Immersive Worlds

The beautiful and scholarly book looks at the Japanese screens of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The first publication in over ten years focusing on Asian art at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, this book explores how Japanese folding screens and sliding doors in the Museum’s collection visually, socially, and conceptually create immersive and transportive experiences. It will accompany a major exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which includes Scenes from the Tale of Genji, a pair of the Gardner Museum’s most celebrated Japanese artworks. Gabrielle Niu introduces the place of Japanese folding screens in Isabella Stewart Gardner’s collecting and curatorial practices. Focusing on the Gardner Museum’s Scenes from the Tale of Genji screens, Melissa McCormick expands upon and redefines the immersive viewing experience of the folding screen. Talia Andrei relates the Museum’s Rice Cultivation in the Four Seasons screens to social-political histories and artistic exchanges between China and Japan. Kyoko Kinoshita presents the first survey of the Gardner Museum’s sugido and fusuma, one of the rarest and most important collections of Japanese sliding doors in North America.