A Taste For Japanese Art
Through January 1, 2007

This exhibition celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of Charles Lang Freer's gift of his collection and museum to the United States features a selection of 31 paintings, calligraphy, wood sculpture, lacquer, and ceramics from Freer's Japanese art collection.

For two decades from 1887, when Freer bought his first Japanese painting, his interest in Japanese art grew deeper, as he sought to increase his knowledge of Japanese and Asian art and to understand the aesthetic harmonies between art of different historical periods and cultures. Although he was encouraged in these interests by his friends, the artist James McNeill Whistler, and the scholar Ernest Fenollosa, Freer relied on his own judgment and consciously resisted the decorative porcelain and gold lacquerware popular among Western collectors. Instead, he focused on painting, ceramics, Buddhist sculpture, and lacquerware from earlier periods, forming a collection of some 1100 Japanese works of art dating from the eighth through the nineteenth centuries.

Highlights of this exhibition include a Heian period (794–1185 Buddhist sculpture, a thirteenth-century Buddhist narrative handscroll, Miracles of the Bodhisattva Jiz?, Moonlight Revelry at Doz? Sagami, by Kitagawa Utamaro, Fisherman and Woodcutter by Katsushika Hokusai, calligraphy by Hon'ami K?etsu, paintings by Ogata K?rin and ceramics by his brother, Kenzan.

Facing East: Portraits From Asia
July 1–September 4, 2006

"Facing East: Portraits from Asia," on view July 1 through September 4 at the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, explores how portraits expressed identity in Asia and the Near East. Paintings, sculpture, and photographs of Egyptian pharaohs, Chinese empresses, Japanese actors and a host of other subjects, reveal the unique ways that the self was understood, represented, and projected in Asian art.

The exhibition includes approximately 70 masterpieces from the collections of Chinese, Japanese, South Asian, Islamic and Ancient Near Eastern art at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art. A number of the works from the Sackler and Freer galleries will be on view for the first time.

Popular and academic surveys of portraiture deny that Asia had a portrait tradition. "Facing East" reveals rich and diverse Asian conceptions of portraiture through thought-provoking, cross-cultural juxtapositions of portraits in thematic groupings. These portraits not only provide an entrée into Asian cultures, but also lay bare many of the mechanisms and conceptions of the self that inform western portraiture.