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,” in /Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan/ (2007) and /Daitokuji: The Visual Cultures of a Zen Monastery /(2005). His current research focuses on fragments of Buddhist images within devotional and modern contexts in Asia and the West. A portion of this research will appear in an essay “Malraux’s Buddha Heads” in /The Blackwell Companion to Asian Art/ (2010). He is also at work on a book, A Long Strange Journey: Zen Art in the Modern Imagination, and an essay, “Silenced by Aesthetics? A Conjectural Poetics of Art History and Ecology.” With Yukio Lippit, he is co-editor of the volume /Re-Presenting Emptiness: Essays on Zen and Art /(Princeton Univeristy Press, 2009).

He has taught graduate seminars on topics such as Daitokuji; Kan’ei-era visual culture; problems of portraiture in Japan; shohekiga; art forgery; iconoclasm; and fragments in art history. In fall 2008 he will lead the Judith Stronach Graduate Travel Semiinar in Art History in Japan. 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 Hokyoji; and the Gutai collective.

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. "Silenced by Aesthetics? A Conjectural Poetics of Art History and Ecology." Manuscript under review. Download as PDF

Gregory Levine, “Two (or More) Truths: Reconsidering Zen Art in the West,” in /Awakenings: Zen Figure Paintings from Medieval Japan/, eds. Gregory Levine, Yukio Lippit (New York: Japan Society; Yale University Press, 2007), 52-63. Download as PDF

Gregory Levine, “On the Look and Logos of Zen Art," in /Re-Presenting Emptiness: Essays on Zen and Art/, eds./ /Gregory Levine, Yukio Lippit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2010). Download as PDF

“Malraux’s Buddha Heads,” in Blackwell Companion to Asian Art, ed. Deborah Hutton, Rebecca Brown (London: Blackwell Publishing, forthcoming 2010).

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.