Kodojin rediscovered: Rare exhibition highlights enigmatic Japanese painter

Sweeping display in US puts spotlight on 19th-century scholar-poet artist

Fukuda Kodojin (1865-1944), leaf from “Album of What Exists,” circa 1907, ink on paper, Kura Art Gallery, Kyoto. (Courtesy of Minneapolis Institute of Art)

EDWARD M. GOMEZ, Contributing writer

July 11, 2023 08:00 JST

MINNEAPOLIS -- Japan's cultural exchanges with the West that began in the decades after U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry's fleet forced the feudal country to open up to foreign trade have been well documented. Perry's "black ships" famously stormed into Edo Bay in 1853; subsequently, information and ideas about art, design, fashion, literature and technology began flowing between the West and isolationist Japan which, until the Americans' menacing arrival, had remained closed to much of the world for 265 years.