YUKIO LIPPIT
Jeffrey T. Chambers and Andrea Okamura Professor of History of Art and Architecture;
Director of Harvard Summer School in Kyoto
Yukio Lippit is Jeffrey T. Chambers and Andrea Okamura Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. His book Painting of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in Seventeenth-Century Japan (2012) was awarded the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award by the College Art Association and the John Whitney Hall Book Prize by the Association of Asian Studies. His article “Of Modes and Manners in Medieval Japanese Ink Painting: Sesshū’s Splashed Ink Landscape of 1495” was awarded the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize by CAA in 2013. Lippit’s other books include The Ten Kings of Hell and the Beyond in Medieval Korea (Cleveland Museum of Art, 2026), Sesson Shūkei: A Zen Monk-Painter in Medieval Japan (2022), Painting Edo: Japanese Art from the Feinberg Collection (Harvard Art Museums, 2020), The Artist in Edo (2018), Irresolution: The Paintings of Yoshiaki Shimizu (2017), Japanese Zen Buddhism and the Impossible Painting (2016), Sōtatsu: Making Waves (2016), The Thinking Hand: Tools and Traditions of the Japanese Carpenter (2013), Kenzo Tange: Architecture for the World (2012), Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-Flower Paintings by Itō Jakuchū (1716-1800) (2012), and Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan (2007).
Forthcoming publications include “The Floor-Sitting Artist” in West 86th Street (forthcoming 2027) and “The Wood Arts in Japan: Three Scientific Approaches” in Art Objects and Scientific Approaches: Global Perspectives and Practices, edited by Maria Kokkori and Francesca Casadio (forthcoming 2027). Current research projects include a collection of essays on Japanese architecture and a book-length study on the Shōsōin Imperial Treasury, as well as articles on Mokuan Reien’s The Four Sleepers and Sesshū Tōyō’s Huike Offering His Arm to Bodhidharma.
Professor Lippit has taught at the Universities of Tokyo, Heidelberg, Los Andes, Campinas, and Melbourne, and is the Director of the Harvard Summer School in Kyoto. He is a founding organizer of the World Japanese Culture Forum and helped to initiate the Harvard Bunkazai Project. From 2013 to 2018 Lippit served as the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Faculty Director of the Arts at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, and in 2018 he was appointed Harvard College Professor for a five-year term for distinguished contributions to undergraduate teaching.