In March of this year, Professor Ide Seinosuke will retire from Kyushu University after twenty-one years as a faculty member, having previously worked for seventeen years (1987–2003) at the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties. 

Claimed as ‘the first exhibition to reveal the international art and culture of the Mughal court’, The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, (from 9 November 2024 to 5 May 2025) curated by Susan Stronge, takes us back to the golden age of the Mughal Court (about 1560–1650) to explore the fascinating artistic productions created under the rule of Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan. 

Solace in Painting explores the foundational question of how we raise awareness about and effectively characterize the artwork of conflicted artists of the diaspora who never produced overt ‘conflict art’. This question is examined through the lives and artwork of three Asian diasporic painters: Chao Shao-an (also known as Zhao Shao'ang, 1905–1998, Keisho Okayama (1934–2018), and Ann Phong (b. 1957). 

Over the centuries, Zen Buddhism and its institutions have served as a catalyst for the creation and preservation of Japanese art. Zen monasteries have built up extraordinary collections of artworks and transmitted them from generation to generation. This is especially the case for one of the most prominent monasteries in Japanese history, Kyoto’s Shōkoku-ji.

The exhibition ‘Staging the Supernatural: Ghosts and the Theater in Japanese Prints’ is currently on view in Washington, DC, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art (NMAA; 23 March–6 October 2024). The origin of the exhibition dates back more than fifteen years but was buoyed into reality by two major acquisitions.

For those interested in the history of silk and the movement of materials, techniques, and motifs along the Silk Roads, the 7th century wall painting programme from the so-called ‘Hall of Ambassadors’ in the Sogdian city of Samarkand (in present-day Uzbekistan) offers a rich source of illuminating knowledge.

The historical trail of these Chinese patchworked textiles winds back almost two thousand years, with the entrance of Buddhism to China, and back at least another five hundred years in India. The tradition carried with it not only the concept of stitching together fabric scraps but also layers of meanings attached to such assembling.

The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) has cultivated a distinguished collection of Chinese art with notable strengths in several areas. Qing dynasty (1644–1911) silk textiles are represented with nearly one thousand works, comprising one of the largest and best collections in the West.