October 15, 2009
Talk traces long journey of Japanese art treasure
Heather Blair, assistant professor of religious studies at Indiana University, will give a talk titled Sacred, Scrap, or Art? The Modern Career of Zao Gongen at 2:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 19 in 312 Art.
The talk focuses on a large incised bronze plaque dating to the year 1001 and bearing the image of Zao Gongen that rotates through the galleries in the Tokyo National Museum. This bronze is designated a national treasure, but once was enshrined atop the peak of Kinpusen, just south of Yoshino in the northern reaches of the Omine Range. How did this masterpiece of Japanese art leave the mountain, pass through the hands of a scrap-metal dealer, join the possessions of Sojiji, a Zen temple in Tokyo, and finally enter the modern art-historical canon? That’s what Blair will discuss.
Blair earned her master’s from the UW’s Comparative Religion program and, following a year in Japan, began her doctoral coursework in Japanese religions at Columbia University. She followed her adviser, Ryuichi Abe, to Harvard University in 2004, and conducted research in Japan at Tokyo
University from 2005 to 2007. In 2008, she completed her dissertation, “Peak of Gold: Trace, Place, and Religion in Heian Japan,” an examination of the role played by the sacred mountain Kinpusen in aristocratic culture, c. 1000-1100. The dissertation was awarded the first biennial Stanley Weinstein Dissertation Prize for the best doctoral thesis in East Asian Buddhist studies in 2006-2008.
Blair spent the 2008-2009 academic year as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford before joining the faculty at Indiana University. The talk is free and open to the public.
