SeminarTuesday 21 June 2016
6:00pm – 7:00pm
After Basho: Sketches from the Poem Road
Drinks reception: 7:00pm – 8:00pm
13/14 Cornwall Terrace, Outer Circle (entrance facing Regent's Park), London NW1 4QP
Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
In this illustrated talk, the artist Isao Miura will discuss Sketches from the Poem Road, the upcoming exhibition at Oxford Brookes University which explores Miura’s deepest feelings about the landscapes of north Japan using paper, tatami, calligraphy, oil and ink drawings, and bronze. First shown at the Poetry Society in London, the exhibition is the result of a creative collaboration between Isao Miura and poet Chris Beckett. In it, the poet and artist undertake an interpretative journey in the footsteps of Matsuo Bashō and his 1689 trip which resulted inThe Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Joining them on this leg of the journey is Nathalie Aubert, who will speak about her work on the Surrealist Belgian poet and painter, Christian Dotremont. Just as Miura fashions works of art based upon Bashō’s poetry and prose, so Dotremont creates at the interface of text and image in his ‘logogrammes’, which are intended to be simultaneously visual and verbal expressions.
See the exhibition at Oxford Brookes’ Glass Tank gallery from 20 June to 15 July 2016.
About the contributors
Isao Miura
Isao Miura is a London-based painter and sculptor from Akita Prefecture. He studied at Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. He has exhibited widely in Japan, Europe, UK and USA. In 2014/15 he was awarded a Fellowship in the Bronze Foundry at Chelsea College of Art, in order to develop his project ‘translating’ Basho’s iconic masterpiece The Narrow Road to the Deep North through visual images. His website iswww.isaomiura.com and his Narrow Road project site is http://afterbasho.weebly.com/ Sketches from the Poem Road was recently shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.
Chris Beckett
Chris Beckett is a poet and translator who lived in Tokyo in the early 1980s. He won thePoetry London competition in 2001 and his latest poetry collection, Ethiopia Boy, was published by Carcanet/Oxford Poets in 2013. He has written a series of poem-sketches to accompany Miura’s project, some of which are included in the Hagi Press publication, Sketches from the Poem Road (available through http://hagipress.weebly.com/), also a 15-metre one-line poem in the voice of an ink brush. His website is www.chrisbeckettpoems.com
Professor Nathalie Aubert
Professor Nathalie Aubert is Professor of French Literature at Oxford Brookes University. She has written extensively about Proust, and edited the collection Proust and the Visualin 2012. After co-editing a collection entitled From Art Nouveau to Surrealism: Belgian Modernity in the Making, she published her monograph on the Surrealist Belgian poet and painter, Christian Dotremont: La conquête du monde par l’image in 2012. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Proust and Landscape.
Dr Niall Munro (Chair)
Dr Niall Munro is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Director of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre. His monograph on the American modernist poet Hart Crane,Hart Crane’s Queer Modernist Aesthetic, was published by Palgrave Macmillan last year. He is currently writing a book about literary modernist representations of the American Civil War in works from 1891-1948.