The other day, Meri Mitsuyoshi caught a Wall Street Journal article introducing Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan. This exhibition opened at Japan’s Yokohama Museum of Art (January 12–March 24), is currently at the Noguchi Museum in Queens (May 1–July 14, 2019), and will be at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco this coming September 27–December 8, 2019!
This superb (by all accounts) exhibition is curated by Dakin Hart, Senior Curator at The Noguchi Museum, and Mark Dean Johnson, Professor and Gallery Director at San Francisco State University. In addition to a bilingual exhibition catalogue, there is The Saburo Hasegawa Reader, a new and no-cost download from UC Press:
https://luminosoa.org/site/books/10.1525/luminos.70/
Materials by and about Hasegawa have been difficult to come by and now, suddenly, we have this treasure trove! Thanks to everyone at UC Press who made The Saburo Hasegawa Reader possible and available as an open access monograph.
Readers may remember that Gary Snyder attributes the start of Mountains and Rivers Without End to a conversation over tea in San Francisco with Hasegawa on Shakyamuni Buddha’s birthday, April 8, 1956, as noted in his “The Making of Mountains and Rivers Without End” essay (M&RWE 155) and also here (see top entry):
[Initial 山 河 Conception: 8:IV:1956 occurred during a long talk with Hasegawa Saburo on Sesshu.]
From Eliot Weinberger, “Gary Snyder: The Art of Poetry LXXIV.” The Paris Review 141 (Winter 1996): 89-118, available via this link. A video of this Paris Review interview is available here on YouTube.
Here’s the Journal article mentioned above: Larry Esplund, “‘Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan’ Review: Beauty without Borders,” Wall Street Journal (3 June 2019), p. A19, available here as a PDF.
Meri and I enjoyed an afternoon at the Noguchi Museum several years ago. When I commented on how good it will be to see this show at the Asian, she sighed and said, “Yes, but the light at the Noguchi . . .”
ADDENDUM:
I am happy to report that Meri & I were able to catch this exhibition at the Asian Art Museum on October 27 as part of our wedding anniversary day adventures:
