Glamorous department stores, fashionable cafes, popular movie theatres, swinging dance halls and high-tech transportation.

Japanese Modernism includes a considerable number of beautiful graphic paper-based items, such as colour wood-block prints, fold-out maps, brochures, magazines and postcards, displayed amongst artworks of different material types, primarily…

Throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, Japan’s arts, crafts and design have been heralded for their high level of technical skill, sophisticated use of materials and simple design aestheti

Folding screens, known traditionally as Byõbu in Japan, were initially utilised for the purely practical purpose of blocking drafts in Japanese homes

Widely known as Arita ware in Japan, after the place of its original production and Imari ware in Europe, after the town from where they were exported, Japanese porcelain represents…

In 2004 the National Gallery of Victoria was gifted an early seventeenth-century English painted cabinet (fig. 1).

Noh is a masked dance-drama in which the extreme stylisation of actors’ movements and music evokes a beautiful and mysterious setting for narratives that move between the human and spiritual…

Bodhisattvas are individuals filled with compassion who, rather than enter Nirvana after attaining enlightenment, remain in the life–death cycle to redeem other soul

This simple and elegant Shigaraki jar provides great insight into Japanese culture and the unique Japanese spirit of wabi-sabi.

Japanese suits of armour are complex constructions made with many different materials including suede, rawhide, silk, hemp, various metals and Asian lacquer.

After a century of civil wars, the Tokugawa shoguns (military rulers) of the Edo period (1615–1868) unified Japan and brought about more than 250 years of peace and prospe

This pair of screens illustrates the characteristic elegance, stylisation and flat surface design of Japanese art

Beauty or the life of things, is always deeper as hidden within than as outwardly expressed, even as life of the universe beats always underneath incidental appearance

Negoro refers to simple and elegant red lacquer objects that were produced during Japan’s medieval period, between the twelfth and seventeenth centurie

Folding screens are called byobu in Japanese, meaning protection against (byo) the wind (bu).