Review: ‘Kwaidan: Encounters with Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904)’, Farmleigh Gallery, Dublin, 7 March-24 August 2025

Abstract

The Kwaidan Exhibition project emerged from an invitation from Irish artist Stephen Lawlor to forty artists, twenty Japan-based and twenty Ireland-based, to create prints inspired by their choice of text from one of Lafcadio Hearn’s best-known works, completed in the year of his death in Tokyo in 1904. No stranger to curating collective creative crossovers between literature and the visual arts, Lawlor had previously organized an exhibition of the work of Irish writers and artists inspired by Hearn’s contemporary, the Irish ‘Celtic Twilight’ poet and Nobel laureate, W. B. Yeats. Indeed, it was while presenting this latter exhibition in Japan in 2017 that he first encountered Hearn’s potent aura.