Mapping the Sacred: Nineteenth-Century Japanese Buddhist Prints

December 13, 2003 – March 28, 2004

A map delineates and defines any number of spatial localities, ranging from geography to architecture, but it also illuminates a diversity of cultural and historical possibilities in its rendering of reality into pictorial form.

The single, flattened image of a complex, three-dimensional world reflects the imagined vantage point and spatial conceptions of the artist. In nineteenth-century Japan, the pictorial mapping of both secular and sacred space underwent drastic changes. The varied reasons for this transformation of mapping strategies include the emergence of new concepts of spatial representation such as Western-style perspective, developments in printing technology, and a boom in tourism. Principally drawn from materials gathered in Japan in the 1890s by Edmund Buckley, a professor of Comparative Religion at the University of Chicago, the exhibition documented this transformation and included prints and photographic views of temples and cities, as well as images of religious objects, ceremonies, and deities.