Detail: The landscape of Japan is a complex and invisible topography of interlocking histories and metaphors. As with any ancient and highly evolved culture, there are few places that do not reside atop an accretion of multiple meanings, imposed over centuries by historical events, literary interpretation, or religious explanation. Similarly, sacred and secular literatures are replete with tales of journeys—searches for salvation, flights into exile, and determined conquests. Few places or routes are untouched by a template or metaphor that can transform a quotidian excursion into a trip through other spheres and dimensions.

As Japan moved to modernity in the mid-nineteenth century, references to these "template" journeys were used to great effect in art. James Ulak examines the diverse and rich veins of these journey types as depicted in Japanese works. Examples include how the imposition of sacred geometries onto landscapes transform a Buddhist pilgrim’s trek into a ritualized progression, and how a courtier-poet’s exile becomes a lyric reflection on loss, ephemerality, and longing.

Dr. James Ulak is senior curator of Japanese art. After joining the F|S staff as curator of Japanese art in 1995, he served as deputy director (2003–10) and head of collections and research and chief curator (2002–3). A specialist in the history of narrative painting production in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Japan, Jim received his PhD from Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland) in 1994. Before his arrival at the Freer|Sackler, he was a researcher at the Cleveland Museum of Art, associate curator of Asian art at Yale University Art Gallery, and associate curator of Japanese art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Jim has produced more than twenty exhibitions and has published on a wide range of topics in Japanese art, including medieval Japanese narrative painting, eighteenth-century "eccentric" painters, and Japan's artistic encounters with modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 2010, he was inducted into the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun, an honor accorded by the Japanese government, for his outstanding contribution to the field of Japanese art.