So our speaker today, Robert Singer, received his degree in Japanese Art and Archeology from Princeton University in 1973. And for the next 14 years, he lived in Japan, was a research fellow at Tokyo University. And in 1988, he joined the staff of the Los Angeles County Museum, where he is the curator and head of the department of Japanese Art. [APPLAUSE] So why animals? Why now? It actually began 11 years ago, April 22, 2008, when an old friend, a professor of Japanese sculpture, Professor Ito, came to Los Angeles, looked around the Pavilion for Japanese Art, which I opened in 1988. And he said, "You're not the head of the Japanese Pavilion of Art, Singer-san. You're the head of the Japanese zoo at LACMA." And I remember where I was standing. I said "What?" And he said, "Well look, there's the horse," this famous-- it was in <i>The Washington Post</i> this morning, the horse. "And there's an elephant, and then there's a wild boar in that painting." And I looked around. And he said, "Most of the things I'm looking at are animals." And it never occurred to me. This is 20 years after I started there. No one had ever mentioned that the animals were ubiquitous, replete in many of the works of art. So he said, "You have to do an exhibition." And I said, "I will if you help me." And so that's when it started, 11 years ago. About five years ago, it heated up. Four years ago, it got very intense. The Japan Foundation came online. And so why animals? The other thesis I'd like to briefly broach here is how important animals are in Japanese art. And many people are now asking this question. Nobody's really noticed it much before. If you compare Japanese art, say, to Western art, we have George Stubbs, a famous painter of horses, of course. We had a painting here recently, Dutch painting. And I met the co-curators, Arthur Wheelock here, but the Dutch curator, I met him. And I said, "God, all those dogs in all those pictures were great." And he said to me, "Mr. Singer if I had $1 for every person who's asked me in this last week about all the dogs in my pictures, I could retire." There were a lot of dogs. They're exotic dogs, it turns out. And they were symbols of wealth and property. But they were clearly in those pictures. Many of you saw that exhibition. They were proud. They were part of the household. They were not minor fixtures, and they were prominent in the paintings. But besides those examples, you have the lamb in Christianity. You have coral, which is a sea animal in some Christian iconography. But in Chinese painting-- so you don't have many pictures just of animals like we see here. Also animals are prevalent in Japanese art, art that's a tea ceremony, which is very elevated, very restricted, very precious, in a way, in a wonderful way. You have animals on sake signs. You have animals in advertisements and everywhere. In prints they're quite common. And they're often the sole subject to the painting. In Chinese paintings, it's pretty much a painting history of landscapes, different kinds of landscapes, the different styles throughout the last 2,000 years. There are animals sometimes in them, but you rarely have animals featured. There are auspicious animals in Korea and China. That's mainly their role-- auspicious, highly good fortune, lucky animals. But they're much more ubiquitous in Japanese art. There's some particular examples where there are no animals in a certain kind of scene in China or Korea. But in Japan, animals are added. So that'll be the subject of the symposium, I think, a great deal. Why so many animals, why in so many different forms of art? And I'll be sort of approaching that question two different ways through what we're looking at. We start with Kusama. There was a Kusama dog in <i>The Washington Post</i> article. Another feature of the exhibition, we did not, from the beginning-- and the Japan Foundation was very good about this. Normally, if it's contemporary, it would be at the back, at the end, kind of a dumping ground for leftover contemporary art. But we wanted to integrate it. So the dogs are near the Haniwa dogs in the exhibition, 6th century incredible clay sculptures like these, and then our horse. And I think it's a very nice introduction to the show, that first outside gallery there before you actually enter the show itself. The zodiac-- there are 12 Japanese animals. Does everybody know their animal? I hope by the end of this lecture or by the end of the day, everybody will have looked it up. You can put your birth year in, and just put Chinese zodiac or Japanese zodiac. There are only a few differences. For example, I'm a wild boar, B-O-A-R-- [LAUGHTER]-- in Japanese art, not the other spelling. And in Chinese art, I'm a pig, just a domestic pig. The sheep, if you're 40 this year or 28 or 52 or 64-- I know there's no one here as old as 64-- but that is a sheep in Japan. In China, it's a ram. And it can also be a goat in Southeast Asia. And so Japan is sort of softer, the sheep versus the ram. I once had a young person tell me that he wanted to be a ram, not a sheep. He wasn't going to be feminized. So there are gender issues there. But the 12 animals are important. And older people in Japan, and younger people, everybody knows their animal. And you can guess someone's age. Like yesterday, I was with someone who was a sheep. So he's not 28. He's not 52. So he's 40. And older people in Japan, and many younger people, know all their friends' animal. We often know the zodiac sign. I'm an Aquarius. Everybody says that's obvious. Someone's a Leo. So it's 12 months here, 12 years there. And there's an element. There are five elements-- fire, water-- not air, but I think that's Aristotelian, right? Fire, water, wood, earth, and metal-- is that five? Do I have all five. And metal can be gold, as well. So you're both. And that's like a minor science, like a moon kind of thing. And if you're a fire rabbit, for example, you're a rabbit, that's particularly rabbit-like and has all those characteristics. So you can look up online and find out what those characters are. And five times 12 is 60, so your particular element and sign animal comes around every 60 years. And technically, and even today, on your 60th birthday, you're reborn. You start life over again. And traditionally, and there are some of these in the show-- children's coats. An adult man or woman puts on a little coat as if they're a child and starting life over again. It's a rebirth, a restarting. It's a wonderful custom. There were lots of surprises in the five years we've been working actively on the show. There are remarkably few objects, incredibly few objects in all of Japanese art that show all 12 animals. And we were completely unprepared for this. There's only one kimono or kosode in Japanese art that's known that has all 12 animals. There is some netsuke, like the one the middle. We have one. Boston has one made of ivory that show all 12 animals. And there's a lacquer object with just a snake. But we start the show with 12 animals, all 12 in different materials, from our Bushell collection of Japanese netsuke, 934 netsuke that were given to us a number of years ago, and about which we published a book. But there are very few. There's a set of 12 prints here on the right. There's one print known in Japanese art, the one on the left, that has all 12 animals as one collage pastiche animal here. So you see the snake tail and the rabbit ears and so forth. And so why so few works of art that have all 12 animals? Well, we don't really know. My theory-- since no one else has commented on it, it's the only one so far. But that you don't need an animal, a work of art that shows all 12. You need a picture of a wild boar painting for January in the year of the Wild Boar. You need a horse in the year of the Horse. So you don't really need sets. And they're just not there. There's one pair of screens here from Indianapolis, for example, that has all 12, parody screens, where the animals are dressed up as court members and so forth here on the top. But there are very few. And that was interesting. Then you have in Buddhism-- another feature of this show is to show how things are Japanified sometimes. There is a tradition in China of the 12 heavenly generals and then the 12 animals, each one of them associated with the 12 animals. And only in Japan is an animal put on top on the head of each of these animals. It's hard to see from where I am which is which. But each one has an animal. And this is a Japanese invention. Take the animal that's associated with each and put it on the helmet of the particular general. That up there, this is a dragon for example. This is unique to Japan. Another thing we've done with this show, which is really not done in Japan-- I love doing things that are not being done in Japan. Now they will be done in Japan because we've done them in the West. Japanese prints were not collected in Japan as works of art until Westerners began collecting them. Same thing with netsuke, same thing with other forms of Japanese art that were appreciated first outside Japan, that were considered lower forms of art, until Westerners became obsessed with them. And then they began to be looked at in a new way in Japan. We show Buddhist sculpture and Shinto sculpture together, interspersed in the show in Los Angeles and here. Buddhism and Shinto were violently separated in the late 1860s, 1870s, when the imperial family was restored to power and symbolism and so forth. And many Buddhist temples were destroyed. Thousands of Buddhist temples were destroyed. Thousands of Buddhist artifacts were destroyed. They were often protected, the art, by being taken into Shinto shrines. But in pre-1868, you would have a Shinto shrine with a Buddhist temple on the grounds, or a large Buddhist temple with a little Shinto temple, a Shinto shrine, on the grounds. I didn't understand this when I first went to Japan. I thought, what is this? But if you go back and look at the history, the two religions were interspersed, intertwined, interconnected through the last almost 2,000 years of Japanese history. Shinto is the nature-worshiping, nature-loving religion of Japan, predating Buddhism. So a lake, a tree, a mountain, a stone can be a kami, a diety in Shintoism. Then when Buddhism came in, Shinto was faced with all this incredible imagery and iconography, which they took in to Shinto and adopted. And so for example, the lion dogs, they're called sometimes, they're in both Shinto shrines, guarding Shinto shrines and guarding Buddhist temples. So at first it was interesting to work with the Japanese scholars on that side and get them to agree to kind of mix things up. The elephant is prominent. They didn't know what an elephant looked like. There were no elephants in Japan. The elephant was the mount for a bodhisattva called Fugen in Japanese. This is an early one, a national treasure. There are many national treasures in the show. I want to emphasize, there are two shows here. Jennifer, after July 13-- so up until July 11 or so, you see one exhibition. A lot of pieces will change. All the paintings from Japan will change. There's a light requirement in Japan. Nothing could be shown more than six weeks unless the owner permits it. And if it's a national treasure, it doesn't matter what the owner says. So there will be dozens and dozens of pieces that will disappear after July 11. And starting July 13 or 14, there will be almost a different show. So I urge you to come back and see part 2. If you take part 1 and part 2 and put them out as one show, it's 17,000 square feet. It's really 24,000 square feet if you show them all at once. So it's a twofer. It's a twofer. You've got two great shows for the price of one. So please come back the last five weeks of the show, from July 13 to August 18. And you'll see many, many new pieces that are in the catalog, but are not in part 1. And then if you can, come to Los Angeles from September 22 to December 8. We'll have 150 pieces not in Washington at all. So if you take all the pieces in Los Angeles, whether they're here or not, and all the pieces in part 1 and part 2, you're looking at 650 objects, 650. The catalog alone, this beautiful catalog-- advertisement, very reasonably priced, which I'll be signing outside at 2:00-- has 475 colored plates. If you had all the pieces in both shows that are not in the catalog, either because there wasn't room or it would make the catalog too big, it'd be 650 pieces. So the show just goes on and on and on. So please come back for part 2. I just want to emphasize that. I'll just show you some Buddhist statues that are national treasures. There's the Monju here, the large lion, which is the mount. So animals can be the mount, can be the messenger, can be the Buddha itself, or represent a certain Buddhist image. And in Shinto, it can be the messenger, or it can be the kami, the god itself. So animals are ubiquitous in Japanese religious sculptures. We did some wonderful, fun things. The piece on the right is Uga Benzaiten. And this is also Ugajin. This is the same diety in completely different form. A later sculpture in the middle, very abstract, very simplified, it's a serpent, a sea dragon, with a head here. And this is the same diety in traditional form. And then there are pieces like this, horse-headed Kannon, and multiple faces to show multiple powers, multiple arms. This piece is 11th century. And almost everything in the show is wood. A lot of things look like metal. They're not. Some pieces look like stone. They're not. Japan doesn't have much stone. There's very little stone sculpture in Japan, unlike other Asian countries. It's wood, wood, and wood. They're different kinds of wood. But to preserve wood for 500, 1,000 years in such incredible condition is a testament to Japanese obsession with keeping these things in their pristine case. And in some Asian countries, such as Southeast Asia, there is an act of devotion to repaint the image, repaint... That happens sometimes in Japanese art, sometimes. For example, the piece at the far left was repainted at some time, hundreds of years ago, to look like it was. But most often, Japanese will leave it and just let the paint fall off. Sometimes they'll add a little bit. But the idea, it's natural aging. There's also a tradition of letting it age naturally. And that's a wonderful thing. So you don't have repainting. You don't have heavy repair, as you do in some other cultures in this world. There were some great discoveries made during the course of the exhibition, which Professor Ito and I are particularly happy about. This is a national treasure on the left. We couldn't believe we got this, on the left here. This was a new discovery. We were looking at a national treasure sculpture in a temple. Very, very hard to get to, impossible to get to, the taxi drivers didn't want to go up this hill. They said, "We'll never get back down again." They were actually afraid. We got up there, and we found this in a corner of the shrine, of the worship hall. And it's the earliest known. And again, it's wood. It doesn't look like it. This is a metal sword that's rusted. And here you have the dragon, the sea dragon, in wood from 12th, 13th century. It's about four centuries earlier than any-- only in Japan, I think, searching country temples, do you find some amazing work of art that's there, but nobody's ever really noticed or paid attention to. And this doesn't happen, I don't think, anywhere else. And it's a great pleasure in working in Japan. We started with haniwa in the beginning. And these are huge tombs. Susan Arensberg did a wonderful map and picture of these tombs. They could be a mile long, and they're surrounded by water. Well, one, recently-- this is almost impossible to believe, and it says so much about Japanese character and cultural understanding. No one was allowed on the top of this particular coffin or tomb, because it was linked to an imperial family. And recently, a few archaeologists were allowed to go on top. It's surrounded by water, but it's not inaccessible. And they found haniwa, like the dog and the horse. They saw haniwa sticking out of the ground, clay sculptures sticking out of the ground, from the 6th century. And they were undisturbed. Can you imagine? They weren't stolen. They weren't looted. They weren't dug up and sold. They still existed, because it was taboo to go on top of the sacred tomb. And there were pictures. There would be a horse sticking up or a figure sticking out of the ground, original, 6th century. I just think this says almost everything about Japanese reverence for art and culture of past periods. So this is a Bishamonten. He's a guardian king of the north. There are four guardian kings, the four cardinal directions. The North is where most evil comes from. In Kyoto, there is Hieizan, it's covered with Buddhist temples. Because most evil, most bad things come out of the northeast. Not really sure why that is, but that's why you have all these temples on Mount Hiei. So after a time, from about the 9th century, the guardian King of the North, this fellow, becomes larger. And separate buildings were devoted to him. He's a recent discovery. He's dated 1124. We found an inscription inside his hollow body cavity through a freak accident. And he has been repainted a little bit in the maybe 19th, 18th century. But he's covered in animals. He has a fanged bird-like animal on his helmet. His arms extrude from dragons. There's a lion clutching his sash here. And then down his back was a tiger. So all these animals give him power. That's one important function of animals. They give the figure Buddhist or Shinto power to overcome evil. He is shouting at evil. This is not the photograph that shows it. When you stand in front of him, and you look up at him, he's shouting above your head at evil. And it's literally an evil entity shouting at him. And he's trying to make that figure go away, leave the scene, and so forth. He's very powerful in his attempt to do so. There is a feeling, when you stand under him, that he's a little bit anxious. I had a psychiatrist from Vienna tell me that he looked a little bit afraid that maybe it wouldn't work. He's putting his whole effort into it. And this is marvelous-- 1124, completely original sculpture. On the left, this is an amazing painting. There's a whole essay devoted to it in the book, a whole essay. It's a marvelous painting. It's, as far as we know, the only painting in Japanese art devoted to this particular ritual. In the ritual, a Buddhist priest, who we know-- we know his name, we know his dates from the inscription. Someone asked me the other day what the inscription is. It's by a famous abbot of the oldest temple in Kyoto, Zen Temple, describing this man and his attributes, and the fact that he wrote a very important book on this particular ritual of releasing animals back into nature. So unusually, you have a nun here, releasing birds back into nature. You have a fishermen releasing fish back into the sea up here. This is a lake, so it's freshwater. Saltwater is here. And some animals, like the wild boar-- me-- and a dog here and a bear, they're all kind of fleeing. So it's releasing animals so they're not eaten, is the idea. And the virtues of releasing animals back into nature, it's a wonderful theme. It's a fairly recently discovered painting. And it's the first time it's ever been shown outside Japan. We're very proud to have it. And as I said, there's a whole essay devoted to it. Then we have Dakini-ten. They're wonderful inscriptions. This is the death of the Buddha. It's really the passing of the Buddha, the historical Buddha, 6th century BC, into paradise, into nirvana, parinirvana. And so in Japanese, they're called nirvana paintings. They're not death paintings. But the figures around the historical Buddha, here he is, and he's passing away. Here he is here again, and surrounded by grieving followers, some of whom don't know that he's going into paradise, into nirvana. So there's really no reason to grieve. But only in Japanese art do you have animals-- not in Chinese or Korean-- you have animals appearing here, and they're grieving. And they're often pairs of animals. They're on their backs grieving. They're crying. They're weeping. I think we have in the exhibition the only two paintings in Japanese art that show fish. There is a fish scene down here. There are fish emerging from the water. But this one by Kaiho Yūken, which is also fairly recently discovered in a temple in Kyoto, you have dragons here. You have a whale. You have fictional animals. There is a very large octopus. And here's a turtle. They're coming out of the water and grieving. So even sea animals are at it. This is a feature-- this is a graphic example of how Japanese insert animals, infiltrate animals into paintings. They would not be there in Chinese and Korean art, the cultures from which Japanese art took so many forms and prototypes and so forth. Now, there's a lot of humor in the show. I forget this, because I see these all the time. There's a lot of humor. And sometimes it's subtle. Sometimes it's not. But here you have a pair of ox paintings that show herd boys. It's a very famous-- well, there are three eccentric painters in the 18th century. This is Shohaku, the most eccentric, the weirdest, really. Here you have shepherd boys, one pulling an ox. These are water buffalo, that pull the plow in rice cultivation. And this child over here is playing his Japanese flute or recorder to pacify the beast. But you only see his back. It's really interesting. You just see his butt, really, here, and he's looking off here. This is the fun screen here. When you look at it at the gallery, just look very carefully. There's two males, black and white, for contrast. I don't think it has any other meaning than that. And the female is here. And she's so soft and downy and round. She has beautiful eyelashes. And she's looking at these two males fighting. And you can see on her face, who is going to win the favor of my hand in holy matrimony? Who's going to be the father of my baby oxen? And she's peeking around this tree and this rock form. And there is the shepherd boy up there just loving the fight between the two. And this artist, he crosses the eyes of the figures when they're captivated by something. It's not done anywhere else in Japanese art. So please look at that little detail. Then Zen, many Zen figures are associated with animals. There's Bukan, for example, who was known for having a tiger as a pet. And here he is riding the tiger. There's a painting that's only being shown in Los Angeles in which he's sleeping on top of the tiger. The tiger is sleeping. He's sleeping. They're sleeping in the same blissful sleep. And there's also a theme called the four sleepers, in which two other Zen figures are sleeping with Bukan and the tiger. Anyway, there's a lot of animal imagery in Zen art, as well, that we do include in the exhibition. The one on the right is a prime example. There's a very famous Zen story about a gibbon. In Japanese, it's also called a long-armed monkey, because very long arms. And here, a gibbon is attempting to touch the moon. He's reaching for the moon, but he's reaching for the reflection of the moon in the water. And of course, it's an illusion. So it's the idea of human beings searching for illusions, trying to touch something that isn't there or reach something that isn't there, rather than looking inside themselves and discovering their own Buddhist nature. It's the same theme on the left there. Really one of the most astounding discoveries in the search for pieces to put in this show are these two foxes. They're 13th, 14th century. They were restored at great cost by a private foundation here in the United States. But they're owned by a shrine in Japan. Professor Ito and I went to look at their foxes that they thought were early. They weren't. They were 19th century. They're very large. These guys are big. Immediately, you could see that they're far earlier than any other known in Japanese art. And they were in pieces. And the Japanese, again, I just want to point out how they restore them by leaving the original paint that's left off, only not adding any paint. And they're very sly creatures. You'll see lots of foxes in the show. You'll see lots of dogs. You'll see lots of cats. But foxes and what's called the raccoon dog, the tanuki, they are very mischievous creatures, especially foxes, and tanuki. They will turn into beautiful women to seduce innocent young monks in the countryside. Someone the other day said, that was probably a very good first experience for the young monks. But they're foxy. They're literally foxy. They're tricksters. They're comparable to the coyote. In Disney, Wile E. Coyote, that's what they are. They're Wile E. Coyote. They're tricksters. You don't ever cross foxes. And white snakes, if you have a white-- I had a woman in Japan, her whole life, she said to me, my life was ruined after the gardener killed an albino snake in our garden. It ruined my family forever. There is superstition in China and Japan. And sometimes in Japan, it's often animal related. And she bemoaned this gardener, killing this-- albino snakes are particularly rare, of course. The foxes shown usually is white. It's also the messenger to the rice god, Inari. If you go to Fushimi, Fushimi, Inari, south of Kyoto, has all these fox sculptures. If you've ever been in Japan, it has 25 million people a year, visitors, by far the most popular tourist site in Japan. And it's a rice god shrine. And you see all kinds of stone sculptures of foxes all over. And you don't cross foxes. Their black foxes, particularly, are quite capricious. I have a print in this show. I'm not sure if it's in the slides. I found it in Philadelphia, near here, of a woman, a Western woman with a bustle. It's 1890 or so, 1880. And she's secretly speaking with foxes. The foxes are teaching her fox magic. And there's a Japanese in the background horrified that this Western woman-- in particular, I think-- is secretly learning fox magic and stealing this from the Japanese. And it's a wonderful print, and it says a lot about East-West interaction. And now this is another thing I'm very proud of. This is a Hosomi national treasure, deer on the left, bronze, 14th century. And they showed it like this. But in Japan, this is never done anywhere else. That's a small private museum in Kyoto. But nowhere else in Japan would they ever show a Nawa PixCell-Bambi next to this. Now clearly, he based this on the national treasure piece on the left, because it's on a cloud, just like the original 14th century piece is. And this is made of crystal. And he uses taxidermied deer skin inside. If you've been to Nara, you see the wild deer all over. Half wild-- they'll come up and ask for treats. And if you have treats in your pocket, any kind of food in your pocket, they will take it out. They're like pickpockets. They'll take it out without you even knowing it. And they're partially tame. And that comes from the deer park in Buddhism, originally. These are Shinto, but in Buddhism in India. So many of these things derive from-- Now, these are two of the greatest discoveries that are included in this show. These are 12th century monkeys on the left, a male and a female. They are looking at each other. The woman, the female on the right is a little bit demure and modest. And the male has got his hands on his knees and looking very patriarchal. But there is a very strong link there. And they are the actual deities of a famous Shinto shrine outside of Kyoto, in Sakamoto, it's called. And they're solid wood. They're made of a kind of wood that wasn't used after the 12th century. It grows very slowly. It's very heavy, very thick. And on the right, the guardian lions, these are amazing. And Mark Leithauser, the wonderful designer of the show, put the two lions, flanking, as you go into the religion section, one on the right and one on the left. And that's entirely proper. We show them normally next to each other, but they were meant to be separated. They are guardians. They're protectors of a Shinto shrine or a Buddhist temple. But they're huge. They're one piece of wood. There's even a theory they're the lost guardian lions from Toji, the oldest Buddhist temple in Kyoto. The horse is very important in Shinto. You pray to a black horse for rain. You pray to a white horse for the rain to stop, to stop the flooding, to stop this. And we acquired a black horse. And it's unbelievable. But it's large. Not as large as this. This is life-sized. It's about this big. And at the trustees meeting, it was on its side. I went like this, and it started to rain outside. I mean, it's freaky. And I said, "It's what it's for." And then the rain came down. And people said, "You staged this." I said, "How could I stage it? I can't stage the rain." And originally, they had a white horse, albino horse, and a black horse. But of course, it's very expensive to find the horses and feed them and so forth. So over time, many Shinto shrines in Japan have wooden, life-sized, though, a life-sized 1610 AD horse. And these are powerful creatures. They would stop the rain or give you rain. And like in Los Angeles, we never had rain until this year. Now it's pouring like crazy, and people are complaining, when up to last year, we didn't have enough rain. Another very powerful-- this is Chinese, originally, yin yang. In English, yin "yang," Americans will say. In-yo in Japanese. The dragon is male, and clouds and rain and sky. The female is the tiger. They're both zodiac signs, as well. The dragon is the only mythical animal among the 12 animals. If you're a dragon, everyone else around you should be very careful. You have a lot of power. You can fly over everybody else. And if you're 42 or 43 this year, you're a golden dragon. It makes you even more powerful. And then the left is the tiger, and that's a female yin sign. There's bamboo attached with it. And Earth, which is considered feminine. So we treated this in several ways. On the right, it will take me more time than I have now, but that is a dragon in the air. This is a character dragon done as a-- it's made figuralized. It's supposed to look like a dragon, but it's actually the character for dragon, and the tiger on the left, by a 17th century artist, whose name is-- it's very odd. I don't think it's a coincidence. His name is Cloud Bamboo. And cloud is associated with dragon, and there's the bamboo there, clouds and rain, bamboo on the left. And then the most famous post-war calligrapher in Japan is named Morita Shiryu. And he did these marvelous-- it's in the show. It's gold laquer on black. We found this nearby. There's one in Art Institute of Chicago, but we found one nearby that was much more accessible. I knew this artist, who's a wonderful artist. And that character is dragon. His name, Morita Shiryu, <i>shi</i> means child. So it means child dragon or child of the dragon. This character is the same as this character. Now, only after you've studied Japanese 54 years do you consider this even possible. They don't look similar, but they are. And then we have one of these great articulated dragons that move from 1713. So dragons and tigers are very important, both the zodiac animals and as the yin yang. Cloisonné is featured in the exhibition. I just want to point out briefly, these are phoenixes on the right up here. This looks like woodgrain. It's enamelware. It's almost impossible to imagine how incredible this technique is. I can't go into it. These are dragons surrounding phoenixes, another mythical animal. It's a little bit different from the Western phoenix. But it is highly celebratory, felicitous, propitious, associated with good fortune. And then this is one of the great stories of the show, personally. This is a large phoenix. It's in the show. It's about four feet tall. It's bronze, 14th century. The famous Golden Pavilion in Kyoto-- there's a picture of it on the label-- that burned in the 1950s. And the most famous novel by Mishima is called <i>The Golden</i> <i>Pavilion.</i> And he talks about the monk who burned it down, because he couldn't stand having something of such great beauty in the world. I haven't read the book in many, many years. But Mishima somehow makes you understand why something so beautiful, according to this one monk, had to be burned down. Of course, it was Japanese. It was replicated immediately with a replica large phoenix on top. And when I was talking to Professor Ito about this show, he said, "Well, we should show the original 14th century bronze phoenix that surmounted the Golden Pavilion." I said, "No, it's lost. It would have been burned. At very high temperatures, bronze will melt." And he said, "No, nobody knows this, but it's actually secretly held by-- it was being repaired outside. And they have it in their treasure house." So after a lot of negotiation-- with the great help of Okabe-san, who's here today, Miki Okabe-- we were able to persuade the abbot to lend it. It's never been shown outside Japan. It's only been shown once in Japan, to my knowledge, a few years ago at the Suntory. So this is an incredible thing, the unknown, preserved, still living and powerful phoenix in the show. And when the curators got together-- as Susan Arensberg was talking about, and Jennifer was there-- things would come out. Someone would suggest this that nobody else knew about. Well, what about this artist that we didn't know? Another feature of the show is female artists. I was astounded by how many great female artists came out of nowhere from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s I did not know about. This is an amazing-- I saw this about 40 years ago. It was very hard to get the loan. It's 100 birds, front and back, on this elaborate kimono, 19th century. Every single one of those birds is dyed differently. It's almost an impossible feat. It's in the show. It's up now. Yes, so you have to see it in the first five weeks. Rabbit, of course, is a zodiac symbol. And they see here, they see here and here. We see a man on the moon. They see a rabbit with rice at New Year's making a rice paste that's called mochi, which many of you have had. That's what they see on the moon. And here's a rabbit looking at the moon. These are baku. It's a little hard to see, but they're here. And they're owned by LACMA. But there are this wonderful beast that looks like an elephant. And it's a mythical basis. It's in China, but it's used much more in Japan. They're put on pillows here. And they are animals that eat bad dreams. [LAUGHTER] Children love this. There's a famous actor who brought his kids to my storage, and I was showing them. And they told all their kids, I heard, for weeks, they'd say, "You know what a baku is? They eat your bad dreams. They eat your nightmares." So they put them on pillows. And even today, you can go online and find pillows with this beast. He has an elephant-like snout. He has a tiger-like body. He has dragon-like whiskers. He's a composite. Very powerful, eats nightmares. And these are marriage pillows. There's only one complete set known, for some reason. There's one in the Kyoto National Museum. But this is both. And they're in lacquer. And there's baku on all four sides. Then there's the dog. The dog is important. One, it's a zodiac science. So if you're 37 this year, or 25, or 49, you're Year of the Dog. And these dogs and other dogs, a woman, as she's having childbirth, often would pray to. They'd put these dogs next to her, because dogs have easy childbirth. And in premodern anywhere in the world, childbirth was always, obviously, risky, much more risky than it is today. So the dog is there. It's not particularly cute. He's just sort of looking wistful and hopeful that you, too, will have easy childbirth. Myth and folklore here-- this is one the female artists I talked about. I did not know her. I knew many of the artists. And I introduced some of the artists. There's a bronze we'll see in a second that many of my colleagues didn't know. But I'm interested in bronzeware and metalsmithery. But this is an artist named Sakurai Seppo, early 20th century. And she seems to have specialized in carp painting. This is all broken ice. I've seen lots of carp paintings. I've never seen one in which there was-- it's a winter scene with ice breaking up. It's a very large painting. It's in part 1, and you can see it today. And this is water coming up. I've talked to several curators of European art. And they say there are about five artists, maybe seven women artists in Italy and France that were related to artists, or they were noble women who's names you will not know, you will not know who they are, and it would make a very small show of celebrated Western female artists. But we have metalsmiths, we have painters, we have calligraphers, we have potters, who are women over the last 400 years. And I think it would be fun to do a show, Japanese art, female art, last four centuries, and Western. And surprisingly, we think of the Japanese woman in the Edo period, 17th, 18th, 19th century, as being not empowered, not able to do manly artistic pursuits. But it turns out there were important artists, more important than their counterparts in the West. And this is surprising to everybody, surprising to me. So these were very strong women. Sometimes they were related to a-- one is the niece of a famous artist. But she is a great artist. And she's 1650s. And we have paintings by her in LACMA. Another work by her is becoming available. And there are nuns who are artists. They're imperial nuns. They were women, they were princesses, who didn't want to get married. They take the tonsure, they become nuns, and they become very accomplished artists. There's a whole line of these women who were painters and calligraphers. So it's quite a rich tradition, which really hasn't been-- part of it has been looked at. Like the princesses have been looked at, but not these other artists. I think this is a great idea for a future show. That's what I'm talking about. There's so much. This is a fox's wedding here. Foxes get married at night under the stars. Here's a foxy fox with a full moon. You got to be careful of him. Here's a woman who's actually a fox. And her daughter realizes, through the reflection, through the shoji, the paper, that she's actually a fox. There's a scroll in the show about a woman who marries a rat. And she had suspicions that her husband is not quite all human when she sees him having parties and drinking parties with other rats. [LAUGHTER] And this becomes a problem. And she leaves him, and his heart is broken. And it's a very sad story. [LAUGHTER] And then we have beautiful paintings here of a tengu, which is mythical bird, and a dragonfly. These are large painting. Usually we don't have this in Western art. These would be hung in the tea ceremony, in the house, in the palace, during the season. The dragonfly, of course, is summer. Also a symbol of samurai, they've said-- I've seen dragonflies but they never retreat. So they're ideal for samurai. They never retreat. Then there are mythical animals that are really quite capricious and to be feared. One is called kappa. And this is a kappa caught by a clam. They're river sprites, and they love to do sumo, for reasons we don't really know. And they're spotted, and they're with their loincloths. And here is a sumo. He's actually a kabuki actor performing as a sumo wrestler, looking at kappa river sprites doing sumo, here. And mothers, fathers would tell their children, "Don't go into the river." This is a great way to keep your kids out of the river next door, because of the kappa. If he's in a bad mood, he'll just pull you down and drown you. Now, if you happen to have cucumbers, he loves cucumbers. So if you give him a cucumber, he might not drown you. But it's a great way to discourage your children from wandering into the river. And he's seen in art, as well. Cats, this is one of those famous cat paintings in Japanese art. This is a monster cat by a great artist, Kyosai. And he appears out of this rice paddy. And here you see farmers terrified to death. This is a beautiful paint by a great artist. But the painting is about this big. And it's a marvelous painting. You can see it in large size. And then we have <i>Earth Spiders</i> at the top, and there's all kinds of spiders. Then we have Yoshitomo. We have <i>Harmless Kitty.</i> He's famous for his dogs and his cats. And we're doing a show of 1,000 pieces of his art, 1,000 works of art next year that will go around the world, of this artist, one of the hottest Japanese contemporary artists. He's a wild boar. I know that. He was born in 1959. Then we have samurai, which is incredible, all these. These are processional art. This is the 18th, 17th centuries. There was no warfare in Japan, so they could get really free and fanciful. A visitor the other day, one of your patrons-- I love it when people tell me things I don't know, which is a lot of things I don't know. That in Western art, there's a lot of processional armor. It was not meant to be used in warfare, just like this. So there's a parallel in Western art. So you have this mythical fish here. And a tile form of this in ceramic was put on the top of a castle on both ends, because it's associated with water. And if there's a fire, it'll bring rain to put out the fire-- very practical. It's another theme of the show. So I'm sorry, I haven't mentioned, most Japanese art is practical. It's functional. Most Western art is a painting to put on a wall or a sculpture with a biblical theme or a secular theme. But most Japanese art, in one way or another, is functional. There are many incense burners. There are helmets. These are all meant to be functional, usable things. There are tea bowls. Almost every object in premodern Japan, with few exceptions, has a functional purpose. It could be a religious purpose, showing those passing of the Buddha into nirvana. Those are huge paintings, but they were shown on one day a year. On that day, the 15th day of the second lunar month, the priest, in front of its congregation, would show what was happening. And he wasn't actually dying. He was going into nirvana, and explained the whole story. So almost every one of these works of art is functional. It could be food. It could be tea. It could be samurai. It could be incense-related. But please notice that when you go through it. In Western art, we call these decorative art, which is this terrible word. Decorative art, as opposed to fine art and sculpture and painting. Well, before-- and there are words in Japanese now for decorative art, but they're translation words. Before 1870, it was art, you know? It wasn't separated between high and low, between decorative and fine art. That's all a Western concept that was brought into Japan in the 1870s and '80s. And a lot of research has been done on this. And these are made-up words in Japanese. So just have fun-- Rabbit ears, I love the rabbit ears. I think he's up in part 2. And there's a section on foreign animals being brought into Japan. If you look closely, there's an elephant, foreign dogs. These are around. These are Portuguese coming to Japan in the 1580s and '90s. A wonderful print showing Westerners. Who knew that a Dutch woman, [INAUDIBLE], had a leopard as a pet? Here's for one of the first camels brought into Japan. There's a section on this. This is the most famous cat painting in Japanese art in the middle. There are two versions of it. 1795, <i>Cat Amid Spring Flowers,</i> that's here. This is a reticulated snake. You don't see much snake painting. They're hard to paint in a painting, because they're so long and narrow, of course. But you see them in metalwork. And the sheep, the sheep or the goat-- we found remarkably few examples of this anywhere. We don't know why there were so few sheep, goats, and rams painted. It's an interesting question. This comes from, I think Indianapolis on the right, and another one from Japan. Lots of bunny rabbits, Art Deco at the top. The ears are actually the handle. And this is a new discovery of rabbits on the right. It's supposed to be 100 rabbits. This is 120. This is a very famous painting. And then there's a photographer I did not know of. The photograph on the back of the book here, it shows a bear standing up. And he looks like he's taking a photograph. Most people, including me, thought it was posed. No, this photographer sets up a trip wire with lights. And the bear came out of the woods, stood at the camera, and it went off. The camera went off, and he looks like he's taking a very carefully composed picture. There's an owl here and a fox on the left. This is a four-foot, one piece of wood, national treasure. It was sent to the Columbian World's Exhibition, the White City show in 1893 in Chicago. It came back. National treasure, it's never left Japan. We're so proud to have this on display. And then the wild boar, a lot of wild boar in there, I'm not sure why that is. And this painting is a mystery. And I won't talk about it. We don't know what it means, but that made it more desirable for us to acquire. Because it has different animals, and by the most famous animal painter in Japanese art. This is embroidery. This is amazing. You can't see it in the photograph, but it's the most incredible embroidery. Bats are very important, because they're felicitous, auspicious. Famous painter, 1935, <i>Flying</i> <i>South,</i> and the waves at the bottom are so abstracted. And then this very strange photographer, who is very famous in photography, most people don't know him, Fukase. You can read about him in the catalog. This is a female artist up here, who's become increasingly well-known. She's 18th century. She signs her name "Turtle Woman," Kamejo. We don't know why. But she did these incredible bronze medal incense burners. And there's one in the show we're very proud of. And the penguin and icebreaker ships-- woman's haori-- there's a story behind it. We don't have time. These are the world famous Minneapolis Sesson screens. We recently acquired by gift a wonderful Sesson painting, a hanging scroll. But these are the only-- these would be national treasures if they were in Japan, the Sesson six-paneled pair of screens in Indianapolis, one of the great collections in the country, which has been vastly augmented by the past tenure of our new director here, Kaywin Feldman, who's here today. And they are now one of the great strongholds of Japanese art in the world, thanks to her efforts. Thank you for that. And this is in part 2, <i>One</i> <i>Hundred Insects.</i> The children are going to have a lot of fun with this. Because there are 100 insects, but they're very hard to find. This is the first artist to do nightscapes in Japanese art. Shiokawa Burnin, <i>Fireflies</i> <i>at River's Edge,</i> he's the first artist to really show night. Before this, you knew it was night if you had torches or some indication of some source of light. But this artist actually darkened the scene. And these are fireflies in gold, actually in gold pigment. Incredible metalwork-- again, insects, insects, insects, insects, Japanese love insects. You see that as soon as you go to Japan. This is a river in northwest Kyoto, famous for its fish and its birds. You see the birds, and they're plunging into the water to get their lunch. But there are no fish in this actual painting. You just have to imagine they're there, because they are. Octopi are wonderful creatures. They're associated with fisherwomen as you see on the left there, pearl fishers. This is an amazing work, the only part of a national treasure that came out of Japan a long time ago. And we're very happy, the frolicking animals from the 12th century. And Issey Miyake-- this was my idea. I saw this show in Tokyo. They're incredible garments by him. There is a swallow and starfish and monkey pleats. I was just blown away. I said, we have to have them. It was a long negotiation. He's still with us. He's in his 80's, and he was very cooperative. And there's an incredible display here of his pieces. And the show ends with the great Murakami from Los Angeles from the Broad Foundation, the Broad Museum, the new Broad Museum, next to Disney Hall. It's never left Los Angeles. It will probably never leave Los Angeles again. But thanks to Eli Broad's friendship with Rusty Powell, the recently retired director of the National Gallery, we were able to obtain this painting. And I'm out of time. And I'm sorry. I could go for hours. But thank you so much, thank you, thank you, thank you.
