Life Imitates Collection
April 2008
“There have been a few points in Japanese history when great collections could be made,” says writer, calligrapher and Asian art collector Alex Kerr. “One was immediately after World War II, one was in the ’60s and early ’70s, and one is now. It’s a great time to buy Japanese art. Things I never could have acquired in the past are popping out of collections and estates and showing up at auction.” Kerr is sitting on the tatami-matted floor of his 400-year-old house outside Kyoto, gazing at his favorite Japanese screen, a haboku or splashed-ink landscape from the early Edo period. The screen is one of several hundred Kerr owns; most date from 1600 to 1850, though a few are from the 1500s. This particular screen was popular in the Muromachi period (1336–1573) and is the only extant screen of its type. “It’s basically a few splashes of ink,” says Kerr, “but out of it arise mountains, cliffs, trees, houses—it’s profoundly abstract. It haunts me.”Kerr, who first came with his family to Japan at the age of 12, is a passionate and knowledgeable collector of classic East Asian art, which he has been purchasing for more than four decades. His collection of antique calligraphy screens is one of the largest in the world, yet in Japan, Kerr is better known as a writer and public speaker. His book Lost Japan won the Japanese equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1994, and his next book, Dogs and Demons, Tales from the Dark Side of Japan (published in 2001 in English and 2002 in Japanese), which Kerr says “tried to combine a study of finance and the bureaucracy with cultural issues to show that Japan’s modern malaise arises from the same causes in all these fields,” is considered one of the most important books on Japan’s troubles. “I’m an author who happens to be a mad collector,” Kerr says with a grin. “The collection is my teacher in many ways, concerning what I write. It’s been my teacher as a calligrapher, because I never really learned from a proper teacher. I learned from the pieces that I owned and traced and copied and studied.”
Kerr attended a grade school in Virginia that taught Chinese and from the age of 9 learned to copy the complex strokes of the characters, “I loved the rhythm of it; it kind of moves around like a dance.” Three years later, in 1964, his family moved to Japan, and young Alex bought himself brushes and ink and began to practice calligraphy. Today, he considers the art form, still one of the defining traits of life in Japan, to be his greatest love. In addition to having an important collection, Kerr is considered by calligraphy experts to be a master calligrapher in his own right, and he sells his art.
Collecting runs in Kerr’s family. The Chinese and Japanese souvenirs his father and grand-father, both naval officers, brought back laid the foundations for his love of Asian art. His mother, who collected Japanese screens and Imari porcelain plates, also instilled in him the passion for ownership. When Alex was a teenager living in Japan, his mother took him to a china shop and asked for Imari ware. “She had just done the equivalent of walking into a Woolworth’s and asking for Limoges,” says Kerr. Yet, the shopkeeper went to the back and returned with a box of 10 Imari plates, which had been sitting there since before the war, and were still wrapped in the ropes from the kiln. “It was like opening up King Tut’s tomb,” Kerr recalls. Many years later, he had the same feeling when buying screens at auction in Kyoto. “I’d find a screen that had been in someone’s storehouse that hadn’t been opened, literally, in 100 years. I’d pull it open and there would be mildew on it, and I realized I might be the first eyes looking at this thing in a century.”
Kerr’s budding interest in collecting was interrupted when he attended Yale (where he majored in Japanese Studies), but his passion was rekindled when he returned to Tokyo as an exchange student in 1972. His first acquisitions were Edo editions of block-printed Chinese classics. “It was incredible what you could find,” he says. “You could go down to the Kanda book district of Tokyo, which is still there, and they were selling on the streets Edo-period editions of block-printed Chinese classics. Real treasures were still available, and for only 50 yen [about 47 cents today] you could buy a hand-printed block edition from 1680 or 1720. These books were so little valued that they were being sold as scrap.” Kerr also set his sights on Japanese obis (sashes for robes or kimonos), which, he says, could be purchased for a few hundred yen in the early 1970s. When Kerr left Japan to earn his Master of Arts as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, he began to buy Tibetan and Chinese imperial robes, which came over the border into Nepal. “I went wild,” he says. “I went into debt at Oxford because I’d go to Christie’s and Sotheby’s to buy Chinese textiles. Of course I never had enough money, so my friends had to lend it to me.”
In his final year, Kerr, broke, entered the Chancellor’s English Essay contest at Oxford and won £50 for writing on the subject of exploration in Tibet. The prize, which had never been awarded to an American before, launched his writing career. He returned to Japan after graduation, and for the next 20 years, ran the Oomoto School of Traditional Japanese Arts. It was during this time that Kerr met David Kidd, a legendary collector and dealer who had a fantastic eye. “He taught me an important lesson that I never would have learned from art historians and curators: Beauty comes first,” Kerr says. “It should be old and valuable, but first ask yourself, ‘Is it beautiful?’” Today, Kerr runs the Origin Program of Japanese Arts, based in Kyoto. (For more on Kerr’s writings and programs, visit alex-kerr.com.)
Kerr’s collection includes Japanese ink painting, calligraphy, scrolls, screens, Chinese and Tibetan textiles and rugs, Chinese spirit stones, literati studio objects, Chinese and Southeast Asian ceramics and furniture, and houses. Most of the pieces are in storage, with only a few on display in his home outside Kyoto. “I move them around,” he says, explaining his display philosophy. “In Europe, oil paintings have been on castle walls for centuries, but it’s the opposite in Asia. Here, everything changes. It can be rolled up, folded, and something else takes its place.”
The houses he collects include four residences—two in Japan and two in Thailand—as well as eight houses in Kyoto, which are owned by his company. Kerr created Iori Co. in 2004, and the firm is dedicated to preserving the old machiya townhouses of Kyoto. So far Iori has acquired eight houses, which have been restored and made available for visitors to stay in as well as for cultural programs. He also owns a 250-year-old farmhouse in the mountains of Shikoku, which he has restored to the original wooden floors, floor hearth and thick, thatched roof. “The house is the collection,” he says, “and the beauty of that house is emptiness. I’ve tried to hang scrolls, and I’ve brought all kinds of things to the house, such as Chinese furniture, and the house rejected them all because it wants to be empty. What is compelling about the house is when you sit at that floor hearth and the smoke is rising and you look at the empty expanse of those black floors, you feel like you went back 10,000 years.”
Even though it might seem like Kerr has it all, the collector still has an eye on the horizon. “I want a calligraphy by Sen no Rikyu, the founder of the tea ceremony,” he says. “Sometimes he’d write records of the tea utensils from one of his tea ceremonies. You can buy one of those, and considering Rikyu’s importance to world art history, at about $20,000 it’s amazingly inexpensive. I won’t rest until I have one.”Kerr’s interest in the arts of Southeast Asia and Thailand in particular became so great that a few years ago, he established a second home in Bangkok, and presently resides half the year there and half the year in Japan. His base of operations is now in Bangkok, where he continues to collect Asian art. “I’d been buying calligraphies and hand scrolls, then hanging scrolls, then my first screen. Eventually, someone came and asked if I’d trade my screen, so I traded up. Then someone wanted to buy something else, so I sold. One day I woke up and realized I’m a dealer. It happened accidentally because I’m actually not a dealer, I’m a collector,” he says.
“I put my favorite things around me and asked myself if I’d be willing to let it all go, knowing that if I couldn’t, then I should immediately stop being a dealer,” he continues. “I decided I could let it go. You have to let it go because it doesn’t belong to you anyway; it’s passing through your hands. And so I made that promise not to cling to these objects, as much as I love them. And today, I’m still a dealer but, of course, the things just accumulate, because as a collector you can never stop.”
As both a dealer and a collector, Kerr has strong opinions on what should and should not be bought in Japan. For example, if you are interested in tea ceremony items, it is best to approach this field with caution. He explains, “The tea ceremony world is still very active: utensils, such as tea bowls, scoops and scrolls for the tearoom are highly valued. In fact, they are often overvalued and command ridiculous prices. But step outside the world of tea, and Japanese artworks sell for a song.” However, he advises collectors to purchase hand scrolls in Japan. “Hand scrolls roll sideways and can be 5 or even 10 meters long. Unlike hanging scrolls, they are difficult to use in the tearoom so they sell for a fraction of the cost of hanging scrolls, although they have equivalent, or even greater, artistic and historical importance,” he says. “Screens are likewise a terrific value, because so few people have the space to display them, and yet in their large scale and creative scope, they are among the great treasures of Japanese art.
“The art-collecting world stands at a major turning point,” Kerr continues. “A private collector from the next generation would need to be very wealthy to create a collection similar to mine, because the spring is running dry. Folding screens have declined in quantity and quality, and ink paintings have only a few more years before they vanish as well. My ability to keep collecting depends on just one thing: The lack of interest the Japanese display in Asian art. So, although it’s a self-centered wish, I pray they will stay asleep a little while longer.”