Thursday 19 June, 2025
6:00pm BST - 7:00pm BST
Online lecture via Zoom.
50 min lecture followed by Q&A.
Free and open to all, booking essential.
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If you have limited access to the internet but would still like to view the lecture, please email sisjac@sainsbury-institute.org or call us on +44 (0) 1603 597507 to book to attend our livestream from 64 The Close.
Speaker
Dr Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer (Associate Professor in Japanese Arts, Cultures, and Heritage, Sainsbury Institute)
About the Talk
The talk “Unpacking the Archive” in its experimental format invites the audience to discover a private archive of leading Japanese calligrapher of the twentieth century, Morita Shiryū (1912-1998), which documents his efforts to internationalize Japanese calligraphy in the postwar years. Morita Shiryū was instrumental in bringing the art worlds of European and American abstract art and Japanese avant-garde art closer to each other and, throughout his career spanning almost fifty years, created a global network of abstract artists, curators, art critics, Zen scholars and philosophers. In dialogue with artists such as Franz Kline, Pierre Soulage, Pierre Alechinsky, Hasegawa Saburō, Yoshihara Jirō, and Zen scholars including Hisamatsu Shin’ichi and Suzuki Daisetsu, Morita redefined modern Japanese calligraphy, merging and innovating traditional arts with cutting-edge ideas and art practices.
The artist’s personal archive, meticulously assembled over almost forty years, has not been accessible to researchers until now. This will be the first opportunity to bring its content to a broader audience. Streaming from within the archive which is situated in Uji, Japan, together we will look at the letters from artists and galleries in Europe, international exhibitions, artworks, postcards, and sketches, which reflect the zeitgeist and networks of global postwar art, but also provide an intimate insight into one artist’s creative process and life as it was unfolding. This talk will invite for reflection about the role of an archive in art history, and about the connection between the material traces and artistic creativity in the art of calligraphy.
About the Speaker
Dr Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer is an art historian specialising in modern Japanese art. Before joining the Sainsbury Institute in 2018, she received her Ph.D. from Heidelberg University and held postdoctoral positions at Emory University, Atlanta, GA and Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington, D.C. Her research interests include postwar art in Japan; modern calligraphy history in East Asia; transcultural studies; abstract art; and the relationship between image and language in modern Japan. She is the author of Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde (Japanese Visual Culture Series 19, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020), and of the recently published article “Zen Violence: The Legacy of Nantenbō Tōjū’s Calligraphy” (Journal of Japanese Studies, Spring 2025). She is currently working on her second book project on the history of calligraphy modernization in East Asia.
Image: Unidentified artist. Books and Scholars’ Possessions. Korea, early 20th century. Ten-panel folding screen; ink and color on silk. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005.385. Purchase, Shelby White Gift, 2005.
The Third Thursday Lecture series is funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and Yakult UK.