Some・Seiryukan　～dye museum／kyoto～

The current Kobe City Museum was established from what used to be the Namban Art Museum in Kobe. In 1940 (Showa 15) when Hajime Ikenaga founded this museum, he stated, “There are many people in the world who are skillful at making money, however not so many people who know how to spend it well.”
“An internationally well-known big city like Kobe, not having even one art museum, is a reflection of the level of education of its people as well as a big national disgrace.” For similar reasons, the Seiryukai was established and on the occasion of its first exhibition I recalled Ikenaga’s above comments. Kyoto is internationally well-known as a “city of textile dyeing” however it’s curious that there hasn’t been an art museum specifically for textile dyeing. When Jyunji Ozawa was deeply concerned about this matter and asked me for advice on founding a museum for textile dyeing, I whole heartedly agreed and felt that there was good reason for overall support. To say in a word, textile dyeing is “kimono” plus other related works, thereby covering a wide field. Therefore we decided to limit the works to textile art mounted onto panels. The selected artists are veteran and mid-career artists from the top of the field of textile dyeing. As for the future, we also plan to hold an exhibition overseas. I hope that many admirers of art and lovers of textile dyeing, even just one more, would visit this museum, and through the beauty of these works, take part in the growth of the art of textile dyeing.