drag the M away
The Bells Are Still Raised
Sasayama Yōi · Sanbasō-related hanging scroll · Cincinnati Art Museum · acc. 1906.14
M was an archival handle for this group of scrolls — a temporary way of pointing, never the painting's own identity.
drag the M away
Sasayama Yōi · Sanbasō-related hanging scroll · Cincinnati Art Museum · acc. 1906.14
M was an archival handle for this group of scrolls — a temporary way of pointing, never the painting's own identity.
Sasayama Yōi · Sanbasō · hanging scroll
The whole scroll, at size. Tap or click anywhere on it to bring that exact place nearer — the mask, the bells, the fan, the cranes, the bare feet, the empty paper. Look where you like; release when you are done.
Five marks sit on the painting itself; read them in order: 1 the bell-tree, low and forward, the hand already past its lowest point · 2 the mask, chin tipped up toward the raised arm · 3 the sleeve, still carrying the turn it has just left · 4 the fan, open at the top of its arc · 5 the cranes swung off-centre with the hem, the bare feet crossing, weight not yet put down. Every part reports the same instant from a different distance.
the address it was given
In a group of hanging scrolls lettered A to U, this one was M. For years that letter was all that could be said quickly: an address that kept the scroll findable while the rest of the description was still incomplete.
Nothing was lost and then found. The object stayed in the building; the knowledge around it thinned, and then people thickened it again — a painter, Sasayama Yōi, signed and sealed at the lower right; a subject, Sanbasō, the masked bell-dance of the Okina tradition, danced as a blessing; a collector, Robert Blum; conservation; a reading written back down.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U
the lettered group this scroll sat in · M marks this one
Who made it, who kept it, who wrote it down, who held the paper together, who read it again. Where a person is not named in the records, the recorded role or the institution stands in their place.
Attributed to Sasayama Yōi, signed and sealed at the lower right. The subject is Sanbasō: the masked, bell-carrying blessing dance of the Okina tradition.
The recorded provenance runs through Robert Blum, an American painter who collected Japanese art. The scroll survived in part because someone wanted it near them.
Keeping is unglamorous and continuous: shelves, wrappers, boxes, a place on a list. The museum held the scroll through the years when its description was incomplete.
Before artist, subject and context were reconnected, cataloguing preserved an address: M. Incomplete information, faithfully recorded, is what later research needs in order to begin.
Curatorial and archival research reconnected the scroll to artist, subject, collection history and the Okina–Sanbasō context — the slow work of writing the sentence back around the object.
Paper and silk have their own patience, and it runs out. Records place accession and conservation context in 2006 — the work that keeps a scroll openable, viewable, studiable at all.
Two hanging scrolls at The Metropolitan Museum of Art show figures of the same stage tradition — Sanbasō with bells and fan, and Okina, the old man. Shown here as context for the dance only.
The dance never needed recreating. It has been mid-turn the whole time — bells low, fan high, one foot still in the air.
What came back was everything standing around it: a name, a subject, a collector, a shelf, a letter that held the place, hands that held the paper together, a reading written down again so the next person could start further along.
M was an address in that relay — one human trace among many, and not the dancer.
With thanks to Sasayama Yōi, who painted it; Robert Blum, who collected it; the Cincinnati Art Museum, which kept it; its Asian Art Department, whose 2002 research reconnected it; the conservators and registrars behind its 2006 accession and care; and the unnamed cataloguers who kept a letter where a name would later go.