Event
CEAS Humanities Colloquium series, co-sponsored with the Penn Forum on Japan as part of the PFJ Third Thursday series.
A group of eighty-eight sites related to the life of the eminent Buddhist priest Kūkai (空海774-835 posthumously Kōbō Daishi 弘法大師) came to prominence in late medieval Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands. Today these temples form a circuit traveled by thousands of henro 遍路pilgrims annually. Dr. Frank Chance walked the 1200-kilometer route in February and March of 2016 and participated in many rituals along the path; this paper reports on his experience and reflects on the survival and adaptation of this tradition in contemporary times. The talk is illustrated with images and artifacts from his sojourn.
Frank L. Chance is a scholar of early modern Japanese art. Born and raised in the Kansas City area, he received Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Asian art history from the University of Kansas. After five years in Japan studying language, culture, ceramics, and tea he entered the doctoral program in the History of Art at the University of Washington. Following two years as a research fellow at Kyoto University, he received his Ph.D. in 1986 with a thesis on "Tani Buncho and the Edo School of Japanese Painting." From 1991 to 1998, Dr. Chance was the Director of Shofuso, a Japanese House and Garden in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, where he oversaw operations, preservation, and educational programs for a seventeenth-century style shoin and teahouse designed by Yoshimura Junzo for the Museum of Modern Art in 1952. Dr. Chance has curated exhibitions of Japanese prints at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and Haverford College, and served for three years as the Far Eastern Bibliographer for the Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He has taught at several colleges and universities, most recently as Visiting Professor of Japanese Art History at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for the 2001-2002 academic year. Currently, he is preparing an exhibition of postwar Japanese prints as Guest Curator at the Berman Museum of Ursinus College. In August, 2002 he began serving as the Associate Director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.