A Tokyo Artist's Dante-Inspired Artwork for Difficult Times

The Japanese visual artist Kazumasa Chiba (b. 1967) has been depicting himself as a modern, Japanese Dante cycling through past, present, and future hells, purgatories, and paradises for over 20 years.  His massive, crowded paintings and sculptures of the afterlife move from being intensely graphic in their expression of human cruelty and punishment to evoking a technicolor space of pan-species harmony. This talk focuses on Chiba's remarkable way of metabolizing pain and suffering for his viewers and how he, via Dante, envisions a possible world of transcendent peace.

Arielle Saiber is Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She publishes primarily on the intersections between premodern Italian literature and mathematics/science, and on visual interpretations of Dante’s Commedia. Her current research is on “altered states of consciousness” in medieval and Renaissance Italian literature.

All welcome- this seminar is free to attend, but booking is required.