Narrates the history of a single object - a tea-leaf storage jar created in southern China during the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries - and describes how its role changed after it was imported to Japan and passed from owner to owner there.
Louise Allison Cort is curator of ceramics, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. She received the 2012 Secretary's Distinguished Research Lecture Award, Smithsonian Institution, and the 2012 Koyama Fujio Memorial Prize for her research on historical Japanese ceramics. Andrew M. Watsky is professor of Japanese art at Princeton University. His book, Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan, received the John Whitney Hall Book Prize (Association for Asian Studies) and the Shimada Prize (Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution).
