Mia Curator Talk: The Art and Life of Fukuda Kodōjin: Japan’s Great Poet and Landscape Artist (Online)

Please join us for Curator Talk “The Art and Life of Fukuda Kodōjin: Japan’s Great Poet and Landscape Artist” on Thursday, April 20 at 6:00 p.m. on Zoom.

Fukuda Kodōjin (1865–1944) was one of a handful of scholar-artists who continued the tradition of Japanese literati painting (nanga) in the early twentieth century. Kodōjin’s painting style is characterized by bizarrely shaped mountain forms rendered in vivid color or monochromatic ink that often include a solitary scholar enjoying the expansive beauty of nature. Not only a painter, Kodōjin was also an accomplished poet and calligrapher patronized by influential industrialists and politicians of the era. Following his death, he slipped into obscurity, and today is more appreciated outside his native Japan. The result of fifteen years of extensive research into more than eight hundred works, in April, Dr. Andreas Marks will talk about his upcoming 344-page book that accompanies the first ever exhibition of Kodōjin outside of Japan, on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art from April to June 2023.

(Picture left) Fukuda Kodōjin, Landscape after Mi Fu, April 1918, hanging scroll: ink on silk, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Suzanne S. Roberts Fund for Asian Art (2012.71.3) , (Picture below) Fukuda Kodōjin, Blue-green Landscape, April 1928, hanging scroll: ink and color on silk, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Gift of David Tausig Frank and Kazukuni Sugiyama (2015.111.21)

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Dr. Andreas Marks is the Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese and Korean Art and director of the Clark Center for Japanese Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. From 2008 to 2013 he was the director and chief curator of the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture in California. He has a Ph.D. from Leiden University in the Netherlands and a master’s degree in East Asian Art History from the University of Bonn, Germany. A specialist of Japanese woodblock prints, he is the author of 16 books. In 2014 he received an award from the International Ukiyo‐e Society in Japan for his research. He has curated exhibitions in a variety of media from pre‐modern to contemporary art and visual culture at 38 museums. His most recent book on Hokusai's reknown Fuji series was published by Taschen last summer. His next book will introduce 100 different types of Japanese demons and ghosts and is said to be released this autumn.