Word: gu
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...declares that this was the place where he decided to become an artist. Growing up in Kotohira, a backwater town on Shikoku island in southern Japan, he rarely gave any thought to art. But one of his best friends was the son of the head priest of Kotohira-gu, commonly called Konpira, an important Shinto shrine that is the town's great pride and that is said to date back more than 2,000 years. So Takubo spent a lot of time on the shrine's grounds, climbing up and down the complex's infamously forbidding 785 steps, and watching...
...more than 40 years after his revelation, Takubo is back at Kotohira-gu, curating an exhibition of the treasures of the okushoin?the first time many of the pieces have been seen by the public in 125 years. Takubo says it is fate that he should return to liberate the works he loves more than all others by offering them to everybody. It all came about when his childhood friend, Yasutsugu Kotooka, who is the shrine's 22nd head priest, asked him a few years ago what special events could be held in 2004 to coincide with Senza...
...Right now, the art attractions at Kotohira-gu are not limited to the treasures of the okushoin. Current exhibitions there also include four other galleries of paintings, sculptures, scrolls and screens from various periods. One fascinating show is a retrospective of the work of Yuichi Takahashi, one of the first Japanese artists to adopt Western oil-painting techniques. His still lifes and landscapes, from the second half of the 19th century, are a fascinating glimpse of an artist struggling to master a new and foreign style while remaining traditionally Japanese in his subject matter...
...Gu was a member of the Asian-American Christian Fellowship throughout his college career and served on the group’s executive board while he was a senior...
Quach, who also roomed with Gu in Boston several years after his graduation, remembered his relentless positivity and curiosity about people...