The 8th-century Shosoin Treasury, Japan’s most celebrated art collection, offers a remarkable array of artworks spanning the cultures of Central and East Asia. Its nature and purpose, however, continue to be shrouded in mystery and mythology. This lecture offers three new perspectives on the origin and meaning of the Shosoin, as well as a number of new interpretations of its most well-known art treasures.

Yukio Lippit is Jeffrey T. Chambers and Andrea Okamura Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, and specializes in Japanese painting. His book Painting of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in Seventeenth-Century Japan (2012) was awarded the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award by the College Art Association and the John Whitney Hall Book Prize by the Association of Asian Studies. His article “Of Modes and Manners in Medieval Japanese Ink Painting: Sesshū’s Splashed Ink Landscape of 1495” was awarded the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize by CAA in 2013. Other books include The Artist in Edo, Irresolution: The Paintings of Yoshiaki Shimizu, Japanese Zen Buddhism and the Impossible Painting, Sōtatsu: Making Waves (with James Ulak), The Thinking Hand: Tools and Traditions of the Japanese Carpenter (with Mark Mulligan), Kenzo Tange: Architecture for the World (with Seng Kuan), Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-Flower Paintings by Itō Jakuchū (1716-1800), and Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan (with Gregory Levine).

Lippit has taught at the Universities of Tokyo, Heidelberg, Los Andes (Bogota), and Campinas (Brazil). From 2013 to 2018 he served as the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Faculty Director of the Arts at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. In 2018 he was appointed Harvard College Professor for a five-year term for distinguished contributions to undergraduate teaching.