BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Arthur M. Sackler Gallery -- Exhibit: Traveler's Eye: Scenes of Asia

DC -- Arthur M. Sackler Gallery -- Exhibit: Traveler's Eye: Scenes of Asia:

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Description of Pictures: The Traveler's Eye: Scenes of Asia
November 22, 2014–May 31, 2015
Travel shapes how we see the world. Long after a trip has ended, images made to guide, track, and represent travelers and their journeys continue to influence our views of other cultures and our own cultural identities. Featuring more than 100 works created over the past five centuries, The Traveler’s Eye: Scenes of Asia provides glimpses of travels across the Asian continent, from trade voyages to tourist trips.
Juxtaposing East Asian scrolls, Japanese woodblock prints, and contemporary photography with maps, archaeological drawings, and souvenirs, The Traveler’s Eye invites viewers to look more closely at these seemingly straightforward images. Beneath the surface, they will discover the deliberate choices made by artists representing journeys and travelers seeking to remember them.
The exhibition moves through a provocative series of themes, ranging from Edo-period views of Japan’s famed Tōkaidō Road to Raghubir Singh’s photographic essay on the ubiquitous Ambassador car in India. All of the works shed light on particular cultural histories of travel throughout Asia.
The Traveler’s Eye concludes with three vignettes on Western travelers who recorded and remembered Asia during the last century: German archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld in central Asia, American collector (and museum founder) Charles Lang Freer in China, and the many travelers worldwide who shared memories with mass-produced, hand-colored postcards.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. TRAVEL_150328_010.JPG: Japan: "Southern Barbarians" on Japan's Shores In the 1540s, Portuguese and Spanish colonizers began establishing footholds in south and Southeast Asia. Commerce and conversion to Christianity were the tandem goals. The Japanese knew about ongoing colonization elsewhere and wanted no part of it. A century later, fearful of these Nanbanjin, or "southern barbarians," the Japanese expelled all foreigners (besides the Dutch, who were interested solely in trade) from their borders. In the meantime, Japanese artists had painted numerous six-fold screens depicting Iberian missionaries and merchants on Japan's shores. Until recently, Westerners typically viewed these screens as iconic images of their own technologically remarkable contact with distant lands. Westerners also assumed that the scenes were based on first-person observation. Recent research, however, suggests a more complex interpretation. Most scholars today assert that these panoramas are pastiches of a previously popular genre depicting Japanese ships. After all, these paintings weren't created for Westerners; more likely, they were commissioned by owners of major Japanese trading houses or of the ships themselves. Scholars also suggest that the Iberians in the screens are based more on adaptations of Buddhist figures than on observation. While an image of a ship might imply "adventure" or "exploration" to a Western viewer, it takes on different symbolism in Japan. The takarabune, or treasure ship, for example, transported the seven gods of good fortune, who arrived at the New Year to distribute blessings of prosperity -- a visual echo of the treasures being loaded into the ships on the screens. Rather than images celebrating international encounter and the brilliance of European outreach, Japanese viewers may have seen these paintings simply as messages of bounty and blessings.
2. TRAVEL_150328_020.JPG: "Southern Barbarians" on Japan's Shores
3. TRAVEL_150328_022.JPG: The Traveler's Eye: Scenes of Asia: Over centuries, images depicting travel have transformed individual journeys into familiar routes and distant sites into iconic destinations. Whether they were acquired as mementos by travelers or provided a virtual trip for people back home, these images have powerfully shaped perceptions of native and foreign lands. For The Traveler's Eye, six Freer|Sackler curated selected remarkable artworks and resonate objects that represent travels through Asia. Together, they explore how place becomes tied to conceptions of beauty, prosperity, tradition, and modernity. Created over give hundred years, the works are by travelers who recorded their own trips, as well as by artists who imagined, with compelling immediacy, journeys and cultural encounters. The exhibition is organized into vignettes of closely related works. The first three galleries present how artists in Japan, China, and India envisioned particular journeys and destinations at key moments between the 1600s and the 1990s. The last gallery contrasts personal and mass-produced records of travel to and within Asia during the twentieth century. Radically diverse in style and intent, these glimpses invite us to consider the visual choices that established particular routes, places, and human activities as fascinating or important. Looking beneath the surfaces of these works illuminates the ways that seemingly straightforward images encode broader cultural perspectives. Travel through these galleries to explore ideas about the significance of the past, the excitement of the new, and the relationship between individuals and the world.
4. TRAVEL_150328_030.JPG: China: On the Roads and Rivers of China Travel is one of the most common themes in traditional Chinese landscape painting. From ancient times, the emperors of China maintained a network of roads and waterways that unified their vast realm and facilitated the movement of people and goods. Owing to this imperial association, images of ordinary travelers on the roads and rivers of the empire inherently connoted the benevolent rule of an enlightened sovereign and evoked an era of peace and prosperity. The five paintings in this room portray commercial travel on land and water. These works were created for members of the political and business elite. Neither artists nor patrons were interested in documenting the hardships or actual circumstances of any particular journey. Rather these slice-of-life images of anonymous characters traveling or working together capture some of the noteworthy sights and scenes a traveler might encounter along the way. Simultaneously, they promote the fundamental ideals of a harmonious society and a well-ordered state. As noted in labels throughout the room, the different formats of Chinese painting (handscroll, hanging scroll, and album leaf) help to define and enhance the experience of looking at and understand these lively scenes.
5. TRAVEL_150328_033.JPG: Travelers at a Mountain Way Station: The unknown artist of this hanging scroll invoked the monumental vocabulary of Song dynasty (960–1279) landscape painting, where nature tends to dwarf people in both size and importance. Reinforced by the painting's vertical format, the mountains here maintain that scale, filling the frame and drawing the viewer to look up -- but human activity has supplanted landscape as the primary focus. At bottom, two riders accompanied by a porter approach a mountain way station, where numerous other travelers have paused to rest their mounts and grab a bite to eat. Above, earlier riders zigzag up the trail following the crests and cantilevered roadways until finally disappearing around a high bend. The well-maintained roads and travelers' apparent ease speak to the order and security of the time.
6. TRAVEL_150328_063.JPG: Boats Grappling Upstream Full of small details meant to delight the imagination, this album leaf reveals the texture of life in rural China. Using grappling hooks on long poles, men in five small transport boats negotiate the bend of a river and work their way upstream. Arriving from the opposite direction, similar boats land at a village market and unload their wares. From a pavilion perched above the swift current, two men let down a rope and bucket to draw water. Red-walled shrines or temples overlook the stream. Birds wheel over the roofs and watchtowers of a nearby city. This leaf originally was folded in the middle; the viewer would have opened it to reveal its content, like turning the page of a book. A meticulous work by an unidentified eighteenth-century artist, the painting bears a forged signature of the Yuan dynasty painter Wang Yuan (ca. 1280–after 1349) at lower left.
7. TRAVEL_150328_076.JPG: Travelers on the Road to Shu Four groups of springtime travelers negotiate a mountainous track in Shu, in modern Sichuan province. At right, several women riders wearing red hoods emerge from the mountains, accompanied by a male escort in front and another man wearing a tall hat at rear. In the middle, travelers rest as one of their horses rolls happily in the grass. At left, another contingent ascends one of the famous hanging roadways of Shu, which hugs the sheer cliff ahead. The painting's "blue-and-green" style originated during the Tang dynasty (618–907), considered China's golden age, and was often employed in later periods to evoke an era of peace and prosperity.
8. TRAVEL_150328_082.JPG: Well-Traveled Routes: In this gallery, seventeenth- to nineteenth-century prints depicting travels in Japan are presented alongside late twentieth-century color photographs of India by Raghubir Singh. Singh's views of the Indian landscape bear comparison in particular to Utagawa Hiroshige's nineteenth-century prints of the Tōkaidō, a key Japanese roadway. Although created more than a century apart and in different media, each group of works memorializes an artist's impressions of journeys along familiar routes. Both artists employ distinctive color palettes and juxtapose unusual visual elements, resulting in images that reach beyond simply depicting scenery to mediate the viewer's encounter with places and social contexts.
9. TRAVEL_150328_098.JPG: Japan: On the Tokaido, Japan's Eastern Sea Road: The Tokaido was the most important and heavily traveled of the five major routes that linked other regions to Edo (modern Tokyo), the administative and political seat of the shogun's government. Rebuilt in the early seventeenth century by the first Tokugawa shogun, this coastal road connected Edo and Kyoto, home of the emperor and Japan's historical center of authority and national identity. People traveled along the Tokaido primarily for political, mercantile, and religious reasons. The road provided a controlled route for commerce, communication, and official travel -- especially by the large retinues of daimyo (domainal lords) who were required to spend alternative years in Edo. other travelers used permits similar to today's passports to cross security checkpoints along the way. Travel along the Tokaido was mainly on foot. Although it was possible to make the entire journey in about a week, the route required fording bodies of water, and delays for weather or high water were common. Fifty-three stations -- rest stops offering refreshments, lodging, and some entertainment -- were established along the way. Leisure travel for sightseeing was not common on the Tokaido. Artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), however, had a rare opportunity to travel along the whole route with an official envoy in 1832 and went on to immortalize it in his best-selling woodblock prints. He created more than twenty full series of Fifty-Three Stations along the Tokaido, featuring designs of the lively activities and magnificent landscapes he witnessed and reimagined in his prints. Landscape prints by Hiroshige and other artists, such as Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), gave people throughout Japan images of sights and events that most had not experienced, much as videos, photos, and the Internet do today.
10. TRAVEL_150328_111.JPG: Yoshiwara: At Yoshiwara, the fifteenth station along the Tokaido -- far from the pleasure district in Edo with the same name -- Mount Fuji looms majestically from the mists that frequently envelop it completely. Hiroshige has chosen a low viewpoint that emphasizes the soaring height of the sacred volcanic mountain, which was believed to be the home of Buddhist and native deities.
11. TRAVEL_150328_134.JPG: Stations Along the Tokaido
12. TRAVEL_150328_182.JPG: Map of Beijing-Fengtian (Shenyang) Railroad: During his travels, Freer made extensive notations in whatever was available, including guidebooks, maps, and hotel stationery. Freer visited Shenyang in December 1910, following his return to Beijing from Longmen. On this map of the rail line from Beijing to Shenyang, he noted events, landscape features, and industries.
13. TRAVEL_150328_187.JPG: China: Freer at Longmen: In 1910, Charles Lang Freer, founder of the Freer Gallery of Art, made his final journey to China. He usually had stayed in urban centers, where he could meet with dealers and feelow collectors. Yet he was increasingly drawn to China's interior, where he could directly encounter its ancient capitals and cultural centers, thereby deepening his insight into and emotional connection with these works. On this trip, Freer's goal was to visit the Buddhist cave temple complex at Longmen Gorge in Henan province. One of China's great cultural monuments, Longmen has more than a thousand man-made caves, many containing masterpieces of stone sculpture dating from the fifth to the ninth century. The site is only five miles from the provincial capital of Luoyang, but in 1910, it was remote and largely abandoned; bandits had become a concern. Chinese officials insisted that an armed guard accompany Freer. When he set out from Luoyang, his party had grown to more than twenty people, including porters, a cook, a photographer, and six soldiers. Over the next two weeks, Freer and his photographer, Yutai, surveyed the caves with delight and awe. Many of the more than one hundred large-format photographs produced on this trip -- along with dozens of relief rubbings -- are the best in situ visual documents of sculptures that were looted over the following decades. Later in his life, Freer frequently recounted the profound impact of his time spent with some of the finest works of early Chinese Buddhist art.
14. TRAVEL_150328_220.JPG: Iraq: Archaoelogist Ernst Herzfeld at Samarra: German scholar Ernst Emil Herzfeld (1879-1948) is renowned for his archaeological explorations of Near Eastern sites and widely credited with introducing modern scientific methods to this field. His 1911-13 survey of Samarra in modern-day Iraq was the first major study of an Islamic-period site. Located some fifty miles north of Baghdad, Samarra was the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate during much of the ninth century -- a brief-lived cultural center of the Islamic world. Within this vast complex were imposing buildings of fired brick, decorated with ipulent plaster wall reliefs, painted wood carvings, and elaborate frescoes. Abandoned after the tenth century, the site was rapidly falling into ruin. Herzfeld, in typical fashion, painstakingly documented each artifact and architectural feature, amassing an impressive body of materials that allowed him to reconstruct large portions of the former metropolis. Before Herzfled, the public was unable to visualize the beauty of ninth-century Abbasid culture, which had virtually no representation in museums of publications. Herzfeld's analyses and careful reconstructions led to a reevaluation of Abbadis-period art and architecture, with its emphasis on rich surfaces filled with geometric forms.
15. TRAVEL_150328_234.JPG: Recording Travel in the Early Twentieth Century: Western adventurers, archaeologists, and scholars, such as Ernst Herzfeld and Charles Lang Freer, have long been traversing the globe to conduct research and explore foreign lands. In the early twentieth century, leisure travel among Europeans and North Americans also became increasingly common. Fascinated by the cultural heritage of Asia and the Middle East, tourists began to expand their horizons by venturing East. The advent of commercial travel networks was accompanied by a flood of photographs, drawings, postcards, mementos, and other means of recording scientific and sentimental experiences abroad. This gallery presents a variety of materials compiled by travelers in Asia and the Middle East, and offers insight into how these artifacts transmitted ideas, emotional responses, and technical information about locations and landscapes.
16. TRAVEL_150328_261.JPG: Throughout his adult life, Freer kept daybooks full of recordings of where he was and whom he met. These entries are complemented by extensive journals that Freer kept during his 1910 travel in China and letters he wrote to friends back in the United States. Together, these documents convey Freer's fascination with what he saw. He wrote to Longmen: "Its beauty is varied and has something new to disclose each time it is seen. It's of a fascinating and illusive kind. Behind and deeper is its spiritual meaning which forces itself upon one constantly."
17. TRAVEL_150328_268.JPG: Excavation of Samarra: Finds Sketchbook 1 Ernst Herzfeld, 1911-13 Herzfeld maintained a library of field sketches of objects, fragments, and inscriptions. Each is carefully numbered and cross-indexed to other drawings, photographs, and maps. Here, Herzfeld illustrates artifacts from the Palace of Caliph, including fragments of the carved plaster wall surfaces.
18. TRAVEL_150328_276.JPG: Postcards of Asia and the Islamic World: Perhaps the most recognizable artifact of travel over the past 150 years is the picture postcard. During their golden age (1890s–1920s), postcards were requisite souvenirs. They were collected as mementos or mailed to family and friends from abroad, accruing the additional prestige of a foreign stamp and postmark. Armchair travelers also acquired postcards, compiling them in specially made albums. Picture postcards were the inheritors of an earlier tradition of photographic souvenirs, the albumen prints of the 1860s–1880s. Smaller in size and lower in cost, postcards quickly developed into much more ubiquitous and varied souvenirs than the prints they replaced. In some cases, postcards were produced by Western firms and distributed globally; in others, they were made locally. Their images served a multitude of functions, from advertising to commemorating events, advancing political agendas, or romanticizing a vanishing way of life for tourists' benefit. With travelers and residents visiting the same photography shops, however, views intended for tourist markets served to redefine local communities' perceptions of their own pasts and traditions, as well as how they understood their own modernity. Postcards remained popular through the twentieth century, but with the advent of mobile phones, they are becoming harder to find. Millions of posts on Instagram, Facebook, and other outlets, however, prove that the appeal of recording travels with a striking photograph and brief message has not diminished.
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