Good evening, everyone, thank you for being patient with us as we delay beginning our event a little. We have had such great popularity, we are suffering from our own success, not only was the event sold out, we have a crowd of people eager to get seats who would like to come into the room. If there is a center seat in your aisle that you have been avoiding, if you wouldn't mind moving in to make it a little bit easier for people to fill in the empty seats, we would greatly appreciate it, thank you very much. My name is Michelle DiMarzo, I'm the curator of education here at the museum, and it is my pleasure to welcome you all tonight to kick off our spring calendar with the opening of Gifts of Gold, the art of Japanese lacquer boxes, and I just want to point out we have a lot of fantastic programs coming up this spring, so when you go downstairs, please be sure to grab one of our program brochures so that you can see everything that is coming up later this semester, and it's also my pleasure to introduce tonight's speaker, Eva Kobachi, who is known to many of us in the room as both a professor and a colleague. She is the curator of Gifts of Gold, and she is adjunct professor of our history here at Fairfield University in the art history program in the Department of Visual Performing Arts. She teaches courses on the arts of Asia and global introductory courses in art history. Eva received her PhD in the history of art from Yale University with a focus on pre-modern Japanese art of the 14th, I'm sorry, and her research focuses on Japanese illustrated scrolls and Buddhist art of the 14th century. She's held fellowships at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Culture in the UK, and the Asian Network Loose Foundation Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship here at Fairfield. In 2016, she was the co-curator of the exhibition Kamakura, Realism and Spirituality in the Sculpture of Japan at the Asia Society Museum in New York City, and with the editor and contributing author of the exhibition catalog. Dr. Kobachi also volunteered for the Westport Public Art Collection, where she serves as chair of the Education Committee. So please drive me in welcoming Dr. Eva Kobachi. Thank you so much, Michelle, for the kind introduction, and thank you all for coming out on this blustery and increasingly frigid evening. I want to thank the Fairfield University Art Museum for inviting me to put together this exhibition, which has been in development over a number of years now, which was prompted by the acquisition by the museum of a beautiful writing box with cranes that you'll see in the show. So that's what really inspired this project and kicked it off. So I want to thank the entire museum staff, Carrie Weber, the director, Michelle DeMarzo, of course, Megan Pacqua and Emily McKeon, for really shepherding this project along over the past few years. My deep gratitude goes to the lenders of the exhibition, private and institutional, and especially to Eric Thompson for working with us on this project. It's really been a pleasure. And also my gratitude goes to Setsuko and Maikuni, who kindly lent some kimonos from their collection to accompany the lacquer exhibition, which will also be really useful in the course that I'm teaching this spring as well. I also want to thank my colleagues in the Art History Program and the Asian Studies Department for their support, and last but not least, my family for love support and for putting up with me. So let me see if I can get this working. So today's lecture will be an introduction to the exhibition and to the works that are on display into lacquer as an artistic form. And then I want to also take a bit of a deep dive into two topics that are kind of near and dear to my heart. One is the eight views in lacquer and painting, and I'll fill you in on what the eight views are. That's a poetic and painting theme. And then also on poem cards and fans as motifs in lacquer decoration. I'll be showing a lot of contextual images today, and so for clarity, I have put the titles of works in the exhibition in gold at the bottom, and any contextual works, works from other collections that are not here for this show will be shown in gray or in black just so that you can keep them all straight as we go down and have a little preview of what you'll see once you go into the galleries a little bit later. So my own introduction to lacquer came when I worked as a graduate student at the Yale University Art Gallery many years ago now. For a year I worked there in the Asian Art Department, and I was later invited to write a short essay on these two objects, which Yale has kindly lent to the exhibition for their bulletin. So that was my introduction to lacquer, and the experience of working in the Yale Art Gallery was really formative for my future teaching and for my interest in working with original works of art in person and taking my students to stand in front of works of art and to talk about them in a gallery and museum setting. And to that point we're extraordinarily blessed to have this museum here on campus and the wonderful complimented exhibitions that are ongoing every semester. The programs, the permanent collection, and the works that we have on long-term loan really facilitate the kind of teaching that I do and that my colleagues in the Art History Department do as well. So we're really thankful for that and look forward to many future years of wonderful shows. Okay, so let's get into the lacquer, starting with these two. So could you speak for us with the microphone so we can have a volume? Absolutely. Thank you, Michelle. I'll try to lean forward a bit. So lacquer wares and lacquer objects are ultimately functional things. As you can see here in this meal table and a tea caddy that are both in the show. Red and black are the principal colors of Japanese lacquer ware, although certainly other colors are used in lacquer as well, and as we will see, black and red lacquer also become a base for sprinkled picture decoration in gold and other metals on a majority of the objects in the exhibition. So this tray that we see here shows signs of wear and use, which relates to that idea of utilitarian function that I talked about, but these are also prized aesthetic qualities. Conserves and collectors sought out these kinds of signs of wear and use over time, part of the aesthetic tradition of appreciating these objects. But how do we know that they were actually used for these kinds of things? This takes me back to the illustrated scrolls that Michelle mentioned that I work on in my research. And so here, I show you a scene from a 14th century hands scroll. It's a detail of a much larger scene. Showing a group of people eating off precisely the kind of table that we see here in the show. And this dates to the early 14th century when these types of lacquer wares, nigoro wares as we call them, were being produced and used in temple and then also in noble settings. Other scenes from scrolls show us lacquer wares as well. And it's funny since I've started working on this project, now I see lacquer wear everywhere in these scrolls. Whereas before, I just, you know, I didn't really pick up on it so much. So this is a scene from a mid-14th century scroll where we see over here, this is the kitchen, where food is being prepared, that's what's going on over here, and then being arranged on individual lacquer trays that will then be put right out to the diners over here. Also here we have lacquer stirrups on the saddles that are hanging here. So lacquer wares used not only for dining utensils and for storage boxes but for architectural elements, for parts of armor, for horse trappings, I guess you call them as well. And so what we have going on over here is a poetry gathering and that will become relevant to my later discussion of poetry as a theme in lacquer decoration as well. More furniture and lacquer wares shown here, a table, a low table before this icon of a poet that's being honored in this gathering. A writing box before this gentleman here with an inkstone as he prepares to write a poem. Note also poems left here sitting before this monk here. And I'll make this point later too, but poetry was a social practice. People held poetry gatherings, wrote poetry, building upon earlier verses. Jumping back a little bit, just to start talking about lacquer as a substance and as a tradition, we should mention Chinese lacquer wares. And these are dating all the way back to the second century BCE, recovered from the tombs at Muangwei. And if anyone had the opportunity to see the exhibition Age of Empires at the Metropolitan Museum a number of years ago, they displayed these lacquer wares. And they look really as pristine as if they were created yesterday. And that speaks to lacquer's durability as a medium and its ability to withstand time and retain its luster and its beauty over millennia. Many of you may also be familiar with the carved lacquer tradition, something that we don't have in the show here today, but which was an important part of the Chinese lacquer tradition and which were also collected by Japanese nobility and shoguns forming part of the shogunate collections and actually also used in tea ceremonies and such as well. So I just wanted to show you those before we go any further into the Japanese materials. So what is lacquer ware? What is lacquer? It's derived from the substance of the lacquer tree, which is native to East Asia. It's a sap that's harvested from making incisions in the tree and tapping the raw lacquer. Oops, that's not good. We're back up and running. So if I pull this closer to me, it won't lean against the computer. And the lacquer tree is a relative of poison oak and poison ivy. The substance is actually called udoshio, right? That gives you the allergic reaction when you come into contact with poison ivy. And the word for lacquer in Japanese is udoshi, right? So that is that connection. So the craftspeople that work with lacquer as a substance must be sensitized to it, right, to avoid having allergic problems when they work with the substance. So once the lacquer itself is tapped and refined and processed, it can then start to be applied to a substrate or built up into lacquer ware themselves. And this board, which is in the exhibition, shows you various layers of lacquer that can be applied to an object. Sometimes the lacquer is mixed with other substances, fine clay powder and other things for the lower inner layers. And then increasingly refined lacquer is applied as the outer coats, each layer being polished between the others as they're built up to achieve finally a very highly lustrous surface on the final layer. Okay, and I have a very brief clip of the sprinkled picture process, the makie process, which is used to take fine gold powders or metal powders and sprinkle them onto a wet lacquer that has been painted onto an object. So the full video is kind of cycling on an iPad in the exhibition, but you can see just a little bit of this, so you have a sense going forward of how the objects I'm showing were actually decorated. So let's see if this works, I hadn't loaded up earlier. Okay, so you can see that the artist is here taking a tube with a filter on it, loading it with the gold powders, and then sprinkling it through a filter onto the wet lacquer that's been painted onto the lid of the tea caddy here. And then that's allowed to harden. Sometimes layers are applied on top to seal it in, and it's polished out to show the sparkling beautiful gold beneath. So that's the process, then, that's used to decorate a large object like this, a trousseau box in the exhibition. And you can get a sense of the time that's involved in this because not only must each design be sprinkled on, but between each lacquer application the object has to cure for the layers of lacquer to properly harden to become a finished object. I wanted to speak a little bit about styles of lacquer because there are many different styles of lacquer decoration. This one here, represented by the trousseau box that's in the exhibition, is referred to as the Coda Eiting style. It's named after a temple in Kyoto, which I've just inserted a picture here just for some visuals. And as you can see, showing these two objects that are in the Metropolitan's collection, it's characterized by oftentimes these contrasting zigzag fields of red ground and black ground, which creates a kind of abstract effect. And each with motifs. Here we have autumnal motifs, which are very common in Coda Eiting lacquer decoration, chrysanthemums, autumn flowers and grasses and such. And then here crests, palonia crests, that kind of float on this red ground. In this one, we don't have just autumn, but we have many different seasons represented on this box, and I'll get to that in a moment. But in the Coda Eiting style, the autumnal motifs are the most prevalent. So lacquer also, and I can't give it away with my next slide here, often come in sets. So this trousseau box, perhaps, would have formed a part of a bridal trousseau set. And as you can see, it's a wealth of gold in this set that would accompany a daughter of a Daniel or warlord, regional feudal lord family into marriage during the Edo period. So from the 17th to the 19th century. And so when we see an individual box like this, we have to picture them as part of larger collections. We can imagine the expense and the time required to create a whole set like this. The Edo period was a time of great peace in Japan. It was a feudal period where you had the regional lords, loyal to the Tokugawa Shoguns ruling from Edo, from Tokyo. And part of the government system at the time was to have the Daimyo, the regional lords, come to Tokyo periodically. And so they had to maintain households, not only in Tokyo than Edo, but also in their home domains. And so one can imagine this is, you know, the central shogunate regime is encouraging spending on these kinds of processions, weddings, lacquer sets, as opposed to spending on things like arms, armies, building up insurrections to somehow challenge the Tokugawa themselves. Now at the same time, of course, sumptuary laws, laws restricting the ownership of luxury goods were also a part of the Tokugawa's effort to maintain control. And so not everyone could own commission by sets of lacquer like this. And to get a sense of how these would function in interiors, we can again turn to scrolls. Now we're looking at a mid-17th century scroll that's in the Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library. And this part of the wonderful Metropolitan show of the Tale of Genji, which I believe that was just last spring, if I'm not mistaken. And so this is a fictional scene, but displaying perhaps what a 17th century interior with, complete with lacquer wares might have looked like. We can see the main characters here are using a writing box, right? He's actually painting a picture for her. We see a mirror stand that's decorated with sprinkle picture, gold here with a drawer. We see a box, almost like the one in the show, where it's silk threads tying it up here. And more storage boxes back here, placed on the shelf and in this alcove. So again, I'm seeing lacquer everywhere now as I look at these things. But to speak a little bit about seasonal motifs. And again, I'm using this box because it's nicely going to take us from the winter, which we're in now through into the spring for the end of the exhibition. So some common motifs that you see here are pines. Here on this contrasting field, we have wisteria for spring. On the top of the box, both cherry blossoms and plum blossoms. They're shown here, both winter into early spring for the cherry blossoms. Along with the seasonal motifs, and here, I forgot to point out this, this is for where we are right now, right? In the bamboo with snow for winter. Auspicious motifs that would also complement, let's say, a wedding or celebratory occasion are cranes, as you can see here, a pair of cranes and another one flying up here, as well as tortoises. These signify long life, longevity, good fortune, auspicious wishes, perhaps for the bride and groom. And I'm not entirely sure, there are three little birds here in the tree, which I'm not sure if they're baby cranes awaiting this one or some other kind of bird. But that perhaps works into that same theme of happy wishes for a bride and groom. Also in the show, we have a number of works more recent that have seasonal associations as well. These two tea caddies, this one with mate beliefs, that are in a kind of a golden spiral. And I kept thinking of this one this fall, as I would see the leaves kind of plastered on my driveway after a rain, shining it really, kept bringing this one to mind. Here we have a more abstract design of plum blossoms on a black tea caddy. And again, plum blossom blooming in late winter, early spring. This one combines also several seasonal motifs. It's called the snow, moon, and flowers theme. The moon is associated with autumn. It represents the autumn season. The cherry blossoms, of course, with spring. And snow here for winter is shown graphically by this character for yuki, snow, in the middle of the box. And also the cherry blossoms cascading here recalls a kind of poetic conceit of the confusion between snow and cherry blossoms. Cherry blossoms falling from the trees like snow. This is the box that kind of started it all, the writing box with cranes that the museum acquired and was the inspiration for this exhibition. The inside of this box has also a decidedly autumnal theme. The red sparse background here, kind of the lips in autumn color and the chrysanthemums, autumn grasses, and other auto-related plants depicted on the inside of the box brings up autumn. Cranes, again, relate to those auspicious motifs I just mentioned. So perhaps for the new year, perhaps for a wedding, a celebratory occasion on which good wishes and felicities is desired. I'm showing you also the inside of this box. It's a little bit hard to see in the exhibition the full beauty of the inside of this lid, which contrasts really strongly with the black, kind of strong contrast of the outside with the gold cranes against the black background. We have a much softer effect here on the inside with this diagonal of autumn flowers with little buds. These I think are bell crickets or susumushi that are also associated with autumn and were actually captured and held in cages or in the tail of Genji. We read that they're released into the gardens of the nobility in the Heian period during autumn to sing their song and provide kind of atmospheric effects. So that's what we have here, frolicing among these. And then these golden clouds here perhaps evoke a meandering stream or clouds themselves. So what is a writing box? And here we're turning to, again, this idea of poetry and writing and lacquer words. It's a container for an inkstone, which we see here, which is used to grind up the ink, and I think I'll just pop forward really quickly to show you this one, to grind the ink stick on the stone and dilute it with water from the water dropper. There, you can also see up here to mix with the ink to create the ink for writing. Writing boxes would also store brushes right all in one package, so you could hold that in there. And some of the writing boxes in the show are stacked and would also provide storage for papers within them. Of course, there are also separate boxes for paper storage, for document storage, for scroll storage that forms part of these sets of lacquer words. So as we can see, you know, grinding the ink and then using this for writing on papers. Here we also see perhaps a document storage box right for the papers themselves, also lacquer. So this idea of writing then brings me to the literary and poetic themes that I want to talk about for the remainder of the time. Find my place here. Okay, this one I was actually thinking of as I came in here today, because it's a winter theme, I think, with a horse and rider here. He's holding his sleeve over his head as protection against the elements. The horse looks tired. He's kind of bending his head down as he walks forward. And we see beautifully rendered this court figure with inlaid mother of pearl for the face and also used here for the contours of the clothing. All right. And then the horse itself is also using an inlay of a pewter that's been further decorated. All right, with these kinds of designs here. So this is a poetic theme, and I just want to explain a little bit about poetry before I go into this one. Go for it. I can read you one. So this is the poem that perhaps accompanies this theme. Not even the cover of a tree where I might stop my horse and brush off my sleeves. A twilight of snow here at Sound Up Crossing. So this poem is written by Fijiwara Noteka in the 12th to 13th century. And as we can see, it's interpreted not just on this box, but also in paintings and in many, many other media. So this image of a courtier on a horse with specifically his sleeve over his head immediately starts to evoke that particular poem and that particular tradition. And Fijiwara Noteka himself is building on earlier poetry when he composes his verse. So he's looking back to an earlier poem from the eighth century about the Sound Up Crossing and encountering rain and not finding shelter. So in that way, this place that's named in this poem here, the Sound Up Crossing, builds up these associations of bad weather, whether it be rain or then snow and take us home. And so any further poem then on the theme of Sound Up, is going to build on that theme as well and evoke these earlier poems just like the pictorial tradition, whether it be in lacquerware or in painting or in other media, are then also going to build on these prior pictures on this poem. And there's been a lot of really wonderful work on poetry and painting in both fields of art history and in literary studies. And I'm thinking specifically of Ed Kamens' Waka as things, Things as Waka, a recent book where he looks at the material culture of poetry. So poetry are not just literary works that exist in anthologies and such, but they're intimately associated with things, whether those things be writing boxes, poetry slips, screens onto which those poetry slips are pasted. The theme even gets picked up in Woodblock Prince, a popular medium easily reproducible in the 18th and 19th centuries. And I love this one by Suzuki Harunobu in 1765, which again, parodies, or in Japanese amitate, builds upon that earlier theme, now substituting a young lady for the courtier, but also with the sleeve over her head at Asano. And this is actually a calendar print. So here the dates of the short and the long months are embedded into the bridge. And these would be privately commissioned among literary circles and then circulated. And it was a kind of game where a way to display your erudition and your wit, to recognize these prints, recognize the poetic references that they speak to from the classical tradition. So we see iterations like this that relate to these lacquer ways as well. And the Woodblock Medium was also used to transmit lacquer designs. And so lacquer designers and artists would make famous designs and they would be recorded in books like this. This happens to be a book that compiles the designs of Corian, a DIMPA school artist, showing the Sano crossing and how to depict this particular theme. Of course it's not the same one as the box we see here, but another iteration on this Sano crossing theme. All evoking the soul figure on horseback, this idea of loneliness, of bad weather, the traveler far from home. Okay, then giving into the eight views of Omi, we have this wonderful screen on display paired with a lacquer box depicting the same theme of the eight views of Omi. And this is another poetic theme. Omi, which is now Shiga province, is a real place. All the places depicted within each of these are real places. But it carries the weight of this really long poetic and pictorial tradition so that anyone designing painting a view of Omi in 1910 is building upon a tradition that dates back to the 16th century in Japan and then as I'll show even back earlier in the Chinese painting tradition. So again, as I said, Omi is a real place. It's now called Shiga. Lake Biwa, the main lake that forms part of so many of the Omi views. It's Japan's largest lake. You can see just how big it is right here. And it was a popular spot for pilgrimage to the various temples that surround the lake. The one that I worked on from the dissertation Ishii Amadeira was one of the eight views of Omi itself, a place where people would come from Kyoto on pilgrimage quite frequently here. And it was also depicted in popular print series, again in the 19th century. A number of series by Shiga, not just this one, he did on the eight views of Omi theme. Here showing the temple Ishii Amadeira always with the full moon, always associated with autumn. And here the theme of sunset glow at Seta, showing the Seta bridge. And here Shiga has included the poems themselves, because each one of these eight views that become codified has a poem that it's associated with. So any interpretation of this theme is going to refer, whether it includes the poem or not, it's going to invoke in the mind of the viewer this particular poem, this particular scene. This one, I put in this length, I'll just pull it up, because many of you might get a kick out of it. This is a project actually done by an undergraduate who's created a map of Ukioi prints and where they, the scenes that they actually show. And he's just added the eight views of Omi. So if this were to load, we could actually mouse over Lake Bihua here and see where these particular eight views are. So this would be even rain at Kawasaki here. Evening bell at Midara, the temple here, down here. Clear breeze at Awazu. So he's really mapped these prints onto the different locations. Kind of fun. And if you're interested in the 53 stations of the Tokaido, that's on there as well, so you can go and look those up. And the 36 views of Mount Fuji, of course, by Hokusai as well. But that's to say that the artists representing these places are not so much thinking about the real places, as they're thinking about the artistic and the poetic tradition that has evolved through centuries when they were putting together the eight views of Omi, whether in one composition or not. So let me show you just a few of these. And I've taken just details of the screen. The artist of the screen, Hasagawa Gilgujen, actually did live in Otsu for a while. So perhaps that also influenced his thinking about this particular theme as well. Otsu being a town on the shore of Lake Bihua in what used to be Omi Province. So each of these views has an associated poem. This is Evening Snow at Hida. And I pulled up pictures of these that evoke. Here is Hida depicted in the lacquer box on the inside of this writing box lid. And then here the scene from the screen. And here's that same confusion of snow and blossoms that I mentioned with the portable tea set that we saw earlier where the cherry blossoms and the snow that kind of poetically confused. We also see that happening here. Snowy peak is a spring which surpasses even the blossoms peak. That's referencing that same poetic conceit. Descending geese at Katara, a motif that we see here, often depicted with this moon viewing pavilion. So you have these little icons that signal that this is the view that's being represented. The descending geese and the pavilion. The Karasaki pine. It's voice lifted in the gathering evening breezes. Differs to the sound of the night rain. So these very kind of atmospheric ink washes here. And then in this lacquer box shown by the pine and then the indication of kind of a driving rain here in the metal itself. The poems themselves are very evocative of evening moods generally. Winter appears very frequently. Autumn in the Ishiama scene as well. So you get an evocation of a season, a weather event or atmosphere with these poems. So as I mentioned, the Hasagawa Kyokojin in 1910 when he's painting in the tents when he's painting the screen, it's also hardening back to a much older tradition of painting the eight views upon me. You know it's hard to see the whole screen here. So I've given you a detail of the scene of Ishiama Temple of a monochrome ink painting of the eight views of Omi. That combines them into a single composition much like the lacquer box here does where it takes the eight views and puts them into one unified landscape. Although they don't appear like that in reality. It's an imaginary landscape. But even this theme has more ancient precedents. It goes back to Chinese things. And ink paintings of a region in China, a poetic theme of the eight views of the Xiaowen Town, came into Japan in the medieval period and became very popular in Shogunou collections and influenced painters in Japan like Kana Motonova who's painting here. A scene he's probably never seen in China but he's building upon those Chinese landscape paintings that he's seen to create this eight views of the Xiaowen, the Xiang region. And so that gets mapped on to the Japanese landscape around Omi. They're taking each of these eight views from the Chinese painting theme and recreating them with scenes around Omi province itself. And I'll just go quickly through this. This is a Chinese painting of the kind that would be referenced in the eight views theme. Now Ishiyama, the temple at Ishiyama, again always referenced by the full autumn moon, has a lot of other literary associations besides the eight views of Omi poetic tradition. This is the famous temple where the author Murasaki Shikibu is supposed to have conceived the tale of Genji, this novel, a court romance that she writes around the year 1000. And the legend goes that she was on pilgrimage to this temple Ishiyama when she looked out over the lake under a full moon and was inspired to write the two core kind of key chapters of the tale of Genji and build it out from there. So the poem in the eight views sequence that talks about Ishiyama also references Akashi and Summa. The glow of the moon across Lake Biwa, that's an old word for that, can be none other than the light that fell on Akashi and Summa. Akashi and Summa are places in the fictional tale that she writes. And at the temple, they actually have a room that is dedicated to her commemorating her being there and writing this tale, whether that actually happened or not, that is the long tradition of the origin of this tale. And so we can see that here in this depicted temple. So this writing box then would evoke the tale of Genji by its poetic reference and by depicting this particular temple of Ishiyama. Another box that's in the exhibition here actually depicts a scene from the tale of Genji. Here on the lid, we see a cart, a group of courtiers here, one who's perhaps carrying maybe a lacquer tray, a box of some sort, and then a boat with two women here in the background, a shrine gate, a shore with pines. So this is another common motif, one that would evoke in the mind of a viewer steeped in the Genji tradition, a particular chapter, a particular scene, which is Genji's pilgrimage to Sumiyoshi Shrine, where he comes to thank the gods for his recent good fortune after having been exiled for a number of years. And while he's there on pilgrimage, his former lover, the Akashi Lady, comes on her own pilgrimage quite by coincidence. She's really embarrassed that she didn't know he was going to be there. There's a difference in their social status because she doesn't dare to come and say hi to Genji's party. She can't do that. He also doesn't know she's there, but they end up exchanging poems. And so it speaks to poetry as a communication, and if you read the Tale of Genji, the characters are constantly sending poems back and forth to one another. And many of the chapter titles in the Tale of Genji then take their titles from these poems that are written in the tale itself. So just to show another composition and reference the box, here's what Genji writes to the Akashi Lady. How deep the destiny that guides our hearts, like the channel markers leading us here, showing how deeply I channeled my love. So the title, the chapter that this comes from, is called The Channel Markers, and taking its title from this poem. And like the only compositions, these become codified, right? Here we have a fan painting that shows a similar scene of carts, a cordy entourage, a shrine gate, and a pine laden shore, depicting this particular chapter. Now as I mentioned, the titles often take their... the chapter titles reference poems in that particular chapter. This is a medicine container that's in the exhibition. It's a little thing that looks larger than life up here. But when you see it, look closely because it has 54 little cards, little squares, each depicting a kind of canonical motif from a particular chapter of the Tale of Genji. And they also have cartouches or little labels, just in case you don't recognize the full motif. Or if it's hidden behind here, you can't quite see it, labeling the chapter title itself. And so it's really delightful to look at this thing closely and then have joy of recognizing the motifs and reading the titles and saying, oh yeah, I know that, you know. I don't quite know what to compare it to in the Western tradition, but it's really a lovely object to look at and look at for a long time closely. And it fits in the poem with your hand, it's a very small object, so it's an intimate object. Now what kind of object is this? Many of you may be familiar with Indro. These are medicine cases, pillboxes. Oh, there we go again. That would be worn suspended from the belt of menswear of a mens kimono in the Edo period. And so they would be luxurious productions, specialized lacquer workshops that worked on producing only Indro existed because they're so small and you have to have such fine detail work. And they really spoke to the wearer's irredition, wit, style, fashion sense, whether you're wearing an Indro with classical motifs or something that was perhaps a really up-to-date and surprising design. And so it's a fashion accessory, as well as being an object that references ancient poetry and literary traditions. But the motifs that's shown on here, I mentioned briefly, are poem cards, shikishi, these square shaped, and then there are other ones that are rectangular, tanzaku, which is a common motif in lacquer decoration. And it speaks to the kind of intermediality of these objects where you have painted things, paper things, that are represented in lacquer on lacquer objects, some of which then are used to produce or store those very painted poetic things. Shikishi were used not only in lacquer decoration, but these are actual poem cards that are pasted onto a large string. It was a way of preserving these and pairing them and creating these compositions that play with the idea of surface and ground, having written things on decorated papers that are then on a golden screen with a painted picture behind it. In the exhibition, we also have this large document storage box and a writing box, again, thinking about these insets, that also have poem cards depicted on them as if they were just kind of scattered across the surface, overlapping and with varied designs. I'm not sure if these have specific literary references, but you see seasonal plants, courtly motifs, even calligraphy being written on these decorated papers. And there's a lot of synergy between paper decoration and lacquer decoration, if you think about it. The papers themselves would be decorated with gold powders, silver powders, cut gold squares, just as the lacquer decoration itself is. There are also these miniature containers for square and rectangular poem papers. Again, these are teeny tiny, so get up close to them and look at them. The motif of water wheels and a bridge that you see here is also shown on huge screens, taking it from the teeny, teeny tiny, the same motif to the very large on this pair of golden screens that are at the mat. So again, the delay is in recognizing this motif. Ah, the water wheels, the willow, the bridge. This is Udi Bridge, which takes us, again, back to the tale of Genji because part of the tale is set in Udi. And so it brings up all of those references as well. This slide I'm just showing a selection of these poem papers and how they appear in different media. Here is a poem calligraphy written on one that's been mounted as a hanging scroll. Here is actually a kimono that's decorated with poem papers with calligraphy on them. And in this print here, you can see not only what's perhaps a lacquered writing desk of sorts here, where she's holding onto these papers on which poems are written, but the title cartouches here playfully echo the poem papers themselves. So it plays with that idea of this is an actual object represented within the composition, and this is the kind of surface cartouche that identifies the print and the scene that's being depicted here. Likewise with the fan that she holds here and the way these motifs are set into these fan shapes on the print itself. And then if you want to keep going with the references, these are eight views of Omi, which are matched with eight scenes or chapters from Genji, and you can build back on those long literary references as well in these fans. This brings us to fans. It's another motif that we see commonly on a lacquerware's textiles, boxes, prints. Both as objects held by people, as we saw in that early court scene with the poetry gathering where the gentleman's holding a fan, to use the decorative motifs for, again, one of the eight views of Omi here or as decoration on this stacked writing box with a little drawer here. And again, fans themselves were also pasted onto large screens creating golden compositions across here. Okay, I just want to very briefly finish by mentioning the textiles that we also have in the adjacent gallery to the show. Speaking of screens, the same painter of these fan screens also created these, which were picked up many, many times, both in lacquer decoration and in textiles designs and is the motif that probably inspired this kimono here that's on display in the gallery. Likewise, the same kinds of auspicious motifs of cranes, open books here with carts like the one you saw in the Genji writing box. Here is another box with a design of books on a wood grain surface that we see here. And then, of course, seasonal motifs like Prasanthamans, Maple Leafs, Cherry Blossoms that are picked up in textile design as well. I don't have a lot of time to talk. I'm giving another gallery talk later where I'll talk more about the synergy between textile design and the lacquer design later on in the semester. But I think I'll just leave you with that. I know the exhibition is going to be opening soon. Please save the date on April 8th. That's a Wednesday for a talk by Monica Vincic, who's a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a specialist in lacquerware. She will be here speaking to us. So I encourage you all to come back for that lecture, as well as the other wonderful programs that we have both around the show and the other shows open this semester. So thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of the week.


The elevated lifespan and increased focus on age-associated diseases such as neurodegeneration, cardiovascular disease, frailty, and arteriosclerosis have led to an understanding that protein, lipid, or nucleic acid modifications are involved in these chronic diseases, including cross-linked and non-degradable aggregates such as advanced glycation end products, ages. Formation of endogenous or uptake of dietary ages can lead to further protein modifications and activation of several inflammatory signaling pathways. This review provides an overview of the most prominent AGE-mediated signaling cascades, age receptor interactions, prevention of AGE formation, and the impact of ages during pathophysiological processes. This article was authored by Kristiana, Kathleen Jacobs, Alyssa Hauke, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


So let's move on to ways we can actually detect similarity in particular things our homologous in practice. So the first thing is to separate those two points I can only detect similarity. Now if the similarity is large enough I might personally draw the conclusion that two things are homologous but that's always a guess. It can be a really good and safe guess but all guesses can be wrong now and then. The simple way of doing this is just to check whether amino acids or DNA nucleotides are similar and I'll start with the verse we normally use for DNA because it's simpler and it's really only there we use it. If I have bases on rows sorry rows and columns here I can mark this so that I make put a red square here or think of this giving a plus one score if they are identical and if they are not identical I give them zero. Already for these random sequences that I drew here actually they're not entirely random but this is a bit of a mess. The problem is that if you only have four bases we're going to have lots of random hits in principle roughly every fourth position on average right. So let's filter this a bit. Do you see this diagonal path here this meant that have GCT lining up to GCT so maybe I should add a filter here that I will unless I have at least three residues lined up I'm going to filter them away and ignore them and then I end up with this is that this is massive. Do you see here I have GCT matching there and then I have a streak of six residues matching there it is just that I happen to have two extra residues that have been inserted in one of these two sequences. This is very common occasionally we have single residues that have been changed and in other cases I have residues that have been inserted or deleted. Now in practice this is going to be very noisy and it's mostly for DNA I'm interested in this type of identical comparison so at some point I want to move over from these bases to amino acids instead in particular if I'm interested in protein structure.