Report from Tokyo
C.B. Liddell
Tokyo is gearing up for the summer holidays with the usual apparently random selection of exhibitions pepped up with a smattering of kid-centric shows, like "Howl’s Moving Castle" at the Museum of Contemporary Art. This "exhibition" hypes the latest production from Japan’s answer to the Disney Empire, Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. Heck, it even goes one better than the movie, with wind-up dolls, modeled after the characters, performing acrobatic stunts inside a mockup of the eponymous castle. The kids will probably love their first visit to the museum so much that they’ll go back when there’s an exhibition of Kandinsky or something, and end up leaving in tears!
Another trick of the summer trade is to have exhibitions that focus on nature in some way. The University Art Museum has an exhibition of botanical drawings, including Dutch and British works dating back to the 16th century, while Tokyo Station Gallery has the work of Ioki Bunsai, a 19th century Japanese pioneer of botanical art. A much more attractive summer exhibition is the work of Tamako Kataoka, a nihonga artist who is still around to enjoy her centenary exhibition, which opened at the nearby seaside resort of Hayama, where the Imperial family has a holiday home.
In her long career, Kataoka has used expressionist techniques within the framework of traditional Japanese painting to create large, vibrantly colored panels, like Mountain: Mt. Fuji (1967), that complement summer as well as any Hawaiian shirt. After Hayama, the exhibition travels to Nagoya and then to Ibaraki near Tokyo, where it ends in November.
If there is a trend in exhibitions this year, it is to have a lot more exhibitions of pre-impressionist European art from European museums and galleries than normal. A major exhibition of Romantic and Neoclassical art from the Louvre, including Ingres’ The Turkish Bath (1863) and Delacroix’s Young Tiger Playing With Its Mother (1831), ends in July. But there is plenty more on the way, in particular, major exhibitions of Western art from the State Art Collections Dresden at the National Museum of Western Art and Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum.
Japan is renowned for its slightly narcissistic obsession with Impressionist and Post Impressionist art, two genres towards which it contributed some influence, but, with insurance fees much higher since September 11, the cost of bringing such art to Japan has soared, forcing museums and galleries either to focus on less popular periods of European art, or to scale down the major exhibitions. The current exhibition of van Gogh, for example, is meant as an important reappraisal of the artist, but could only scrape together less than 30 of his oils, supplementing this with works by related artists.
Most museums, however, seem to be concentrating on lesser known work. This creates several new problems for curators, as I discovered when I visited yet another exhibition of pre-Impressionist European art, " French Paintings from the Musée Fabre, Montpellier" at the Sompo Japan Museum, perched atop a skyscraper in Tokyo’s Shinjuku business district.
For my article in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper I described one of the pictures, Louis de Silvestre’s The Formation of Man by Prometheus With the Aid of Minerva (1702) as it must look to the vast majority of Japanese people, who have little acquaintance with the classical myths or Biblical legends that provide most pre-Impressionist subject matter: …a woman in a plumed helmet, floating on a cloud, talks to two naked men in a forest, one of whom holds a torch; while the rest of the painting is populated by a variety of creatures, including a couple of lions and a strangely unconcerned rabbit and peacock.
The curator, Shoko Kobayashi, expressed the hope that the attractiveness of the paintings would open the way for greater understanding of their arcane subject matter. "It’s very difficult for Japanese people to understand the background," she said. "But I hope some will feel that the paintings are beautiful, and will want to understand them."
Another, more radical approach to understanding pre-Impressionist Western art is currently being exhibited at the Shugoarts Gallery, hosting the latest exhibition by Yasumasa Morimura, an artist renowned since the mid-1980s for dressing up and photographing himself as famous European artworks. The latest show tackles Francisco Goya’s series of etchings, Los Caprichos (The Caprices), with Morimura appearing as everything from the Duchess de Alba to Saturn consuming his children.
In these works it might seem that Morimura is following Kobayashi’s advice of understanding the background of European art, but from his comments, it’s clear he has something a lot more glib in mind. "Since the Renaissance, art has been about the artist–the self–more than the work," he said at a recent talk. "What artists try to do is express themselves. I take that idea to its logical conclusion, by putting myself inside the art."
In other words these works are more about a 54-year-old man who likes to dress up in drag and makeup, than about the proto-surrealistic genius of Goya. Although some critics have hailed Morimura as a genius, his work is really expression without creativity. At best, these odd works have flashes of wit; at worst they simply reveal–but don’t bother to bridge–the chasm that opens when one nation tries to understand the culture of another.
