Love, Fight, Feast

Telling stories through images: Japan's multifaceted narrative art across eight centuries

The use of pictures to communicate a story has a long tradition in Japanese culture that dates back more than a thousand years. Such narrative illustrations draw on Buddhist texts, classic literature, poetry, and theatrical scenes to create rich visual imagery realized in a wide range of media and formats. Quotations from and allusions to heroic epics and romances were disseminated through exquisite paintings, woodblock prints, and in pieces of applied arts such as lacquerware or ceramics, thus becoming anchored in the collective consciousness. As story-telling art found expression in a variety of materialities, it became an integral part of daily life. A fascinating narrative space evolved that combined artistic excellence and aesthetic pleasure.

Love, Fight, Feast features some one hundred paintings, woodblock prints, illustrated woodblock-printed books, as well as lacquer and metal objects, porcelain, and textiles from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, alongside scholarly essays on a range of aspects of Japanese narrative art. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the renowned Museum Rietberg in Zurich, the book offers a unique survey of the multifaceted, colorful, and imaginative world of Japanese narrative art across eight centuries.

• A uniquely comprehensive survey of Japanese narrative art across eight centuries
• Highlights the vast variety of picture worlds and of stories told in Monogatari-e, or story pictures
• Demonstrates the entire range of artistic media and techniques used for this type of Japanese art

• Features some 100 rarely or never before published art works, including paintings, woodblock prints, illustrated woodblock-printed books, lacquer and metal objects, porcelain, and textiles

  Autorentext
  Khanh Trinh ist seit 2015 Kuratorin für japanische und koreanische Kunst am Museum Rietberg in Zürich. Davor war sie als Kuratorin und Dozentin für japanische Kunstgeschichte in Berlin (Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, 19972004), Tokyo (Waseda University, 2006/07) und Sydney (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 20072015) tätig.

  Zusammenfassung

Telling stories through images: Japan's multifaceted narrative art across eight centuries