Baskets

Joe Earle was Director of Japan Society Gallery in New York until 2012 and has held leadership positions in Asian art departments at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Over the past 38 years he has curated, organized, or written catalogues for numerous exhibitions of contemporary Japanese art, craft, and design, including Japan Style (London, 1980), Japanese Ceramics Today (the Kikuchi Collection, London, 1983), The Toshiba Gallery of Japanese Art (London, 1986), Visions of Japan (London, 1991), Splendors of Meiji: Treasures of Imperial Japan (Wilmington DE and Portland OR, 1999 and 2002), Contemporary Clay: Japanese Ceramics for the New Century (Boston and New York, 2005 and 2006), New Bamboo (Boston and New York, 2006 and 2008), Serizawa: Master of Japanese Textile Design, (New York, 2009), Bye Bye Kitty!!!: Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art (New York, 2011), Fiber Futures: Japan's Textile Pioneers (New York, 2011), New Forms, New Voices: Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection (New Orleans, 2017). He is now based in London.Raised in Switzerland, Bertrand Stark set out on graduation from Paris University on a career with an investment bank which sent him straight to Hong Kong. From there his life as a banker took him to the top financial capitals of the world. When after ten years he was recalled to the bank's headquarters, he decided to become a photographer. He embarked on his new career by assisting leading photographers in Germany, the USA and France. After three years' intensive training, he set up his own freelance practice in fashion. Now back in Asia, he works in the world of fashion, beauty, and lifestyle photography, contributing to fashion magazines such as Vogue, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Numero, as well as undertaking advertising assignments for brands like L'Oreal, Nivea, Wella, Opel, Schwarzkopf, and Shanghai Tang. His work has been exhibited at the Pin-Up Studio in Paris and at the Pingyao International Photography Festival and his photographs feature in a number of books on fashion and beauty. He teaches fashion photography at the Conde Nast Center for Fashion and Design in Shanghai.

• Following an essay outlining the evolution of bamboo art in Japan and a small section introducing earlier Chinese baskets and Japanese baskets in Chinese style, the bulk of the catalogue is organized by artistic lineages, starting with the founding father Hayakawa Shokosai I (1815-1897) and his successors and moving on to the other great craft dynasties based in Osaka, including large sections devoted to the Yamamoto Chikuryosai, Tanabe Chikuunsai, and Maeda Chikubosai lines. From catalogue number 192 the focus moves to the Iizuka line in Tochigi Prefecture and Tokyo, with numerous works by Hosai II, Rokansai, and Shokansai. The story is then continued into the post-war period when artistic basketry came to be practised in many other parts of Japan and a new generation of masters emerged, supported by patrons in both Japan and the United States. Each of the fourteen sections of dramatic colour plates (in most cases with both general and detail images) is followed by a section printed on matt paper with photographs of all the signatures and box inscriptions and biographies of each artist. The catalogue concludes with a bibliography, glossary, and artist index.