Heritage | Museum of the Orient shows unseen folding screen in Japan

The Portuguese Museum of the Orient, located in Lisbon, holds in its permanent collection a previously unseen art piece and has chosen to loan the piece, for its first public display, to the city of Fukuoka, Japan.

The art piece, a Chinese origin folding screen, portrays scenes of the life of Jesus Christ and is on display in the Kyushu National Museum. The display is dedicated to the Portuguese presence in Asia.
The piece is part of the exhibition titled “Japanese Art in the Age of Discoveries” that, according to the information provided by the Museum of the Orient, explores art in the perspective of cultural interaction, namely during the period from 1543 to 1639, when the Portuguese were present in Japan. This was the period when the Portuguese introduced firearms to Japanese culture and when the regime of Xogunato Tokugawa forbade the monopolization of commerce by the Christians in Japan. At the time of their arrival in Japan, Macau was used as a base for the Portuguese travels to the Far East. Evangelization and commercial exchange were the two main purposes of those travels.
The exhibition gathers a collection of over 120 art pieces from several Japanese National Museums, Emperors Collections and temples. The collection also includes pieces from Museo Soumaya (Fundacíon Carlos Slim), in Mexico.
As the spokesperson for the Portuguese Museum, Joana Belard da Fonseca, noted, “the folding screen is a very rare piece that combines the Coromandel lacquer and eastern painting style done, most probably, in China with European religious paintings and images,” and is likely, “a piece done by special order that shows the work of the Jesuit missionaries in China.”  RM