 After the cherry blossom is brightening up the ANU campus, with an exhibition of art inspired by Japan currently on display. The exhibition, Seeing Japan, features art by ANU staff, students and alumni who've been inspired by a time spent in the country or interaction with the East Asian nation. Forming part of the Japan Studies Association of Australia 2013 conference, the exhibition has been organised by the ANU Japan Institute. The Japan Institute at the ANU is hosting the national conference for the Japanese Studies Association of Australia this year and we thought it would be a great idea to have an exhibition showcasing some of the relationships between school of art and Japan and more specifically the Kyoto Seiko University. A lot of the artists who are exhibiting in this exhibition are actually people who have been to Japan and have been influenced by people, by culture and by art in Japan. We have a bit of everything, we have visual art, we also have sculptures, we have enormous sculptures, we also have smaller paintings, lithographs, jewellery. There is a fabulous series of cats by Amelia Davies and there is an amazing looking cat in the very middle who looks very unhappy with something and he's my favourite. Former head of sculpture at ANU, Michael LeGrand is one of the artists who's currently on display. He tells us what it was about Japan that inspired his work. The one thing that still remains with me, even though it's not as acutely better as I like to use it, is in the torii, those temple gateways and that horizontal bar across the top is in my work but I don't sort of go and say I see a torii I'm going to make a sculpture about that, it's nothing to do with that, it's about acknowledging that as it reveals itself in the process of making. I was fascinated by the discipline, the attention to detail, the fastidiousness of that and the single-mindedness of it, as distinct from the western everybody have a go, anything is valid, they go through a procedure of measured responses and you don't get an accolade or until you've done your servitude in some way.