Exhibitions

In Japan, the first sign of spring is the cherry blossom (sakura). The sakura flowers only for a short while, about a week, and has become the symbol of a transient world, its pink and white flowers conveying the traditional Japanese values of purity and simplicity.

The techniques of chromo-lithography printing first reached Japan at the beginning of the 20th century, when there appeared a series of posters of beautiful women. These posters were framed and exhibited in a closed hall, rather than being displayed on hoardings in the streets as is customary in the western world.

Modern Japanese art is cosmopolitan, largely because of the current speed of information retrieval, the artists' ability to travel, and the international exhibition scene in which they participate.

An owl, a crow, a monk wandering in endless wastes of snow, all represented with gentle humour in these monochromatic black woodblock prints, each with two small red marks, on rough paper - these are indications that the work can only be that of the artist Akiyama Iwao.

The paintings of Shigeru Matsuzaki, like the illustrated fables in children's books, conduct us on a journey through an enchanted world of dreams.

Japan, the chain of islands off the East coast of Asia, is a land that nature has endowed with an abundance of sweet water to replenish her rivers and lakes, and her waterfalls.

Genmei Takahashi was born in Kyoto in 1942.

The photographs in the Henderson Collection cover a period of change in Japan - the end of the isolation of the Tokugawa era
(1603-1868) and the exciting beginnings of a modern industrial society based on western technology in the Meiji era (1868-1912).

There is a legend that before Buddha entered nirvana, he summoned every living creature to him. Twelve creatures presented themselves, in the following order: mouse, ox, tiger, hare, dragon, snake, horse, sheep or ram, monkey, cock, dog, and a wild boar.

In the year 1603, after a long and bloody civil war, the Tokugawa Shognate came to power in Japan, a military rule that lasted more than 250 years.