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. 

With an artistic career spanning six decades, Fong Chung-Ray (b. 1933) is an early pioneer of contemporary Chinese art. The recent retrospective held at the University Museum and Art Gallery (UMAG) at the University of Hong Kong is the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the city.

Antiquarianism (jinshixue) established itself as a respected academic discipline in the Song dynasty (960–1279) and gained significant prominence in the 19th century. Following the reign of the emperor Jiaqing (1796–1820), more scholars collected and published bronze and stone inscriptions to verify and supplement classical and historical records found in transmitted texts.

In the 1980s I bought both Japanese and Chinese textiles. I decided to focus on Chinese textiles because I could see there was a unique opportunity to put together a great collection whereas I could not do the same with Japanese textiles.

In Japan, squares of lined silk called fukusa were used to cover and exchange formal gifts. Exquisitely embroidered, woven, painted, and dyed, fukusa are some of the finest examples of Japanese textile artistry.

Understanding and uncovering where these artworks went after the looting is a fascinating exercise in detective work that runs through libraries, palaces, auction archives, museums, and private houses around Europe and the United States.