NEW YORK.- As part of its centennial program, Japan100: Celebrating a Century, Japan Society Gallery presents Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan, the first systematic introduction to this subject mounted by a U.S. museum in over 30 years. On view from March 28 – June 17, 2007, the exhibition explores the origins and traditions of figure painting associated with Zen Buddhist communities of medieval Japan, an era of singular artistic merit. Moreover, Awakenings introduces a contemporary shift in the way that scholars and art historians interpret, look at, and think about Zen paintings.

Co-organized by Japan Society and the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan, and the Independent Administrative Institution National Museum of Japan (Tokyo National Museum, Kyoto National Museum, Nara National Museum and Kyushu National Museum), Awakenings is comprised of 47 Japanese (Zen) and Chinese (Chan) painted works from the 13th to the 16th century, including loans from museum and private collections in Japan, North America, and Europe. In addition, the exhibition will feature one Japanese National Treasure, which is making its first trip out of Japan, and eleven Important Cultural Properties, which rarely travel or leave the country.

Awakenings continues Japan Society's tradition of major Buddhist art exhibitions, with the cooperation of important institutions in Japan, Europe, and the United States, including Transmitting the Forms of Divinity: Early Buddhist Art from Korea and Japan (2003); Enlightenment Embodied: The Art of the Buddhist Sculptor (1997, organized with the Agency for Cultural Affairs during the Society's 90th Anniversary); Visions of the Dharma: Japanese Buddhist Painting and Prints in the Honolulu Academy of Arts (1992, traveling exhibition); The Great Age of Japanese Buddhist Sculpture (1982, traveling show from Kimbell Art Museum, Texas); and Horyu-ji: Temple of the Exalted Law – Early Buddhist Art from Japan (1981, as part of the 75th Anniversary).

Since World War II, there have only been two major art exhibitions outside of Japan related to medieval Japanese Zen Buddhism. The first, Zen Painting and Calligraphy, held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1970, assembled some of the finest surviving works in Japanese collections and provided an overview of many of the principal premodern pictorial themes and genres of Chan and Zen Buddhism. The second exhibition, Zen: Masters of Meditation in Images and Writings, held at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich in 1993, limited its scope to Japan’s medieval period (ca. 1200–1600) but brought together an impressive selection of paintings, calligraphies, robes, and sculptures, many from temples in Japan and inaccessible to the general public. Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan focuses on Japan’s medieval period and its antecedents in China. It builds upon the insights of these predecessors but directs attention specifically to the visually alluring and potentially esoteric subject of Zen figure painting.

Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan explores the significance of figural painting in the presentation, performance, and perpetuation of religious lineage in medieval Chan/Zen monastic settings. This exhibition is a search for new ways to understand Zen communities in medieval Japan as embodied in representations of the Zen “pantheon”: the Buddha Sakyamuni and various bodhisattvas, the First Patriarch of Chan/Zen, Bodhidharma, and other figures. Awakenings proposes that figure paintings, often graced with calligraphic inscriptions, played an indispensable role historically in the fashioning of representations of Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen Buddhists in relation to themselves and to the communities that supported (or competed with) them.

Including hanging scroll paintings and painted sliding door panels (fusuma-e), the works in the exhibition depict Zen Buddhist monks in spirit-infused states: sleeping, dreaming, walking, and reaching awakening. Communicating an “ideal self,” these painted images gave their creators a uniquely sophisticated format to “perform” and record their awakened status for themselves and subsequent spiritual followers, while also preserving their distinct religious identities for posterity. Through its provocative presentation of these delicate works, Awakenings traces the roles that monks performed in relation to other members of society, from patrons to dignitaries to laypeople.

Eminent Zen masters not only left behind relics, as did their ancestor Sakyamuni, but they also produced numerous texts and commentaries, brush traces, and painted images. The latter, as Awakenings suggests, were continually on view, carefully preserved, and indeed would become ubiquitous and indispensable within the devotional, literary, and artistic lives of later generations of monks, nuns, and lay followers.

The exhibition also highlights the visual characteristics of these paintings—their brushwork, compositions, and subtle gestures and poses—and demonstrates that the styles and practices that flourished briefly in China in calligraphy and other forms were transmitted to and further developed in Japan. Awakenings illuminates the artistic, philosophical, literary, and religious dimensions of this genre within the art of Zen as it evolved in religious communities in Japan in dialogue with the Asian continent.

Given the historical erosion of Chan monastic sites and artifacts in China, due partly to political circumstances throughout subsequent centuries, the large number of Chan paintings and calligraphies from the Song dynasty that survive in Japan have often been used to argue for Japanese Zen as the apogee of what was in fact an interdependent religious tradition and culture across East Asia. Rather than depicting Japanese Zen as the ultimate culmination, the exhibition presents a select group of works extant in Japanese monasteries, temples, and museums (and later passing into Western collections) as a basis from which to reconstruct an explicitly interregional history of Chan and Zen visual culture, distinguished by pluralism and multi-sectarian flavor.

For the first time, the intercultural contexts and specific characters through which Zen communities represented themselves are examined in Awakenings. Zen figure painting established its own pantheon based on an accepted Mahāyāna Buddhist canon of well-known buddhas and bodhisattvas. In addition to patriarchs and famous early monks, newly deified figures were incorporated into this pantheon to expand the lineage of intuitive awakening. The exhibition also explores new interpretations of these old Mahāyāna themes, as well as the uniquely sectarian use of portraiture, in order to understand the culture of likeness that developed in early Zen communities.

Featuring numerous works of great importance, Awakenings will present the Japanese National Treasure Budai and Jiang Mohe, a painting by Yintuoluo that depicts Budai, a roving priest of the street who is among the best-known members of the Chan/Zen pantheon called sansheng (scattered saints), seated and accompanied by Jiang Zongba (Jiang Mohe). According to the Jingde-Era Record of the Transmission of the Lamp (Jingde Chuandeng Lu; 1004–1008), these sansheng were not considered members of the legitimate patriarchal succession but did enjoy a special spiritual status in Chinese Buddhist belief systems. This painting depicts a legend, wherein Budai was bathing in a river and asked Jiang to scrub his back; suddenly “four eyes” appeared on it. This story does not appear in the earliest Chan account of Budai, but is included in a mid-thirteenth-century record. Above the figures is an inscription in two lines, brushed in a fluid semi-cursive mode of calligraphy, which identifies the story depicted in the