About the Program
January 27-31, 2014
January 27-31, 2014
Japan is known for cherishing its cultural heritage. A system of designating objects of cultural significance as either Important Cultural Property or National Treasure has ensured the safeguarding and reverence for objects of particular beauty and resonance. Similarly, experts in significant historical artistic traditions are honored not only for their outstanding and honed abilities, but also for their ongoing contributions to cultural life and national definition. Indeed, they are the vessels through which arts are passed down and which enable traditional arts to thrive.
A spirit of ambassadorship and extraordinary generosity on the part of our visitors brings us at once the renowned noh drama, techniques of traditional Kyoto-style cooking and discussion of their incorporation into family life, and an introduction to the rebuilding and rededication processes of the great Imperial shrines. During this week, we are given a rare opportunity to experience - with our eyes, senses, and minds - these three heritage practices, each with deep roots in Japanese culture. Artists of the highest level perform, demonstrate, and explain their respective expertise and address the topic of handing down the knowledge and methods that their work encompasses. You are invited to enjoy and learn from each of our eminent visitors, and also to consider ways in which traditional cultural and artistic forms continue to exist through the process of transmission and the “vessels” through whom they pass. These visiting artists preserve cultural traditions, but not in glass: through continuing practice, they carry the traditions forward, reinvigorating them and devoting their lives to keeping vibrancy and meaning in their inheritance.
May the events of the week bring enrichment to our individual lives, and may we collectively learn, from the exceptional dedication of our visitors and those who have supported them in coming here, to maintain our engagement with our own arts and cultural legacies as essential and necessary treasures in our lives.
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For more information about the program
Please contact the program director, Katherine Saltzman-Li: [email protected]
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Acknowledgements
Master Artists from Japan: Living Traditions owes its existence to the initiation and tremendous contributions from the KofukuTaishi project of Felissimo, Japan, together with Professor Taguchi Akiko of Kyoto University of Art and Design. It is through their joint dedication to traditional Japanese culture, and a sense of mission in facilitating international visits by some of Japan’s finest artists, that UCSB is able to bring this program to our community.
The program is co-sponsored at UCSB by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, Shinto Studies Chair Endowment, Division of Humanities and Fine Arts, UC Institute for Research in the Arts, East Asia Center, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, College of Creative Studies, Department of Theater and Dance, Department of Religious Studies, UCSB Art, Design & Architecture Museum, and the MultiCultural Center. We are very grateful to Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Friends of Asian Art for co-sponsorship of the museum event that forms part of the week’s program, and to Susan Tai, Elizabeth Atkins Curator of Asian Art, for her important role in helping arrange this event. Finally, this program would not have been possible without the extremely generous commitment of the artists: Sugimoto Setsuko, Katayama Kuroemon, who is joined by Aoki Michiyoshi, and Masuura Yukihito. Each artist made time in a very busy schedule, and together they offer us their work in a gesture of friendship. Their group expression of gratitude on behalf of their countrymen, who have suffered so greatly in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, sets a model for the power of art to express and communicate humanity. |