Elizabeth Horton Sharf: "The Fully Illumined Sage: Reading Twelve Centuries of Japanese Buddhist Imagery"
Abstract:
This seminar features the most compelling, time-honored masterpieces of the Buddhist arts of Japan. It is divided into segments addressing aesthetic issues: What is involved in the creation of a striking likeness of a Buddhist monk in Japan? How have artists responded to the challenges of portraying revered figures in the Buddhist pantheon? How does the image of the Buddha in Japan change over time?
In the course of the workshop we will follow the trajectory of twelve centuries of Japanese Buddhist art, from the earliest alluring sculptures to the latest developments in ink painting. Works of art will be understood in relation to their place in the Japanese monastery, its image halls, gardens, and residences, and in relation to the person of the abbot. We will learn how to "read" conventions for the portrayal of monks and nuns, buddhas and bodhisattvas, lesser deities, guardians, and demons, as well as how to best enjoy pictorial narratives of Buddhist hells and paradises and other selected subjects.
Speaker's Bio:
Elizabeth Horton Sharf
Visiting Scholar, Center for Japanese Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Dr. Elizabeth Horton Sharf received her Ph.D. in Asian Art History from the University of Michigan, and trained as a research fellow in Japan at Kyoto University. She has taught at the University of Michigan and McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and has lectured in Japanese art at museums and other institutions in the United States including Detroit Institute of Arts; University of Michigan Museum of Art; Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas; Kuroda Institute, Los Angeles; the Asian Art Museum; and the Clark Center for Japanese Art & Culture, Hanford, CA, where she was guest curator for an exhibition of Japanese landscape painting entitled Inhabited/Uninhabited: Intimacy and Exuberance in Japanese Landscape Painting. She has also worked in the museum field at The Saint Louis Art Museum and MIT. With Robert Sharf she co-edited Living Images: Japanese Buddhist Icons in Context. Her dissertation on Obaku Zen portrait painting is the basis of her recent work, "Obaku Zen Portrait Painting and Its Sino-Japanese Heritage" in Images in Asian Religions: Texts and Contexts (2004).