Michigan Asian Art Society : April 2013

Michigan Oriental Art Society

Sunday, May 19, 2013

St John Hospital-Oakland Education Center, 27351 Dequindre Rd, Madison Heights (between 11 Mile and 12 Mile Rds)

Social Time at 1:30 pm, Meeting at 2:00 pm.

We hope to see you at the May 19 meeting devoted to Japanese Woodblock Prints and a video showing of a BBC feature on Hokusai’s “The Great Wave”.

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PRIOR MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT

Michigan Oriental Art Society

Sunday, April 21, 2013

St John Hospital-Oakland Education Center, 27351 Dequindre Rd, Madison Heights (between 11 Mile and 12 Mile Rds)

Social Time at 1:30 pm, Meeting at 2:00 pm.

Isamu Noguchi and Qi Baishi: Beijing 1930

Natsu Oyobe, Associate Curator of Asian Art, University of Michigan Museum of Art

The career and work of the American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) have long been associated with Japan and India. Few people know, however, that Noguchi lived and studied in China during the formative years between his apprenticeship with the abstract sculptor Constantin Brancusi in Paris in the mid-1920s and his immersion in New York’s vanguard art circles in the 1930s. Isamu Noguchi and Qi Baishi: Beijing 1930 is the first large-scale exhibition to focus on the fruits of Noguchi’s six-month stay in Beijing (Peking) from July 1930 to January 1931. There he had the remarkable opportunity to study with the ink painter Qi Baishi (1864–1957), now considered one of the most important artists of twentieth-century China. The result of Noguchi’s encounter with Qi was a series of more than one hundred works in ink on paper later called the Peking Drawings. When these are seen side by side with contemporary paintings by Qi Baishi, as they are for the first time in this exhibition, they reveal the importance of China in Noguchi’s artistic formation. This talk will introduce the overview of the groundbreaking exhibition, which will open on May 18 at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.