Professor Shimizu's teaching and research interest in Japanese art includes: Japanese ink painting of the medieval period; arts of Zen Buddhist establishment; Heian and Kamakura narrative painting; Sino-Japanese cultural history of 12th through 16th century; Chinese and Japanese calligraphy; Kamakura Buddhism and its art; etc. In the summer of 2003 Shimizu spoke in Sidney, Australia, on early Japanese landscape screens and the treatment of the Four Seasons in Japanese painting. He also visited Korea for one week in the fall of 2003 under the auspices of the Korea Foundation. Most recently the Yashiro project took him to Italy, to read the letters written between 1921 and ca. 1958, by the Japanese scholar to the American scholar/connoisseur in Florence, and to view several Japanese art collections in Rome, Florence, Venice and Genova.

Shimizu's interests in the more traditional areas of Japanese art from Heian to Edo, including Sino- Japanese relations, continues to produce research papers, such as the one read at the CAA and other academic gatherings. One of them, "What Happened to Wang-liang-hua" was read at the 2004 CAA Annual Meeting in Seattle honoring James Cahill. He has published on workshop operations of the Kano School of Japanese painting of the Muromachi and Momoyama periods. He is widely published on the subject of Japanese ink painting from the 14th century on, represented by Mokuan, Shubun and Sesshu. He was also the keynote speaker at the Edo period art conference held in Chicago in April of this year. His general interest in the history of how Japanese art has been received in America, especially through public exhibitions, may be seen in his article in the Art Bulletin, spring, 2000, entitled, "Japanese Art in American Museums: Which Japanese Art?"

Since 2006, Shimizu has worked as senior curatorial adviser on the New York Japan Society’s centennial celebration exhibition, “Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Mediaeval Japan”, which was organized jointly with the Japanese government’s Agency for Cultural Affairs and was curated by Greg Levine of Berkeley and Yukio Lippit of Harvard, with Shimizu contributing a large body of descriptive entries to the accompanying exhibition catalog of the same title. To oversee preparatory activities of the exhibition (held from March 28 to June 17, 2007) Shimizu received an appointment, at Japan Society, as Scholar-In-Residence”, from September, 2006 to January, 2007.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS: “Dune Gulls,” and “Manjusri Riding on a Lion”, two contributing essays in Buddha’s Smile (Nenge misho): Masterpieces of Japanese Buddhist Art, exhibition catalog for exhibition of that title at the Okura Shukokan Museum of Fine Arts (Hotel Okura), Nov. 2-Dec. 24, 2000, pp., Tokyo; “Japan in the American Museums: But Which Japan?”, Art Bulletin, March, 2001, 37 pp.; Respondent’s paper for the “more recent” painting in East Asia, One of the panels at the symposium, “Painting in East Asia” held in Taipei, in 2002, would appear in the symposium’s proceedings expected in 2004.