Hanford, California - The Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture is pleased to announce the first-ever American exhibition of the paintings of Ikuo Hirayama, one of Japan’s most celebrated living artists.  This exhibition will feature forty-six of Prof. Hirayama’s atmospheric paintings, brushed in his distinctive style of nihonga (Japanese-style modern painting).  The works, which largely depict contemporary views of historically important sites in Asia, the Middle East and the Mediterranean, will be arranged geographically by subject in the exhibition, to highlight one of Prof. Hirayama’s major themes in his artwork and philanthropic missions: the promotion of peace and world unity through cultural exchange and expanded understanding of the intertwined roots of human civilizations. On exhibition 27 March until 18 May, 2007.

A survivor of the atomic bombing at Hiroshima, Ikuo Hirayama has devoted his life to the promotion of cross-cultural understanding and the recognition of the common ground of all humankind, regardless of nation or creed.  This quest was in part defined by his fascination with the Silk Road, the ancient trade route that connected India to China, the Middle East and Mediterranean Europe, along which philosophical and artistic ideas were exchanged, alongside material goods.  In the Silk Road, Hirayama found a model for his vision of a world in which cultural interchange acted as the foundation for mutual understanding, as well as historical evidence for the common elements that linked the civilizations of Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia.  From the 1960s, he has traveled the Silk Road, painting its sites as they appear today, as well as creating a foundation for the preservation of sites and works in danger of being lost.  He has served as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, the Chairman for the Japanese National Commission for UNESCO, and twice as President of the Tokyo National University of the Fine Arts.

For the upcoming exhibition at the Clark Center, Prof. Hirayama has personally created a selection of his older, acclaimed works, and new, never-before-displayed paintings, hoping to bring his message of peace through cultural understanding to the United States.  The exhibition starts with Buddhist landmarks in Hirayama’s homeland, then traces their origins in the transmission of culture along the Silk Road, taking the viewer on a journey through western China, India, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Turkey, all the way to Greece and Italy.  Hirayama has focused his artistic vision on the people, artifacts and famous ruins he found on his own travels, depicting life along the remains of this ancient trade highway as it appears today.  By so doing, he presents the layers of the historical legacy of the Silk Road, together with the surface of the contemporary world, a new, complex approach to the theme of history-painting in nihonga.            

The Clark Center is located 6 miles south of downtown Hanford at 15770 Tenth Avenue.  The gallery and reference library are wheelchair accessible and open to the public Tuesday­-Saturday from 1:00–5:00 pm.  Admission fees are $5 for adults, $3 for students; members and children under 12 are free.  Docent tours of the exhibition are held every Saturday at 1:00 pm and special pre-arranged group tours are available for an additional fee. Please see our website at http://www.ccjac.org