Meet Japan without leaving Los Angeles Silk Road-themed Nihonga exhibition by renowned Ikuo Hirayama, Mar. 27 – May 19
Cultural News, March 2007
Hanford, California - The Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture (formerly the Ruth and Sherman Lee Institute) presents Tracing the Silk Road with Ikuo Hirayama: Legacies of East-West Cultural Exchange from March 27 through May 19.
The Silk Road is the romantic name given to a series of trading routes that stretched from Mediterranean Europe, through the Middle East, to East Asia.
For well over a millennium, beginning approximately 100 BCE, the Silk Road provided the primary means by which material goods and cultural concepts passed from place to place, bringing Chinese silk to ancient Rome and Buddhism from India to China and Japan, alongside other goods and ideas.
Cultural and material exchanges left their marks from East to West, transforming and intertwining the civilizations in-between. The products and remains of these exchanges can still be seen in the ruins and preserved sites that line the traces of the Silk Road today.
Ikuo Hirayama, Japan’s most celebrated living painter, has made these sites of cultural interchange along the Silk Road the focus of both his artwork and philanthropic missions.
("Ruins in the Morning Sun at Palmyra, Syria" by Ikuo Hirayama, 2007)
In this, his first American exhibition, the Clark Center presents forty-six of Hirayama’s nihonga-style paintings, arranged geographically from the cultural sites of Hirayama’s homeland, influenced by Silk Road exchange, through those of China, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Greece and Italy, following the westward course of the old Silk Road.
Along the way, Hirayama presents his artistic vision of the people, historical artifacts and famous ruins he discovered on his own many personal journeys along this ancient trade highway.
Believing that cultural sites embody a legacy of meaning and worldview from which contemporary people can draw strength, Hirayama has devoted much of his resources and energies to the preservation and recognition of the importance of these sites.
Yet the Silk Road for Hirayama stands not only for the recognition of the importance of distinct cultures and their legacies, but also for the interconnectedness of all cultures and civilizations.
The Silk Road, by physically linking one place and another, led ultimately to their cultural conjoining, allowing for the mutual influences of ways of religious and philosophical thought—Jewish, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu and Muslim, for example—that have since come to be seen as antagonistic and exclusive.
Hirayama’s artistic reminder of the deep interconnectedness of cultures comes at an important moment in the U.S. and the world history, and stands as a monument in his mission to enhance cross-cultural understanding and cooperation as a means towards world peace.
The Clark Center is located 6 miles south of downtown Hanford at 15770 Tenth Avenue. It takes three hours to drive from Los Angeles to Hanford in the Central Valley of California on the route of Freeway I-5 and 99.
The gallery and reference library are wheelchair accessible and open to the public Tuesday-Saturday from 1:00–5:00 pm. Admission fees are $5 for adults, $3 for students; members and children under 12 are free. Docent tours of the exhibition are held every Saturday at 1:00 pm and special pre-arranged group tours are available for an additional fee. For more information visit the website at www.ccjac.org or call (559) 582-4915.
Cultural News will organize a bus tour from Los Angeles to the Hirayama exhibition on Saturday, April 7. For detail, call Shige Higashi at (213) 819-4100 or e-mail to higashi@culturalnews.com.
Renowned Ikuo Hirayama’s Silk Road series paintings to be exhibited, Mar. 27 – May 19
Cultural News, February 2007
HANFORD, California - The Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture (formerly the Ruth and Sherman Lee Institute) presents the first-ever American exhibition of painting of Ikuo Hirayama, one of Japan’s most celebrated living artists at its own gallery here.
("The Pagoda at Yasaka Shrine, Bathed in Sunlight" by Ikuo Hirayama)
Hirayama’s lithographs were exhibited at the gallery of the Japanese Culture and Information Center in Washington, D.C. several years ago. But Tracing the Silk Road with Ikuo Hirayama: Legacies of East-West cultural exchange is Hirayama’s first painting exhibition in the U.S.
Opening to the public on March 27, this exhibition will feature over forty of Prof. Hirayama’s atmospheric paintings, brushed in his distinctive style of nihonga (Japanese-style modern painting). The exhibition will run until May 19.
The works, which largely depict contemporary views of historically important sites in Asia, the Middle East and the Mediterranean, will be arranged geographically by subject in the exhibition, to highlight one of Prof. Hirayama’s major themes in his artwork and philanthropic missions: the promotion of peace and world unity through cultural exchange and expanded understanding of the intertwined roots of human civilizations.
("Horyuji" by Ikuo Hirayama)
Born in 1930 at the island town of Setoda in Hiroshima prefecture, Hirayama was 15 when his school was mobilized to help the war effort in the City of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
Unlike several hundred of his schoolmates, Hirayama narrowly escaped with his life that day, and this catastrophic event planted in his mind a conviction to overcome the conditions of mutual distrust and separation on which wars are predicated.
Shortly after graduating from Tokyo National University of the Fine Arts and receiving some acclaim for his early paintings, Hirayama was struck down by leukemia, a result of his exposure to atomic radiation. At the lowest point in his health struggles, which nearly took his life, Hirayama discovered Buddhism as a theme that expressed his worldview, and began to create paintings that explored the origins and transmission of this religion of peace.
("Desert" by Ikuo Hirayama)
This quest took him to the Silk Road, the ancient trade routes that connected India to China, the Middle East and Mediterranean Europe, along which philosophical and artistic ideas were exchanged, together with material goods. In the Silk Road, Hirayama found an ideal model for his vision of a world in which cultural interchange acted as the foundation for peace, as well as historical evidence for the common elements that connected the civilizations of Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia.
From the 1960s on, he has traveled the Silk Road, painting its famous sites as they appear today, and creating a foundation for the preservation of those sites in danger of being lost. He has served as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, the Chairman for the Japanese National Commission for UNESCO, and as President of the Tokyo National University of the Fine Arts.
For the upcoming exhibition at the Clark Center, Prof. Hirayama has personally created a selection of his older, acclaimed works, and new, never-before-displayed paintings, hoping to bring his message of peace through cultural understanding to the United States.
The exhibition starts with Buddhist landmarks in Hirayama’s homeland, then traces their origins in the transmission of culture along the Silk Road, taking the viewer on a journey through western China, India, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Turkey, all the way to Greece and Italy. Hirayama has focused his artistic vision on the people, artifacts and famous ruins he found on his own travels, depicting life along the remains of this ancient trade highway as it appears today.
By so doing, he presents the layers of the historical legacy of the Silk Road, together with the surface of the contemporary world, a new, complex approach to the theme of history-painting in nihonga.
The Clark Center is located 6 miles south of downtown Hanford at 15770 Tenth Avenue. The gallery and reference library are wheelchair accessible and open to the public Tuesday-Saturday from 1:00–5:00 pm. Admission fees are $5 for adults, $3 for students; members and children under 12 are free. Docent tours of the exhibition are held every Saturday at 1:00 pm and special pre-arranged group tours are available for an additional fee. For more information visit the website at www.ccjac.org or call (559) 582-4915.
Painter Ikuo Hirayama has focused on the theme of the Silk Road for 40 years
Cultural News, March 2007
Ikuo Hirayama’s first American exhibition will open on March 27 at the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture in California’s Central Valley. In this article, Hirayama discusses the meaning of his art and its central subject, the major cultural monuments found along the ancient Silk Road, as they appear today.
By Ikuo Hirayama
It is my great honor to have an exhibition of my paintings at the Clark Center for Japanese Art & Culture. This opportunity came about through the invitation of Mr. & Mrs. Willard Clark, who have devoted so much of their lives and resources to collecting and introducing Japanese art works to the American people.
This year commemorates my 60th anniversary as an artist. The theme of this exhibition is the “Silk Road.” The Silk Road, which has long been a trade route between East and West has, in its long history, also contributed to the exchange of eastern and western cultures. I have visited sites along the Silk Road approximately 130 times over the past 40 years.
There are two reasons why I have taken such great interest in the Silk Road. The first is to relive the experiences of the monk Xuanzang, to show gratitude toward him and to learn of his great faith.
Many historically important people, such as Marco Polo, have traveled the Silk Road. Xuanzang (600-664), a highly ranked monk during the Tang Dynasty, was one of these. In order to learn more about Buddhism, which he believed was essential for building a peaceful society, Xuanzang spent seventeen years to reach India and bring back the true teachings of Buddhism to China. As one can still see today, the Silk Road has many difficult and risky passages, including deserts and high mountains, not to mention human dangers. Crossing it on foot was a great austerity.
My painting, “The Transmission of Buddhism,” portrays the rejoicing of Xuanzang on returning to his own country after this arduous journey. It was with this very work that I first gained prominence as a painter.
As a child I suffered from the effects of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. This devastating experience has made me harbor a strong wish for world peace, just as I believe monk Xuanzang did. Identifying with him thus, I have wished to relive his journey of sacrifice and discovery along the Silk Road.
The second reason for my attraction to the Silk Road is to discover more about the roots of Japanese culture. At old temples in Japan, you can find many beautiful three-storied or five-storied pagodas, which I like very much. These structures originated as mound-like stupas in India, where Buddhism was born, and gradually took the shape of towers such as those we see now.
They stand as the result of Buddhism’s slow spread across the Silk Road, from India to China, on to Korea, and finally to Japan, over a millennium. There were many other tangible and intangible things that came into Japan through the Silk Road, China and the Korean Peninsula. Likewise, Japan imported many aspects of Eurasian cultures in ancient times. In other words, Eurasian cultures, in no small part, also contributed to the roots of Japanese culture.
Generally speaking, cultures are the intellectual and historical products of specific tribes or ethnic groups. Each culture takes a long time to mature. Therefore, people have pride in their own culture. A unique culture is something extremely difficult to establish, but easily lost.
It’s no exaggeration to say that a culture can be wiped out in a second by war. Many ruins and remains found along the Silk Road are the result of war, the supreme folly of humankind. Whenever I visit world cultural heritage sites, I realize that men have been creating splendid and significant cultures since recorded history. We have to be confident about our intellectual activities. In this context, I have been advocating and promoting the “Red Cross Spirit for Cultural Heritage,” which aims to protect precious cultural heritages in the world in order to bequeath them to future generations.
As a painter and an artist, I am always asking myself how I can contribute to lasting peace all over the world. I would be pleased if every visitor to this exhibition could sense my ideals in this regard in my paintings, and I would be even more happy if this cultural event could promote more understanding between the people of the United States of America, Japan, and the world.
(Courtesy of the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture)