Spring 2007

Tracing the Silk Road with Ikuo Hirayama: The Legacies of East-West Cultural Exchange

March 27 – May 19, 2007
One-Day Bus Tour from Los Angeles to the Clark Center

"The Silk Road" is the romantic name given to a series of trading routes that stretched from Mediterranean Europe, through the Middle East, to East Asia. For well over a millennium, beginning approximately 100 BCE, the Silk Road provided the primary means by which material goods and cultural concepts passed from place to place, bringing Chinese silk to ancient Rome and Buddhism from India to China and Japan, alongside other goods and ideas. Cultural and material exchanges left their marks from East to West, transforming and intertwining the civilizations in-between. The products and remains of these exchanges can still be seen in the ruins and preserved sites that line the traces of the Silk Road today.

Dim Moon at Persepolis, Iran, Ikuo Hirayama, 2007. Ink and colors on paper. Courtesy of Ikuo Hirayama Silk Road Museum.  Click here for larger image.

Ikuo Hirayama, Japan's most celebrated living painter, has made these sites of cultural interchange along the Silk Road the focus of both his artwork and philanthropic missions. In this, his first American exhibition, the Clark Center presents forty-six of Hirayama's nihonga-style paintings, arranged geographically from the cultural sites of Hirayama's homeland, influenced by Silk Road exchange, through those of China, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Greece and Italy, following the westward course of the old Silk Road. Along the way, Hirayama presents his artistic vision of the people, historical artifacts and famous ruins he discovered on his own many personal journeys along this ancient trade highway. Believing that cultural sites embody a legacy of meaning and worldview from which contemporary people can draw strength, Hirayama has devoted much of his resources and energies to the preservation and recognition of the importance of these sites.

Yet the Silk Road for Hirayama stands not only for the recognition of the importance of distinct cultures and their legacies, but also for the interconnectedness of all cultures and civilizations. The Silk Road, by physically linking one place and another, led ultimately to their cultural conjoining, allowing for the mutual influences of ways of religious and philosophical thought—Jewish, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu and Muslim, for example—that have since come to be seen as antagonistic and exclusive. Hirayama's artistic reminder of the deep interconnectedness of cultures comes at an important moment in US and world history, and stands as a monument in his mission to enhance cross-cultural understanding and cooperation as a means towards world peace.

Caravan in the Desert of Afghanistan, Ikuo Hirayama, 2007. Ink and colors on paper; single 4-panel screen. 183.0 x 362.0 cm. Courtesy of Ikuo Hirayama Silk Road Museum.  Click here for larger image.

Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday 1-5 pm. Admission: $5 for adults, $3 for students with valid ID. Children 12 and under free.

Weekly docent tours are held Saturdays at 1pm and guided group tours can be arranged by calling the Center in advance at 559.582.4915.

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