corner
Survey No. 1: Ancient
When I was in grad school, I was a teaching assistant in an art history survey course that had the neatest syllabus at which I ever squinted at eight in the morning. It did not go chronologically thro ...
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