Courtesy of the Yale Academy Fine art Gallery

The Yale University Art Gallery volition reveal a new rotation of art objects, titled "Scattered and Gathered: Perspectives on the Tekagami-jō, a Japanese Calligraphy Album," on Thursday.

This latest installation, which is on view in the Shen Family Gallery of Asian Art, was curated by Denise Leidy, the Ruth and Bruce Dayton curator of Asian Art at the YUAG, and will remain on brandish until late May. The Japanese Calligraphy Anthology "Tekagami-jō" is on loan to the YUAG from the Beinecke Rare Volume & Manuscript Library. It is the centerpiece of the installation, which also includes objects from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art, Harvard Academy Art Museums and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The Tekagami-j calligraphy album is an assemblage of fragments from different manuscripts and documents that have been separated, cut up and preserved at different points in their "lives," according to Edward Kamens, a professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures who worked on the installation with Leidy.

"We're exploring the idea of saving and repurposing," Leidy said. "All of these fragments have existed as something else — at some signal, someone gathered these things together and made them into a completely unlike work or art."

In addition to the Tekagami-jō album, the installation contains a Japanese screen layered with fragments from illustrated books, fans and calligraphy books that date from the 8th to the 19th century, a Buddhist priest robe fabricated from a patchwork of unlike cloths and rags, scenes from Buddhist life and representations of verse. The installation will likewise characteristic repurposed fragments from a manuscript that the Beinecke recently acquired, called "Todaiji-gire."

When selecting which objects to include in the installation, Leidy said that she looked for relationships between the various objects past trying to understand the "cultural relativity" and "cultural context" of fragments.

Kamens, who first proposed the idea for this installation, conceived of the projection following his report of the Tekagami-jō album in the Beinecke. He said that he then solicited the aid of a colleague in the Department of the History of Fine art, professor Mimi Yiengpruksawan, to develop the concept. Kamens presented the idea to Leidy, who agreed that the calibration of their project warranted a new rotation at the YUAG. Kamens, forth with the graduate students in ane of his classes, collaborated with Leidy to organize the thematic sections of the rotation.

"We wanted to explore and illustrate in a variety of ways the phenomenon of fragmentation, which is quite prominent in dissimilar aspects of Japanese visual, material and literary culture," said Kamens.

Kamens too mentioned his piece of work with the Beinecke'south director, Edwin Schroeder, as another important impetus for the development of the project. Schroeder indicated an involvement to Kamens in adding significant works of Japanese material and literary culture to the Beinecke's collection, leading to Schroeder's authorization of the purchase of the Todaiji-gire fragments at present featured in the installation.

This rotation of Japanese fragments is 1 of the iii rotations curre ntly on display in the w side of the Asian fine art gallery. These displays rotate every May and December due to the light sensitivity of most papers and textiles in the exhibits.

Leidy mentioned that since conservation needs require irresolute the materials on view, she uses it as an opportunity to showcase a variety of "thematic displays" and create "unlike storylines." The other current rotations feature the history and development of Chinese calligraphy, early Islamic glass, paintings from India and Afghanistan and works in the contrasting textures of cloth and clay from West, Central and Southern asia.

"1 of my duties is to analyze collections and figure out how information technology has to grow," said Leidy. "There are e'er new and interesting things — it is not a static collection; it is e'er changing."

This installation will open to the public with an event at v:30 p.1000. on Thursday, February. 28. The professors and graduate students who worked on this rotation will present the works of art.

Freya Savla | freya.savla@yale.edu .

FREYA SAVLA