Kwaidan—Encounters with Lafcadio Hearn
March 7 @ 10.00am - August 25 @ 5.00pm
An international touring exhibition of contemporary fine art prints by forty Irish and Japanese artists.
Kwaidan – Encounters With Lafcadio Hearn is a touring exhibition of contemporary printmaking featuring the fine art print works of twenty Irish and twenty Japanese artists. It will run from Friday 7th March until Sunday 24th August 2025 at Farmleigh Gallery in Dublin’s Phoenix Park and will be officially opened by H.E. Mr. Shimada Junji, the newly-arrived Ambassador of Japan to Ireland.
The works featured are a response to the Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn’s 1904 book Kwaidan, his world-renowned collection of Japanese ghost stories. The ambition of the exhibition is two-fold: firstly, to raise Lafcadio Hearn’s profile to its rightful place within the Pantheon of Irish writers, and, secondly, through Hearn’s words and the works of the forty printmaking artists, to bring Ireland and Japan closer together culturally.
These exhibition dates will embrace Farmleigh’s annual Experience Japan festival, which will take place this year on Sunday 27th April, and also the 175th anniversary of Hearn’s birth on the 27th June 1850. The presentation will be augmented by a support programme of talks (details below) that will focus on various aspects of traditional and modern Japanese culture and Hearn’s influence on both.
Lafcadio Hearn was born in 1850 on the Greek island of Lefcada, to an Irish Surgeon-Major father and a Greek mother. He was raised in Dublin and Waterford from the age of two until his early teen years, after which he was sent, aged 13, to boarding school at St. Cuthbert’s College in Ushaw, near Durham in England. At age 19, he travelled to the USA, creating for himself an important career in writing and journalism in the 1870s and the 1880s in Cincinnati and in New Orleans. In 1890 he emigrated to Japan, where he spent the remaining years of his life, and from where his writings on that country gained him serious recognition for his sympathetic understanding of Japanese culture.
In collaboration with Hearn’s great-grandson Bon Koizumi and his wife Shoko, who are the custodians of the writer’s legacy, this exhibition has already been seen at the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum in the Japanese city of Matsue, where it was officially opened by H.E. Ambassador Damien Cole, Ireland’s Ambassador to Japan. As well as visits to several other cities in Japan during 2023 and 2024, including Yaizu, Nagoya, Kyoto and Toyama, the Kwaidan exhibition has been presented in Ireland at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Co. Mayo, the Coastguard Cultural Centre on behalf of the Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Gardens in Tramore, Co. Waterford, the Hyde Bridge Gallery in Sligo town, and the Hunt Museum in Limerick city.
This year, the Kwaidan exhibition will be presented as an integral cultural element in the Irish Pavilion at the Osaka World Fair, which runs from April to October, after which it will have a permanent home in Ireland House, the new Irish embassy complex that is currently being built in Tokyo.
The Kwaidan exhibition travels in September and October 2025 to the William Allen Gallery at Ushaw College, in Durham and will be shown in the USA in 2026 at the University of Virginia and at the Cincinnati Public Library, in recognition of Hearn’s successful career working as a journalist and writer in the USA.
Kwaidan – Encounters With Lafcadio Hearn is supported by the Office of Public Works and the Department of Foreign Affairs and runs at Farmleigh Gallery, in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, from Friday 7th March until Sunday 24th August 2025. The Gallery is open Tuesday to Sunday, and every Bank Holiday Monday, from 10am to 1pm and 2pm to 5pm (closed for lunch). Admission is free. Tickets, at €10, for the support events, can be booked at www.eventbrite.ie
- The full list of participating artists in the Farmleigh Gallery exhibition are:
Artists from Ireland Yoko Akino / Ailbhe Barrett / Nuala Clarke / Niamh Flanagan / Richard Gorman / Richard Lawlor / Stephen Lawlor / Sharon Lee / Kate MacDonagh / Alice Maher / Eimearjean McCormack / James McCreary / Ed Miliano / Niall Naessens / Kelvin Mann / David Quinn / Barbara Rae / Robert Russell / Amelia Stein / Dominic Turner
Artists from Japan Kanami Hano / Yoko Hara / Jin Hirosawa / Aya Ito / O JUN / Mayumi Kimura / Chie Matsui / Seiichiro Miida / Yuuka Miyajima / Shoji Miyamoto / Junko Ogawa / Shoko Osugi / Yuki Saito / Michael Schneider / Sudi / Azusa Takahashi / Yo Takahashi / Kanako Watanabe / Toshiya Watanabe / Katsutoshi Yuasa
Inspired by the ghostly writings of Lafcadio Hearn, an electroacoustic sound installation entitled Yōkai, by composer and performer Neil O Connor, will accompany the presentation of the artworks.
- The exhibition support programme of talks and events at Farmleigh includes:
- Saturday 8th March: Paul Murray / ‘Ghosts and Ghouls – The Undead Imagination of Lafcadio Hearn’
- Saturday 12th April: Bill Emmott / ‘The Foreign Correspondent as Double Agent’
- Saturday 17th May: Seán Golden / ‘Lafcadio Hearn & W.B. Yeats – The Writers Who Brought Japan to Ireland
- Saturday 7th June: Agnes Aylward / ‘A Biographical Garden – Ireland’s Living Tribute to Lafcadio Hearn’
- Saturday 12th July: Rebecca Salter / ‘Japanese Woodblock Printing – The People Behind the Craft’
- Saturday 23rd August: Kate MacDonagh hosts Japanese printmaking workshops
- A full-day workshop entitled Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan: from Enchantment to Intercultural Understanding will be presented by the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies at the Long Room Hub in Trinity College Dublin from 9am to 7pm on Friday 7th March. Speakers will include
Inaugural Speaker: His Excellency Mr. SHIMADA Junji (Ambassador of Japan to Ireland)
Speakers and Discussants (in alphabetical order)
- Professor Stefano Evangelista (Trinity College, Oxford)
- Dr. James Hadley (Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation, TCD)
- Professor Bon Koizumi (Honorary professor at University of Shimane Junior College, Descendant of Lafcadio Hearn) and Ms. Shoko Koizumi
- Mr. Paul Murray (Former Irish Diplomat and biographer of Lafcadio Hearn)
- Professor John Neary (Former Ambassador of Ireland to Japan/the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Adjunct Professor at UCD School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice)
- Dr. Fraser Riddell (Durham University)
- Dr. Kathryn Webb-Destefano (University of Virginia)
Admission to the workshop is free and full details can be found here: www.tcd.ie/Asian/events/tcd-Event-Lafcadio-Hearn
- As part of the TCD workshop, a musical performance, entitled Celebrating Lafcadio Hearn – Bridging Japan and Ireland will take place at St. Ann’s Church, on Dawson Street on between 1pm and 1.45pm on Friday 7th March. The concert twins the Irish harp, played by Tríona Marshall, and the Japanese satsumabiwa, played by Thomas Charles Marshall. Admission is free.
