East Asian botanical motifs at the Sackler; Eighth Annual Lantern Festival at Forest Hills
By RANDI HOPKINS | June 29, 2006
Forest Hills Lantern Festival |
The flowering landscape is more than just beautiful and awe-inspiring for East Asian artists and poets, who have always attributed layers of symbolic meaning and to nature’s blooms and branches. The most basic brushstrokes of classic Asian painting are known as the “Four Gentlemen”: plum blossom, orchid, chrysanthemum, and bamboo, each said to embody a noble virtue of the ideal Confucian gentleman scholar. Opening at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum on July 8, “CULTIVATING VIRTUE: BOTANICAL MOTIFS AND SYMBOLS IN EAST ASIAN ART” uses this theme as the organizing principle for what promises to be a pleasurable show of one slice of the museum’s superb permanent collection, works that feature popular botanical themes and symbols as their principal subjects. Assembled by the Sackler’s curators of Asian Art, it’ll include Cho Hui-ryong, a Korean artist whose work in the first half of the 19th century has been seen as harking back to ancient tradition and also prefiguring modern trends, and Yamamoto Baiitsu, a Japanese artist painting in this same period who was esteemed for his bird-and-flower pictures in which the plants, in particular, often stand as symbols of human values like modesty, loyalty, and purity — hey, maybe the show will rub off on some of us.Asian culture places a premium on maintaining contact with one’s ancestors, a commendable tradition that the Forest Hills Cemetery celebrates in its “ANNUAL LANTERN FESTIVAL,” this year on July 13. Now in its eighth year, the event is based on Japan’s Buddhist Bon Festival, in which you pray for the repose of your ancestors’ souls and, as the heavy curtain that separates the worlds of the living and the departed lifts, send messages to the other side. Visitors to the Lantern Festival are invited to make paper lanterns with personal notes for their loved ones and set them afloat on a small lake, lit by a small candle. Before the lanterns are sent adrift, participants can picnic on the lovely grounds of the cemetery, communing with our communal dead and enjoying a multi-cultural program of music and dance that’ll include performances by gospel singers Ron Murphy, Athene Wilson, and Wannetta Jackson, Master Tsuji’s Samurai Taiko Drummers, and students from Showa Institute and Chu Ling Dance Academy.
“CULTIVATING VIRTUE: BOTANICAL MOTIFS AND SYMBOLS IN EAST ASIAN ART” at Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 485 Broadway, Cambridge | July 8–April 8 | 617.495.9400 | “EIGHTH ANNUAL LANTERN FESTIVAL” at Forest Hills Cemetery, 95 Forest Hills Ave, Jamaica Plain | July 13: 6-9 pm [rain date: July 20] | $10 donation suggestion suggested for each lantern | 617.524.0128
On the Web
Arthur M. Sackler Museum: http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu
Forest Hills Cemetery: http://www.foresthillstrust.org
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