"Images of the Journey"

When:

Sundays from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Fridays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Event is ongoing: Until Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Where: Spencer Museum of Art, 1301 Miss., KU campus, Lawrence

Cost: Free

Age limit: All ages

Categories: Art | Ongoing exhibit

Description: Travel is adventure. Not just the destination, but also the journey itself, invites new, enriching experiences. This summer, the Spencer Museum of Art presents Images of the Journey, a selection of works from the museum's Asian collection highlighting depictions of travel, explorations of places unfamiliar to the artists and representations of artists' journeys. The works portray traveling figures, evoke well-known tourist destinations and routes, record artists' experiences of travel, and invite the viewer to experience "virtual" travel through interaction with the images.

Through experiences of travel, we become aware of geography and of the change in our surroundings. Images of the Journey features depictions of the diverse natural features of Asia, including China's northwestern desert and high mountain areas, the rolling, watery landscape of southern China, and the seascapes and inland highways of Japan. The vast landscape paintings invite the viewer to travel through the various compositional elements, while the closer vignettes help the viewer to associate more directly with the travelers within their different environments.

The exhibition crosses temporal and geographic boundaries, moving from seventh-century China to nineteenth-century Japan and then to modern-day China, while depicting different aspects of travel. The camel as valued in seventh-century China is seen again as an important vehicle in twentieth-century northwestern China. Well-established painting traditions from eighteenth-century China are revisited a generation later in Japan. Different nineteenth-century artists' interpretations of the well-known Japanese highway, the Tokaido, speak to the significance of this road as a valuable cultural symbol. Many of the paintings draw upon the Spencer Museum's rich collection of twentieth-century Chinese paintings; it is during this period that Chinese art comes to be recognized on a global level and the concept of art as a world language that obliterates boundaries gains momentum.

Event posted June 13, 2005
Last updated Sept. 15, 2005

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"Images of the Journey"

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