BIO

Gregory P. Levine received his B.A. from Oberlin College and PhD in the art history of Japan from Princeton University in 1997, joining the Department of History of Art that year.  He has written and lectured on the art and architecture of the Japanese Zen Buddhist monastery Daitokuji, the modern construct of “Zen Art,” cultures of exhibition and viewing in premodern and modern Japan, calligraphy connoisseurship and forgery, and the modern collecting and study of “Buddhist art.”  Among his recent published writings is “Two (or More) Truths: Reconsidering Zen Art in the West,” Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan (2007).  His current research focuses on fragments of Buddhist images within devotional and modern imaginations, a project that works from particular sites, episodes, and contexts in Asia and the West, beginning with André Malraux’s exhibition of works of “Gothic-Buddhist” art in Paris in 1931.  He is also at work on a  “novella-length” essay, “A Long Strange Journey: Zen Art in the West.”

He has taught graduate seminars on topics such as Daitokuji, Kan’ei Era Visual Culture in Kyoto, Problems of Portraiture in Japan, Sh?hekiga, art forgery/authenticity, iconoclasm, and methodology/historiography in Japanese art history.  Future graduate seminars include: In Pieces—Fragments in Art History; Zen Art; and a co-taught Proseminar on Asian art and visual culture.  His undergraduate teaching includes surveys of the art and architecture of Japan; Buddhist art and architecture; and Painting and Print Cultures in Japan as well as seminars on Zen painting and calligraphy; Buddhist images in the modern/contemporary world; and the collecting of Japanese art in the West.

He currently advises doctoral dissertations on topics including the Material and Visual Cultures of Sen no Rikyu; Visual Cultures of the Buddhist convent HHokyoji the Gutai group; and festival vehicle (dashi) architecture and sculpture in Edo to Modern Japan.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Gregory Levine, Yukio Lippit, eds. Awakenings: Zen Figure Paintings from Medieval Japan (New York: Japan Society; Yale University Press, 2007).

Daitokuji: The Visual Cultures of a Zen Monastery (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005).

Review: Andrew Watsky, Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan.  Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.  Monumenta Nipponica, 59, no. 3 (Autumn, 2004), 421-24.

“Rakan in America: Travels of the Daitokuji 500 Luohan,” in Moving Objects: Time, Space, and Context, ed. Tokyo National Research Institute of Cultural Properties (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2004), 96-109.  

“Switching Sites and Identities: The Founder’s Statue at the Japanese Zen Buddhist Temple K?rin’in.” The Art Bulletin Vol. LXXXIII (March 2001): 72-104.

Review: Joseph Parker, Zen Buddhist Landscape Arts of Early Muromachi Japan (1336-1573) Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Journal of Asian Studies 58/4 (Nov. 1999): 1150-1153.