News & Events

Ishibashi Foundation Visiting Professor: Kristopher Kersey

​We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Kristopher Kersey will join us as the 33rd Ishibashi Foundation Visiting Professor for the summer semester. Prof. Kersey’s research explores the rich intersections of Japanese art, design, and aesthetics. His first book, ‘Facing Images: Medieval Japanese Art and the Problem of Modernity’ (Penn State University Press, 2024), introduces a groundbreaking approach to art history—one that transcends simplistic binaries such as West/rest or modern/pre-modern. His scholarship has been recognized with numerous prestigious fellowships and grants, including a Senior Research Fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg ‘InHerit: Heritage in Transformation,’ an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), a Getty Scholar Fellowship at the Getty Research Institute, an Anne van Biema Fellowship at the National Museum of Asian Art, and a postdoctoral fellowship from the European Research Council.
Students can look forward to engaging courses on ‘Graphic Arts of Japan’ and ‘Time and Narrative in Japanese Art,’ along with a planned excursion to Stuttgart. Be sure to mark June 23, 2025, in your calendars for his evening lecture titled ‘Nebulous Image: “Clouds” in the Art of Japan.’ [Events]

23/06/2025 | Ishibashi Foundation Special Lecture

​Prof. Kristopher Kersey (UCLA)
Ishibashi Foundation Visiting Professor
Nebulous Images. “Clouds” in the Art of Japan
23/06/2025 | 18:15 | CATS R.120.01.05 | [Poster]

One of the most characteristic and identifiable aspects of Japanese pictorial culture is the prevalence of clouds: blue bands of hazy mist, bold and textured fields of nebulous gold, and nuanced monochrome degradations of diluted ink. Yet despite the longstanding prominence of clouds in Japanese art, it was only in the late nineteenth century that scientist began to document, sort, and name these atmospheric phenomena according to the typology still used today. As this lecture will demonstrate, the modern meteorological understanding of clouds overshadows the far more interesting operations of “clouds” in the history of Japanese art. One might be tempted at first to dismiss such forms as secondary, extraneous, or even “filler,” yet such nebulous images are actually among the most sophisticated elements within the pictorial tradition of Japan. In a global context, moreover, the complex deployment of clouds in Japanese painting serves to refute any purported theoretical universalism stemming from European art history. Far from ancillary, clouds are tied to a rich repertoire of powerful and multivalent pictorial strategies.