EPOCHS & EXPERIENCES
HAKUHō (LATE 7 - EARLY 8 CENTURY)
As the site grows, this page will be home to random sketches of authentic encounters with Japan that you can experience with Kadensho.
Arranged around the standard epochs of Japanese art history, each short article will relate thematically to one of those epochs.
Room 2 of the Taniguchi Yoshio-designed Gallery of the Horyuji Treasures, an annex of the Tokyo National Museum dating from 1999, is for me one of the most beautiful gallery spaces in the World. The treasures of the Horyuji Temple – one of the oldest extant temples in Japan – were given by the abbot to the Imperial Household for safekeeping in 1878, which then passed them to the Tokyo Imperial Museum (today’s TNM). The collection offers a unique slice of 7th Century life, almost unimaginable anywhere else.
It encompasses textiles – some of Sassanian origin, traded along the Silk Road -, bronzes, wooden masks used in gigaku dances, ritual and everyday objects and accoutrements, calligraphy, and painting. The annex is reached along a smooth stone causeway over a pond that perfectly reflects its box-like glass, steel, and concrete structure. The whole harmonious effect is clean and elegant, and one feels drawn to enter.
Inside the calm, understated though luxuriously surfaced gallery one almost immediately encounters Room 2. It houses an unrivalled array of Hakuhō Period gilt-bronze images of Avalokitesvara, or Kannon Bosatsu in Japanese, evenly spaced across the faintly glimmering grey marble floor, each standing on a plinth within its own downlit glass box. The display is of a piece with Taniguchi’s building – the most sophisticated ancient works of art perfectly presented in the most sophisticated of modern settings.
The room is dedicated to bronze, and apart from the Kannon statues it is lined with cast and repoussé pieces. The Kannon, each no larger than perhaps a foot, are all similarly cast in styles representative of the centuries between the 4th and the 7th, during which waves of Chinese artists and crafts people settled around the Yamato Court, to ply their trades and pass on their skills to the locals. Similar they maybe, but the individuality of each image reveals itself in subtle changes of facial expression and posture or the way each’s robes cascade with the kind of angular naturalism characteristic of the period. The calm symmetry of the gallery encourages one to become engrossed in the minute examination of each tiny masterpiece.
