Johann Jacobs Museum Invitation: A Painting for the Emperor
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Dear friends and visitors to the Johann Jacobs Museum,
We are pleased to invite you to the opening of the new exhibition “A Painting for the Emperor.” At the same time, we’re introducing our newly-designed newsletter – a parallel to our new website www.johannjacobs.com, which goes online at the beginning of February 2018. The new website will provide information about the exhibition program as well as an agenda with the upcoming event dates. Texts and pictures from all past exhibitions will also be available in the archive. A new core feature of the website will shed light on the Johann Jacobs Museum’s areas of research, showing how the exhibitions are thematically linked and offering the opportunity to delve further into the history and present of global trade routes. We hope you enjoy exploring the site and look forward to your next visit! Your Johann Jacobs Museum Team |
A PAINTING FOR THE EMPEROR
Japanese Labourers on Sugar Plantations in Hawai’i
Exhibition
8.2.2018 - 31.5.2018 I Johann Jacobs Museum
In 1885, the King of Hawai‘i commissioned a large oil painting as a gift for the Emperor of Japan--but the painting never reached the Imperial Household. This exhibition displays the painting for the first time outside of Japan, reconstructing its historical context and the lives of its protagonists. The painting serves as a window onto the late-nineteenth century world of the Asia-Pacific region, a world that was transformed by the emergence of Meiji Japan as an international power.
In 2018, the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration, we look back on Japan’s entanglement with the Pacific through its labourers, its commodities and the image it wanted to project overseas. A Painting for the Emperor invites you to cross oceans and genres of art, and to consider more generally practices of framing and unframing in the narration of history.
In cooperation with the Chair for Global History, University of Zurich and the Chair for East Asian Art History, University of Zurich.
