The Blooming Mirror
Exploring how plants and flowers encode emotion, desire, and symbolism in Japanese art, "The Blooming Mirror" showcases works where nature becomes a vessel for meaning.
Wednesday, February 18, 2026 – Saturday, May 23, 2026
College of East Asian Studies Gallery at Mansfield Freeman Center
343 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
Exhibition Hours
Closed from Saturday, March 7 through Monday, March 23, 2026.
Free and open to the public
Exhibition Overview
The symbolism of many plants and flowers has long been codified across Japanese art, from seasonal floral motifs on kimonos to poetic tropes in classical literature. In an era of refined court culture that prized allusive expression, plants and their manipulated forms, such as classical flower arrangements [rikka], embodied moral and emotional subtexts that transgressed cultural anxieties and taboos. Featuring homoerotic encounters, courtly love stories, and meditations on transience, the exhibition The Blooming Mirror explores the myriad aesthetic and affective functions of cultivated Japanese nature, presenting objects from Wesleyan’s College of East Asian Studies Art and Archival Collection and facsimiles of Japanese literati paintings and narrative handscrolls that employ plants as semiotic vessels.
The exhibition was curated by Maxwell Maveus ’26 as part of a tutorial in curatorial practice led by Exhibitions Manager Rosemary Lennox and Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee ’00. Exhibition support provided by the College of East Asian Studies.