AIC's 51st Annual Meeting

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) houses the finest and largest collection of Japanese art outside of Japan and is committed to its preservation and display. To that end, in 1988 the MFA constructed a Japanese kare-sansui style garden adjacent to the Museum building. To ensure that this rock garden was authentic to its form, the MFA hired renowned Professor Kinsaku Nakane to oversee the design and construction of the garden. The garden was named Tenshin-en in honor of Okakura Kakuzō (aka. Okakura Tenshin), an eminent Japanese scholar and the first curator of Asiatic Art at the MFA. Tenshin-en is a 10,000 sq foot garden with a dry waterfall, over seventy plant species, and eight stone sculptures enclosed by a kabukimon-style gate. For decades, the garden was maintained by specialists in the care of Japanese gardens. Unfortunately, in recent years, Tenshin-en has experienced a slow decline due to changing institutional and environmental factors, which were exacerbated by the Museum’s closure during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In summer 2022, two pre-program interns, Ellie Ngo and Kei Takahashi, were welcomed by the MFA’s Object Conservation department to assist with the maintenance of the outdoor sculpture collection. Their responsibilities included an in-depth research project into the history and condition of Tenshin-en by gathering existing documentation, undertaking condition examinations, and conducting interviews of current and retired staff. The research and recommendations resulting from this project will hopefully provide new direction as the MFA takes a renewed interest in returning this important space to its former beauty. In the current social climate, inattention to Tenshin-en might lead public audiences to conclude that the Asian collections are not a priority at the Museum. Without proper maintenance, the garden will continue to deteriorate, which could lead to cultural misunderstandings. The MFA must implement a maintenance plan that not only fits the needs of the garden, but also takes into account cultural perceptions, community involvement, and the changing environment.
During this process, it is important to consider how the garden came to be in its current condition, what the garden means to the MFA and larger community, why it is so important to preserve, what successful care has looked like in the past, and what it could look like in the future. Perhaps the garden has been overlooked in recent years because in delegating maintenance responsibilities for different elements of the garden to different museum departments, the unified significance of the immersive space was lost. Given the great intentionality accorded to all the individual elements, Tenshin-en should be seen as an aesthetic entity in which individual artworks reside. The amount of thought, time, effort, and expert craftsmanship that has gone into every aspect of its creation is evidence of this. As a living work of art, it deserves the care of conservators and the attention of curators. Without a clear institutional framework and dedicated sustained resources, Tenshin-en’s proper upkeep will remain elusive.