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Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life @ the Hayward Gallery

‘Everyone’s different. Everyone’s connected.’
(Chiharu Shiota)

‘While we live our lives separately, we are, at the same time, deeply connected’

This is a weird and wonderful, beguiling and genuinely ‘immersive’ exhibition. Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota was born in Osaka in 1972 but has lived and worked in Berlin, Germany since 1996. ‘Threads of Life’ is her first major solo exhibition in a London public gallery. As a retrospective it includes examples of:

drawings
early performance videos
photographs

But the blockbuster items are the three big gallery-sized installations in which thousands of yards of woollen thread have been intricately woven into dazzling webs and cocoons, strange disorientating mazes which eerily incorporate everyday objects such as shoes, keys, beds, chairs and dresses. The show includes other, less dramatic works, but let’s look at the three big showstoppers first.

1. Threads of Life (2026)

‘Threads that bind us to life, to others, the complex ties that not only bind us to one another and to the world, but also to the memories that are always shaping the cycle of life. networks of relationships and meaning…’

In the Hayward’s biggest upstairs gallery, thousands of yards of bright red wool have been intertwined to create an enormously complicated web of fine filaments covering the whole ceiling and coming down the walls of this big gallery, and from this mesh dangle what the visitor assistant told me is no fewer than 20,000 old keys. And there, abandoned in the middle of this strange entanglement, is the frame of an old wooden, double door, set partly open.

Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing the largest installation, ‘Threads of Life’ (photo by the author)

Curators talk a lot about ‘immersive experiences’ but because it comes down from the ceiling at you, and covers the walls and intrudes onto the floorspace it really did feel ‘immersive’. Also the sheer redness, unadulterated, uninterrupted, unrelieved red, the gallery lights shining through the intricate web and turning everything red, red, red. It felt like something urgent and important was happening. What does Shiota herself say?

‘I believe that people are connected by an invisible thread. Some call this ‘the red string of fate,’ but I use red thread because it also resembles the colour of blood. Like threads, human relationships can be tight, loose, dense, cut, or knotted…’

And the keys? Twenty thousand rusty old, second-hand worn keys. What do they symbolise except 20,000 precious locations, places people wanted to keep secure and private – homes, rooms, cupboards, trunks and boxes, safe spaces, protected spaces, locations of experiences and memories and values. And now deracinated, removed from their sources and meanings, from their previous owners, and now dangling from blood red skeins. Why?

Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing some of the 20,000 keys hanging by intricate webs of red thread from the ceiling (photo by the author)

And the doors, the double doors, ajar enough for visitors to walk through – what are you walking into? And out of? What happens when you walk through the door? As when Alice stepped through the looking glass. Doors can mark the boundary between the public and private, the known and unknown, the past and the future. Interestingly, lot of visitors were walking round and round the room but very few walking through the obvious opening, as if daunted. Unafraid, I walked self-consciously through the parted portals and nothing happened… or did it?

Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing the open doors at the centre of ‘Threads of Life’ (photo by the author)

Another thing: these doors had a lock so the obvious questions arises: which of the 20,000 keys unlocked these doors? As in a fairy story, as in a fable. If I’d been visiting with my young children I’d have asked them to suggest which key was The Key, the Key To The Door and set them off hunting. As Shiota puts it:

‘Although each of our lives is different, we all hold a key in our hands, and with that key, you feel anything is possible. It secures your home, but it can also open the door to new opportunities. My work offers the chance to experience something different from ordinary life: the chance to enter another realm and see the red threads that are invisible in the [real] world, but are impossible to live without.’

2. Letters of Thanks (2026)

Into the next gallery and a variation on the theme: instead of tangled skeins we have thousands of small-gauge ropes , dyed the identical same primary red as in the key room, but this time hanging directly down from the high ceiling until just above the floor. But once again that’s not all, there is another component: as the key room enmeshed thousands of keys, so these hanging threads are interspersed with hundreds and hundreds of sheets of paper, folding, curled, suspended in mid-flutter, frozen in space and time as they appear to fall from the white ceiling.

Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing ‘Letters of Thanks’ (photo by the author)

What are they? Thank you letters. Shiota tells us that she wanted to convey her gratitude to her father, who worked so hard for his family but fond it easiest to do in a letter and this prompted thoughts about how it’s often easiest to bare deep emotions in the objective form of writing than by saying them.

And so the genesis of this iterative work: every time the work is exhibited, Shiota invites people to share their own thank you letters, and she proceeds to embed them in the next iteration. This the work includes, in tumbling mid-flight, letters from Brazil, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Japan, and now London.

And clearly the cosmopolitan nature of contemporary art, and Shiota’s many destinations, themselves weave a kind of invisible web of connections. You can imagine a thread following the airplanes she takes round the world, weaving red threads round the globe. And then you could kind of dig deeper, look closer, and imagine the hundreds, probably thousands of thank you letters she’s received and embedded in the work, and the myriad connections those make out to their loved ones, parents, partners, children and so on. Macro and micro meshes.

This exhibition reflects the often-hidden connections between us, with each thread becoming a trace of our shared existence, weaving visible forms from the invisible threads of life. Through my work, I try to make sense of life and its uncertainties; each installation has grown from personal experiences, such as losing my father, facing death and questioning what it means to be human. With this exhibition, I want to highlight the marvellous aspects of ordinary existence.’

3. During Sleep (2026)

The third blockbuster installation is in another big gallery space and consists of half a dozen basic metal beds, such as you might find in an army barracks, laid out in an orderly pattern so you can walk up one aisle, round the end and back out of the gallery – but the point is that these banal objects are enmeshed in an even more invasive, consuming cocoon of thousands and thousands of internetted threads, this time coloured minatory black.

Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing ‘During Sleep’ (photo by the author)

The red key room felt wonderful, liberating and life-enhancing whereas, presumably because of the colour black, and the stark contrast between the black thread and the white sheets and pillows and metal frames of the bed – black and white – this space felt both colder and more claustrophobic and downright spooky. Shiota provides a detailed explanation:

‘When I moved to Germany I moved nine times in three years. Every time I changed where I slept, I’d wake up unable to recognise where I was. While sitting in bed, I picked up some yarn and started weaving it around my body, desperate to create a space of my own. It was like painting in the air. The black threads enveloped the bed just like a cocoon.’

So for her the thing appears to have a comforting, protective motivation but I must say it worked the opposite for me. I am scared of spiders and this made me feel like I was entering an enormous spider’s web with a barely suppressed feeling of panic that somewhere, lurking just out of sight, must be an enormous spider. It reminded me of the horrible scene in ‘Lord of the Rings’ where Frodo and Sam find themselves in the pitch black caves of the giant spider, Shelob, monster of nightmares. Or other old-timers like me might remember the famous Dr Who episode from the 1960s where a monster takes over the London Underground and spins a horrifying cocoon of sticky webs which trap its victims.

Well, Shiota’s aim is nothing like that. She goes on to explain that, as part of the exhibition, on certain days, performers are going to get into the beds and lie there for a time, impressing the beds with their weight and shape and warmth.

‘At certain times during the exhibition, performers sleep in the beds. I like the shape of the sheets after someone has slept in them. Each person leaves a different one and I can see their former existence in those traces. A sleeping person occupies the gap between dreaming and reality. To me, death might be the perfect sleep. It represents a new state of existence within the cycle of life, one that moves towards a larger universe.’

Very restful, calm and civilised. I could see the outlines in the beds and sheets where these performers had already slept and I understand the intention. Shiota intends the work to depict a kind of haunting of the real world by ghostly absences. But I couldn’t get past my own sense of uncanny, spooky and barely-suppressed horror.

Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing ‘During Sleep’ (photo by the author)

Another web work

State of Being (Dress) (2025)

Between the huge key room and the narrow dangling help note room is what looks like a vitrine, large enough to hold what looks like a white wedding dress, but engulfed in an amazingly intricate web of black thread. Again, total black against total white. Maybe white purity occluded by the thousand striations of real life. Or the purity of the dram world or ideal life, imprisoned in ten thousand compromises and preventions.

Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing ‘State of being: Dress’ (photo by the author)

As usual my response is more intense (and negative) than Shiota’s etherial intention:

‘In my work, I use found objects that I come across in my daily life. These items represent an absent person whose story I can never truly know, yet they help me feel connected to universal human experiences. Clothing, in particular, reflects this idea. When we wear our clothes, the fabric accumulates our feelings and memories. It is like a second skin. In the absence of the body, a shell of our existence remains – a state of our being. Piling up layer upon layer of threads creates the entirety of the universe bound within this framed space. When I can no longer trace a single line with my eye, the sculpture is complete. At that point, I feel as if I am able to glimpse what lies beyond, and touch the truth.’

Non-web works

These four web-and-thread works are all relatively recent. As you proceed into the exhibition you go back in time to earlier works from Shiota’s career, specifically to three earlier and non-thread-based pieces.

Video: Wall (2010)

On the stairs to the upstairs gallery you come across a video screen showing all 3 minutes and 39 seconds of ‘Wall’. In this video 38-year-old Shiota is lying naked on a white floor and is covered with a spaghetti tangle of white plastic tubing. As the video proceeds in flickering time-lapse jumps, we discover the tubes are hollow because one by one they fill with a red liquid, red the colour of blood, slowly spurting through all the tubes until a tangle of white tubes has become a tangle of red ones.

Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing ‘Wall’ (photo by the author)

Surprisingly, this started from a meditation on the concept of walls:

‘I had wanted to create a work around the theme of walls for a long time. I took photographs of the Berlin Wall and the Western Wall in Jerusalem, but I decided to focus instead on the ‘walls’ within our bloodstream: family, nationality, religion, and other boundaries to do with the human condition. These walls give us comfort and a sense of identity, yet they can also strangle us. In Wall, my body is entangled in red tubes resembling blood vessels, as if the body has been turned inside out, revealing everything that is carried in our blood on the outside.’

I haven’t yet mentioned that there is an audio track on the film which is a slow human heartbeat:

‘The heartbeat of a fetus inside the womb forms the soundtrack, encapsulating my sense of the many things I have experienced over the years – such as illness, pregnancy, miscarriage, and childbirth.’

Try and Go Home (1997)

This feels very basic and entry-level compared to the mature sophistication of the web works. It simply consists of six black and white photos depicting a performance. According to her own account, Shiota moved to Germany in 1996 and enrolled in the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. Here she took a course with performance artist Marina Abramović who told them to write down one word. ‘Japan’ immediately came to Shiota’s mind.

Her account then jumps to the idea that she went out to the countryside and dug a hollow in the ground. She proceeded to take off all her clothes and performed the attempt to crawl back to the place she wanted to go home to. Again and again she tried, again and again she couldn’t get very far into the cave and rolled back down the slope, obviously becoming more dirty and muddy with every attempt.

Which is why the exhibition presents us with these six photos, presumably taken by a colleague and partner in the performance, of her naked body in various parts of the burrow-and-roll process.

Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing six photos from ‘Try and Go Home’ (photo by the author)

This is so far removed from the webworks as to feel like the works of a completely different artist. On the other hand, it is obviously linked to the video by Shiota’s willingness to get naked, to photograph and film herself naked, and to display herself naked in a public gallery for tens of thousands of visitors to look at. Make of that what you will.

The Trainee (2023 to 2024)

Much more recent is another work which, initially, seems completely unrelated to the web works. In the early 2020s Shiota was asked to create illustrations for a novel. Yoko Tawada’s novel ‘The Trainee’ is set in Germany in the 1980s and follows a young woman who works at a book distribution company. It draws from Yoko’s own experience of moving to Germany around the same time, where she felt like she was starting a second life.

The novel was serialised in the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun and Shiota created pictures to accompany its daily publication. It was a case of trial and error. Her first illustrations derived from underlining words and transforming them into pictures but when she saw them in print they felt too dark. So she developed a new approach which was to use coloured wrapping and origami paper and interweave them with her trademark red thread. Aha! Return of the threads!

The final result was nearly 400 watercolour and charcoal drawings and collages, each stitched with her signature red threads and they are all exhibited here in one wall-length display.

Installation view of Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life. Drawings for Yoko Tawada’s Praktikantin (The Trainee) Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery © DACS, London, 2026 and Chiharu Shiota

To be honest, I was still so dazzled by the big web rooms that I found it difficult to readjust my sense of scale and response to these relatively small and detailed works. Especially as I had no idea what the plot of the novel was that they’re illustrating. And especially since there are so many of them. To my mind they required a completely different sense of scale and attention than the big web rooms which had completely bowled me over.

Video of Shiota at work and explaining

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by Simon on February 22, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Japan, Sculpture

Posted by Simon on February 22, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/02/22/chiharu-shiota-threads-of-life-hayward-gallery/

Samurai @ the British Museum

This is a magnificent exhibition, beautifully staged, showcasing a huge number of objects (over 280) from both the British Museum’s collection and 29 other national and international lenders, most of them objects of exquisite beauty, accompanied by highly informative and fascinating captions.

Suit of samurai armour with bullet-proof cuirass embossed with crest, 1600–1700 © The Trustees of the British Museum

Debunking myths

It follows the basic template of many of the British Museum’s big blockbuster exhibitions which can be summarised as: ‘Think you know about X? Well, think again, because everything you’ve ever been taught about X is wrong and this exhibition showcases the latest scholarship to set you straight’.

So the idea is that we in the West are victims of myths, clichés and stereotypes about the Japanese samurai which this exhibition is going to correct. In the past the Museum has taken the same debunking approach to the Vikings and the Roman emperor Nero, among many others.

The two most common myths the exhibition debunks are 1) all samurai were men (no – a notable number were women) and 2) samurai were all about violence (no – in the post 1600 period they were more like a landed aristocracy versed in the arts of peace and good living).

Definitions and dates

The samurai began as mercenaries for the imperial court and developed over time into rural gentry. From the AD 900s to 1300s, Japanese fighting men were organised into ‘warrior bands’ (bushidan), often based on family loyalties. After a series of brutal and bloody civil wars, a warrior government, or shogunate, was established in 1185. Though the first shogunate collapsed and was replaced by another, warrior governments ruled Japan until the 1570s. The warrior era as a whole is said to come to an end in 1603 with the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate.

Samurai helmets ornate and simple in ‘Samurai’ at the British Museum

Both military training and engagement in cultural activities were essential to a warrior’s identity. The imperial court, which co-existed with the shogunate, provided a cultural model for samurai to emulate.

By the eighteenth century Japan had enjoyed a century of peace and the samurai had become local administrators and benchmarks of civilised behaviour. In this they reminded me a bit of the English lord of the manor who was also a justice of the peace.

NB: The word samurai is more commonly used in the West than in Japan.

Chronological structure

1. Civil wars 900 to 1600

Broadly speaking the first third of the exhibition describes the historical reality of the rise of the samurai, embedding them in Japan’s long period of civil wars and conflict from the dark ages of the 900s, through a prolonged period of civil wars to the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603.

2. From 1600 peace

From that date Japan enjoyed about 250 years of peace and prosperity and the exhibition shows how the samurai tradition was adapted to more peaceful times in the 1700s and 1800s with a wide range of objects demonstrating their role in civil society. If the earlier displays focused on weapons of war, many objects from this phase are domestic, and demonstrate one the exhibition’s chief debunkments, one of the core stereotypes it aims to overthrow, which is the notion that all samurai were men. No they weren’t. There were female samurai warriors during the heroic age of civil wars and this number increased in the peaceful times until up to 50% of samurai were women. Who knew.

3. Nineteenth century stories

The 19th century section looks in detail at how the stories of half a dozen or so of the legendary figures from the golden age of samurai in the middle ages were depicted in woodcuts and fabrics and fans and other media. Here’s a typically striking coloured woodcut of a female samurai, Tomoe Gozen.

Woodblock print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797 to 1861) showing Tomoe Gozen riding away after the Battle of Awazu (1852) © The Trustees of the British Museum

4. Japanese empire

A further section briefly explains how the samurai tradition was co-opted into the rise of Japanese nationalism from 1900 to 1945, was used to justify Japan’s aggressive imperial expansion into Korea and China, and was invoked during the Second World War, before reaching its nemesis in the defeat of 1945.

So far, so historical, the exhibition beautifully displaying often rare and precious objects from all aspects of samurai life, accompanied by detailed historical explanations.

5. Commercial exploitation of the samurai image

This all changes in the final stretch of the exhibition which shows how, in the post-war period, the image of the samurai was fabricated, idealised and adapted for many purposes, both within Japan and beyond.

The most obvious one was making money from movies and TV, manga comics and video games. There are clips from a surprising number of these running on half a dozen video screens where you can watch in detail, as well as projected as vivid displays onto half a dozen big hanging screens. I counted 20 or so TV shows, both Japanese and Western, plus umpteen video games, but probably missed some. And then there’s a selection from the modern world of samurai-themed merchandise, toy swords, figurines, helmets, magazines, you name it, in the display cases underneath.

This final section is in quite a different mode and vibe from the previous, sober and scholarly displays. It’s visually and aurally loud and dynamic, a bit overwhelming. For me it really goes to show how any historical trope is liable to be exploited and milked to the hilt by modern consumer capitalism. Obviously the curators are highly invested in merch about the samurai but this final section makes you realise that the same process of complete commercialisation applies just as much to the Vikings, the Romans, to medieval knights and so on. You could find just as many contemporary movies, TV shows and merchandise about any of them. Pretty much any historical culture which relied on violence, and especially sword fighting, has been turned into violent video games and violent movies.

Proving Karl Marx’s old adage true that History repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as Netflix (or HBO or Disney+) historical drama.

Installation view of ‘Samurai’ at the British Museum showing the hanging video screens which display composite feeds from scores of samurai films, TV shows and videogames, with selections of modern samurai merchandise in the display cases (photo by the author)

Modern artworks

All this slashing and bleeding tends to overshadow an interesting aspect of the final section which is that it includes a few pieces of modern and contemporary art. Some of them are by men who fought in the Second World War and lived on to reflect on war and peace. One is by the ‘celebrated’ Japanese artist, Noguchi Tetsuya who, in my ignorance, I’ve never heard of.

Fair enough – but I think these works would have benefited from having their own, quiet space and not being placed next to video screens of hyperactive men in pigtails eviscerating each other with enormous swords.

The paradox of civilised exhibitions about hyper-violence

Thus saturated in the history and imagery of the samurai, when I got home I toyed with watching one or other of the recent samurai movies – 47 Ronin, the Last Samurai, Shogun etc – but they almost immediately had so much hacking off of limbs and necks and blood spurting everywhere that I quickly stopped. On the same day I read about the suicide bomb in Pakistan, the total casualties to date in the Ukraine War, the rapes and murders taking place in Sudan. God knows there’s enough bloody violence in the world without inviting even more into my living room.

And this led onto an obvious reflection that an exhibition like this is, in a sense, the height of civilisation: created by highly educated people working with international networks of museums in Japan, America and elsewhere, to create a beautifully staged show of exquisite objects all described with minute scholarly scrupulousness. And yet the subject of the show is based on appalling violence and butchery.

These beautifully crafted swords which we are encouraged to admire, well, in a clip from a Japanese TV series we watch the hero slash open the chests, cut off the fingers, and behead all-comers in an epic fight using just such a razor sharp sword. They are instruments of atrocious brutality.

I was particularly struck by adjacent cases showing a huge bow, a quiver and some metal arrows. The arrows had obviously been selected for the beauty of their varied designs and the craftsmanship of their metalwork. And yet, as I admired their curves and points, I reflected that they were designed to pierce the advanced armour and undervests which warriors wore, in order to enter the body and cause as much tearing eviscerating damage as possible to muscles and organs.

I looked up and around the lovely calm gallery, at the other old ladies and gentlemen pottering politely between exhibits, and felt for a moment that I’d entered a parallel universe.

Three ages of samurai

Now I’ll go back over the three ages of the samurai in more detail, and naming some of the most striking exhibits in each section. According to the curators, the history of samurai can be divided into 3 periods.

1. 800 to 1600: Rise of the samurai

mid-900s AD: a warrior class emerges in service to the aristocracy
1185: the Minamoto clan establishes the first shogunate (warrior government)
1330s: the Ashikaga clan seizes power and establishes a new shogunate
1570 to 1615: intense conflict as a series of warlords attempt to unify Japan; attempted invasion of Korea

2. 1600 to 1850s: The long peace

1603: the Tokugawa shogunate is established
Japan enjoys 250 years of peace and prosperity
1867–8: after more than a decade of violence between competing samurai clans, the Tokugawa shogunate collapses
1871: Samurai status is abolished; subsequent samurai rebellion fails

3. 1876 to the present: After the samurai

1894 to 1910: conflict with China and Russia for control of the Korean peninsula; Japan annexes Korea
1931 to 1945: Japan participates in the Second World War, ending in defeat
1945 to the present day: in peacetime, the samurai image is taken up around the world in popular culture

Part 1: 900 to 1600: war

The samurai – known in Japan as musha or bushi – were engaged in protracted warfare and gained political dominance from the 1100s. This section includes detailed looks at their arms and armour.

Cuirasses and armour

The small warrior bands (bushidan) of early battles comprised full-time mounted archers and part-time foot soldiers. Archers wore oyoroi armour with a square, loose form, optimised for drawing the bow. The exhibition includes a cuirass (breast and backplates) with no fewer than 2,000 scales of lacquered iron or leather laced together and covered with leather, making it tough yet flexible. The huge shoulder-guards deflected arrows, serving in place of a shield.

Suit of armour and helmet made of iron, silk, wool, leather, gold and lacquer: Japan, 1519 (helmet), 1696 (armour) and 1800s (textiles) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Bows and arrows

Samurai employed a distinctive tactic in which archers on horseback circled and manoeuvred around each other on open ground, while small groups of foot soldiers skirmished in denser, hilly terrain. Archers used a longbow with the grip below the centre that bent more easily. Bows developed from wood coated with lacquer to a more powerful laminate of wood and bamboo, increasing flexibility and the arrows’ flight range. The quiver developed in form from the open ebira (giving easy access to the arrows) to the closed utsubo (designed to protect arrows from humidity.

The establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603 to 1868) ushered in an era of peace. The new government created a social hierarchy with samurai at the top, followed by farmers, artisans and merchants. The superior social status of the samurai derived from their identity as warriors, so they needed to maintain their military training even during peacetime. In earlier centuries archery had been the primary mode of combat (rather than swordsmanship) and it remained an essential military skill. This set of archery equipment comprises two quivers and two bows, with a bowstring, all decorated with the Tokugawa crest.

Set of archery equipment made from wood, lacquer, leather, gold, metal, bamboo, feathers and silk, Japan, 1800 to 1900 © The Trustees of the British Museum

Saddles

Beautiful yet practical, Japanese saddles were designed as platforms for shooting arrows. (I imagine scholars have made comparisons with Scythian saddles, designed for the same purpose.) Made of red oak and richly decorated with lacquer of various colours, they were sometimes inlaid with mother-of-pearl and other fine materials. Thick leather pads provided cushioning. Larger saddle-flaps protected the horse’s flanks from the lacquer-coated iron stirrups, which supported the rider standing up. Arches at the front and back were often decorated with motifs taken from the natural world.

Swords

As mentioned, swords were less important for samurai than archery. For much of the samurai’s existence as warriors, swords played a limited role in warfare. However, they were always markers of status and refinement. Their forms developed over time. The long tachi, worn with the blade down, was suitable for warriors on horseback. Several examples here indicate the sophistication and skill of sword-makers from the 1200s. (Later on we see swords made for entirely ceremonial purposes up to and including the ones handed over by surrendering Japanese officers in 1945.)

A surcoat

Toyotomi Hideyoshi is a prominent figure in samurai history. In the late 1500s he rose from foot soldier – more peasant than samurai class – to the highest rank in the land, thanks to his military ability and political skill. He became a trusted general of the warlord Oda Nobunaga. After the latter’s demise Hideyoshi forged alliances, built palaces and castles, and received the title ‘regent’. This jinbaori (surcoat), with a target design, supposedly belonged to him. Originally protective garments to be worn over armour, jinbaori became statements of the personal taste of the wearer.

Jinbaori (surcoat) Pheasant and drake feathers mounted on hemp, with Chinese silk, Japan, 1570 to 1598 © The Trustees of the British Museum

Beheading

Warfare was brutal and bloody. Samurai warriors cut off enemy heads and presented them to claim rewards from their daimyo (lord). The exhibition includes a handscroll which records the suppression of a revolt in 1083-7. It depicts bodies and limbs lying heaped under a shield. One warrior carries a head on the end of his curved blade (naginata). Another holds his trophy by the hair. ‘Brutal’ is a word which recurs in the descriptions of the warfare of the period.

Culture

And yet throughout this era, alongside his military skills, a fully rounded warrior was expected to be culturally sophisticated. Samurai patronised the arts and hosted social gatherings, including the ritualised consumption of tea. Performances of Nõ, an aristocratic dance-drama, were sponsored by shoguns and regional warlords. Samurai petitioned Buddhist deities for success in combat and a peaceful afterlife. Some samurai were diplomats, travelling to Europe to negotiate trade relations. And the exhibition features extensive displays of the arts of peace and civilised living. This is the other great debunking the exhibition aims to carry out: to show us that samurai weren’t just about relentless warfare, but were also symbols of civilised living.

Hosting

Powerful lords used formal social gatherings to cement relationships with their allies and followers. Such events were richly furnished with paintings and objects. Hosts sat before folding screens decorated with shimmering gold leaf. The exhibition includes several such screens including this one, which depicts cherry trees above a stream, denoting spring, and deutzia flowers at left for summer. It was created during the Muromachi period (1336 to 1573), a time of immense political turmoil and civil wars.

Folding screen made of ink, silver and gold on paper, Japan, 1500 to 1600 © The Trustees of the British Museum

Part 2: 1600 to 1900: peace

Tokugawa shogunate

By 1615, Tokugawa leyasu had achieved military supremacy and boasted the title shögun. After more than a century of warfare, the Tokugawa government brought peace and stability. Japan was divided into about two hundred and sixty domains each with a ruling lord who pledged allegiance to the shogun.

10%

The samurai became a hereditary class forming about ten percent of the population. Beneath them were ranked merchants, artisans and agricultural labourers. The role of samurai changed from warrior to bureaucrat. Men and women of samurai rank participated in the arts and intellectual life. Many were artists and poets and began the process of recording and idealising the the legendary warriors of the past in books, prints and theatre.

Culture of peace

During the long era of peace from 1615, the samurai moved away from the battlefield to serve as government officials, scholars and patrons of the arts, with women making up to half of the samurai class. To demonstrate this the exhibition includes: hanging scrolls, cutlery, incense, woodblock books, fashion plates in the forms of scrolls and hangings, hats and tunics, kimonos, poetry, a sedan chair, naginata or ‘polearms’, spear covers with clan emblems, the miniature toggles known as netsuki, a mirror decorated with peacocks, children’s toys, and much more.

Staging and soundscape

In the first, warrior section, the entire wall is given over to a dramatic film of charging samurai done in a highly stylised way as black silhouettes against a scarlet background. In the peace section there’s an extended (20 minute) soundscape recreating the sounds of Japan’s then capital, Edo (Samurai march and horses hooves thump on the packed earth street. Music from Kabuki theatre drifts in and out, and temple bells ring. There are birds and other wildlife.)

A woman’s firefighting jacket and hood

On loan from the John C. Weber Collection, worn by women serving within Edo Castle. Fires were so common in the wooden city of Edo (present-day Tokyo) that they were known as the ‘flowers of Edo’, and this jacket’s design of tasselled grappling hooks amid surging water evokes protection against the flames. Many women took part in these fire brigades.

Woman’s firefighting jacket and hood made from wool, satin-weave silk appliqué, and silk and gold-thread embroidery, Japan (1800 to 1850) John C. Weber Collection. Photo © John Bigelow Taylor

Nostalgia

In a period of peace, people became fascinated by legendary samurai heroes from the civil wars of the 1180s. Historical tales offered action and fantasy as an escape from everyday life. Print artists, painters and artisans created dynamic renderings of famous samurai in every available medium. Stories of heroism, sacrifice and betrayal provided endless inspiration for theatre.

I’ve mentioned that this part of the exhibition consists of sections or ‘booths’, each one devoted to a particular legendary figure and bringing together woodcuts, prints and other formats in which their adventures were dramatised. I suppose this is a bit like nineteenth century British nostalgia for a bygone age of chivalric heroes, the knights of the Round Table or Sir Walter Scott’s medieval heroes. The samurai heroes described and depicted here include:

Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159 to 1189) who learned special fighting techniques from the King of the Goblins
Kumagai Naozane who challenges the fleeing Taira no Atsumori to a fight but upon removing Atsumori’s helmet, realises he is only young and takes his life tearfully, afterwards, Naozane renouncing the world to become a monk
Nitta Yoshisada (1301 to 1038) who offered up his sword to the Dragon God
the battles of between rival warlords Takeda Shingen (1521 to 1573) and Uesugi Kenshin (1530 to 1578)
Minamoto no Yoshi-ie (1039 to 1106) who, while returning to Kyoto victorious from battle, paused to compose a poem about the poignancy of falling cherry blossoms
The Tale of the Drunken Acolyte (Shūten-dōji) which describes Minamoto no Yorimitsu’s (944 to 1021) quest to vanquish an ogre who abducted and devoured women
Minamoto no Tametomo (1136 to 1170) was an archer of legendary strength and skill in the conflict of the 1150s between the Minamoto and Taira clans. The victorious Taira exiled him to the ‘Isle of Demons’

And so very much on.

Installation view of ‘Samurai’ at the British Museum showing one of the sections or ‘booths’ which gather together 19th century depictions of a specific samurai hero, in this instance Minamoto no Yoshitsune who ‘trained with goblins’ (photo by the author)

Abolition of samurai status

A new government took power in 1868, ruling in the name of the emperor. The new era was named ‘Meiji’, or ‘enlightened government’. In 1869 the samurai’s hereditary status was abolished. Many former samurai struggled to find employment and resented the loss of their stipends and other privileges. They lost their traditional right to wear swords in public. Disaffected ex-samurai gathered in the southwestern island, Kyushu, planning what became known as the Satsuma rebellion until in 1877 government forces moved to suppress them. The exhibition includes dramatic prints of this whole sequence of events.

Ironically, the abolition of the samurai class released thousands of suits of armour onto the market. Huge numbers were exported to Europe and the United States as part of a fashion for medievalism. The show includes an example bought by the architect William Burges (1827–81) and displayed at his house in Holland Park, London.

Part 3

Japanese imperialism

From the 1890s onwards, Japan was involved in military conflicts in a struggle for geopolitical influence. The ‘samurai legacy’, including the supposed bushido ethos, was used domestically as motivation for Japanese soldiers, and as the basis for propaganda and stereotypes by Japan’s enemies during the Second World War (1939–45).

In fact the exhibition argues that foreign powers used samurai images as much or more than the Japanese themselves in order to stereotype their opponents. The impressive poster on the wall in this photo was actually created by an Italian artist, Gino Boccasile, since Japan was allied with Germany and Italy. It celebrates the Japanese sinking of the British ships HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse in 1941.

Installation view of ‘Samurai’ at the British Museum showing a display case which deals with the use of the samurai image leading up to and during the Second World War (photo by the author)

The curators don’t mention it but this action resulted in the deaths of 840 seamen and the thousand or more survivors went into Japanese captivity where many more died in the brutal conditions inspired by the Japanese military’s ideas of ‘honour’. The war is mentioned here but, in my opinion, the role of the thousand-year-long warrior cult in the formation of Japanese fascism, and in the way they treated the countries they conquered and Allied prisoners of war, isn’t really explored, not as much as it deserves.

Imagine an exhibition which covered the 1,000-year-long role of the Prussian aristocracy and its military ethos up to and including the Second World War but then only briefly mentioned their role in supporting the Nazi regime, and skated over the appalling atrocities which ensued from their sense of their racial and moral superiority, which didn’t mention the Holocaust at all. You’d rightly feel that something was missing.

Same here. Inspired by militaristic pride indissociable from the samurai ideal, wartime Japan committed unspeakable atrocities not only on Allied prisoners but on the populations of conquered Korea and China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, Thailand, Indochina.

Caption showing cover of a Japanese wartime magazine introducing students to the Japanese values of bushido (photo by the author)

Sure, the exhibition includes a 1942 magazine cover showing a Japanese instructor in its newly conquered colony, the former Dutch East Indies, introducing students to bushido, the military’s guiding ethos (see above). And there’s a shin-guntō sword with scabbard, of the type all Japanese soldiers were meant to wear to associate themselves with the samurai ideal. There’s another sword handed over to a British general at the surrender with a photo of the event. And that’s it, when it comes to homegrown Japanese products.

There are samurai-themed images created by foreigners, like the Italian poster shown above, a British cartoon of a samurai in Punch and mention of a Nazi pamphlet which praised the samurai warrior ethos. But that’s about it. There’s almost as much in the next section about Star Wars memorabilia (because Darth Vadar’s helmet and uniform were influenced by samurai armour).

To be fair to the curators, if you check out the exhibition catalogue it looks as if there are 30 or more pages which go into the role of the samurai ideal in Japanese fascism in much more detail. So it looks like it’s been worked through in print but not so much in the physical exhibition which most people will visit.

Fun, film and video games

Instead, much more space is devoted to the post-war era when Japan (under American control for a decade) reinvented itself as a peaceful producer of hi tech goods and products. This is the section which goes heavy on umpteen movies and TV shows which have exploited / recycled the samurai image, not to mention a slew of video games.

Hence the monitors showing suitable violent clips from popular video games such as Assassin’s Creed: Shadows (2025) and Nioh 3 (2026). Apparently, the latter game launched just three days after the exhibition opened. If you read the (characteristically thorough and informative) object label you discover that in Nioh 3 you play as the heir of the shogun, tasked with stopping the spread of non-human powers across four eras in Japanese history, while encountering famous figures, such as the famous 16th century warlord Takeda Shingen. What better way to while away the hours?

Still from the videogame Nioh 3, 2026. Koei Tecmo

Summary

Amazing exhibition. Beautifully staged, with the dramatic animated backdrops and atmospheric soundscapes. Nearly 300 objects, far too many to process in one visit, giving you a tremendous overview of samurai culture in all its historical extent and cultural breadth. I’ve mentioned my personal reservations about the wartime period, but they don’t detract the impact of such a carefully curated collection of stunning objects. An amazing achievement.

Installation view of ‘Samurai’ at the British Museum showing the beautiful, themed set design – imagine the 20-minute-long soundscape of street sounds from 16th century Edo echoing round you as admire the beautiful artefacts and read the fascinating captions (photo by the author)

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by Simon on February 7, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, History, Japan

Tagged Archers, Ashikaga clan, Assassin's Creed: Shadows, Battle of Awazu, beheading, British Museum, brutality, bushi, bushidan, bushido ethos, China, consumer capitalism, cutlery, daimyo, Darth Vadar, Disney, ebira, Edo Castle, enlightened government, exhibition, fashion plates, female samurai, first shogunate, flowers of Edo, Gino Boccasile, hanging scrolls, HBO, historical drama, history, HMS Prince of Wales, HMS Repulse, Holland Park, incense, Japan, Japan civil wars, Japanese Empire, Japanese fascism, Japanese history, Japanese imperialism, Japanese nationalism, jinbaori, kimono, King of the Goblins, knights of the Round Table, Korea, Kumagai Naozane, London, longbow, manga comics, Meiji era, Minamoto clan, Minamoto no Yorimitsu, Minamoto no Yoshi-ie, Minamoto no Yoshitsune, Muromachi period, musha, naginata, Nõ, Netflix, netsuki, Nioh 3, Nitta Yoshisada, Noguchi Tetsuya, Oda Nobunaga, oyoroi, polearms, Punch, saddles, samurai armour, Samurai helmet, samurai rebellion, samurai tradition, Satsuma rebellion, Second World War, sedan chair, shin-guntō sword, shogun, Shogunate, Shūten-dōji, Sir Walter Scott, soundscape, spear covers, Star Wars, surcoat, swords, tachi, Takeda Shingen, the Isle of Demons, The Tale of the Drunken Acolyte, Tokugawa leyasu, Tokugawa shogunate, Tomoe Gozen, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, utsubo, video games, video screens, violence, warlordism, William Burges, woodblock books, woodblock print

Posted by Simon on February 7, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/02/07/samurai-the-british-museum/

Michael Kenna: Shin Shin @ the Photographers’ Gallery

The Photographers’ Gallery Print Room

The Print Room is downstairs at the Photographers’ Gallery, next to the shop. Admission is FREE and if you’re visiting one of the paid exhibitions upstairs, you should always pop down to the basement for her they have rotating displays by one or other of the 50 or so noted photographers which the gallery represents.

It’s a commercial operation and so the large and beautifully made prints are for sale, generally for a hefty price. Currently they’re showing a dozen or so lovely black and white photos by English-born photographer Michael Kenna which start at £1,975 + VAT (£2,370).

Flock of Red Crown Cranes, Tsurui, Hokkaido, Japan by Michael Kenna (2005) Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery

Michael Kenna

Michael Kenna was born in England in 1953. He studied at a seminary school as a boy, intending to become a priest, and his early encounters with ritual and faith left a lasting appreciation for mystery, doubt and the unseen. In his mid-twenties he moved to the United States.

Over five decades, Kenna has developed a distinctive visual language – a dialogue between dramatic chiaroscuro and the quiet minimalism of Japan, where he has regularly photographed since 1987.

Alley of Trees, Damyang, Jeollanamdo, South Korea by Michael Kenna (2012) Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery

Shin Shin

The show is titled Shin Shin which is a Japanese onomatopoeia that describes the quietness or silence of falling snow. This sensory phrase captures the meditative stillness that runs through Michael Kenna’s work, and his reverence for the natural world.

Many of Kenna’s images are made at dawn or at night, often using long exposures, some lasting up to ten hours. Primarily working with a 120 mm analogue camera and printing each image by hand in the darkroom, he creates luminous silver gelatin prints that he describes as, ‘an oasis, a calm place of rest, a catalyst for imagination’.

In his black and white landscapes, snow becomes a veil that softens the world. Through nature’s quiet transformation and the precision of his practice, Kenna invites reflection on what lies beyond what we can see, know, or touch.

An opinion

Obviously they’re all very beautiful but personally, I liked the ones where the subject was placed symmetrically in the middle of the frame. Very calm and pleasing.

Royal Balcony, Peterhof, Russia by Michael Kenna (1999) Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery

But I noticed that having soaked up one of the nicely centred compositions added piquancy and edge when you turned to look at one of the deliberately non-symmetrical images. Having settled into a calm Zen state based on symmetry, my mind was then slightly knocked askew by the off-centre images. That they played off each other. That, in this quiet, calm, subterranean space, they set up a kind of resonance between the two types of picture, like the very faint, distant ringing of bells…

Wanaka Lake Tree, Study 2, Otago, New Zealand by Michael Kenna (2013) Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery

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by Simon on January 23, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, Japan, Photography, Prints

Tagged exhibition, Japan, Michael Kenna, New Zealand, Photographers' Gallery, Photographers' Gallery Print Room, photography, Prints, Russia, Shin Shin, South Korea, symmetry

Posted by Simon on January 23, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/01/23/michael-kenna-shin-shin-the-photographers-gallery/

Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan @ Japan House

Like all Japan House exhibitions, Hyakkō is beautifully laid out, designed and explained. It is a celebration of Japan’s contemporary arts and craft landscape, meaning it is an assembly of over 2,000 items – teapots, bowls, cups and mugs, plates and cutlery, made from materials such as clay, glass, wood, leather, bamboo and raffia, bronze, iron and steel – humble everyday objects but beautifully designed and handmade by 123 Japanese craftspeople.

Part of the display in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

How can you fit so many objects into the relatively small exhibition space under Japan House (the Japan House gallery space is downstairs from the main shop which is just 50 yards from Kensington High Street tube station)?

You can fit them all in because 1) they are all relatively small, some of them very small – and 2) by arranging them tastefully and beautifully and compactly, in clusters or sets of pieces by each of the 120 or so designers.

Showing how pieces are grouped by maker in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

The exhibition derives from the quest by its curator, Nagata Takahiro, to investigate the state of contemporary craft in Japan, a quest which took her to all parts of the country and to meet over 120 craftspeople. And hence the title. Hyakkō literally means ‘a hundred makers’ but can be taken metaphorically to mean ‘lots of makers’. This is an exhibition of ‘lots of [contemporary Japanese] makers’.

History and context

Japan has long been associated with a rich culture of craft, with many practices such as urushi (lacquerware) and metalwork being passed down through generations, often as the result of strict apprenticeships. Historically, the expensive products of many of these more formal crafts were out of reach for most and were often created more as objects to be admired rather than to actually be used.

In the 1920s, the mingei (folk craft) movement turned people’s attention to the crafts of the people, focusing on the beauty of hand-crafted, utilitarian objects. Integral to this philosophy was the perceived anonymity of the craftspeople – the emphasis being on the item rather than its maker.

Bronzeware by Urukami Yōsuke in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

Philosophy

As always at Japan House, there’s some Zen-flavoured philosophy, this time concerning the making of pots and bowls and plates. The wise words of four leading designers are quoted at length in wall posters. Why?

The Japanese word kōgei (‘craft’) spans a wide range of contexts, including Mingei (‘folk craft’), antiques, art and design. Its depth is immeasurable and even among makers it is not uncommon to pause and ask, ‘What does this term truly mean?’

Hence the thoughts on the subject of the four leading figures, namely:

Kurata Takashi, philosopher
Nakamura Masahiro, Assistant Professor of Design
Nakamura Yuta, Artist
Sakamoto Dai, Gallerist

Nearby, in the entrance foyer, there’s a list of 32 Japanese terms which are applied to native crafts, first the Japanese word and then a paragraph-length explanation of its meaning.

The wall of terms in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

Here are a few to give you a flavour:

tsukurite: maker: a maker is someone who engages directly with materials and shapes them with their hands. This term includes not only artists but artisans and craftspeople whose lives and relationships with the land are reflected in their work.

fukanzensa: imperfection: in Japanese craftsmanship and aesthetics, beauty and richness are felt more in imperfection than perfection. The irregularities of natural materials and handcrafted work are valued for their uniqueness, stimulating the user’s imagination and affection for the object.

shizukesa: more than simply the absence of sound, shizukesa conveys a sense of clarity and composure. the serenity felt in a Japanese garden or tea room highlights the beauty of objects and spaces, linking spiritual fulfilment with aesthetic experience.

dezain: design: more than the refining of form or function, design generates new value and relationships in daily life and society as a whole. In Japan, design has historically prioritised an approach that harnesses the inherent properties of materials and seeks harmony between people and nature, rather than focusing solely on decoration or superficiality. It has developed through the integration of craft and architecture in everyday life.

And at the end of the foyer a wall-sized bookshelf housing 45 or so lovely hardback art books covering various aspects of the crafts or individual designers.

Bookshelves containing some 45 books about Japanese craft in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

The pieces

All very enlightening but the point is the objects themselves and these are exquisite, wonderful. Who knew there could be quite so many types and styles and designs and materials for making plates, bowls, cups and mugs, glasses and cutlery?

The grouping by designer allows 6 to 10 pieces per person and this turns out to be just enough to showcase more than just a technique but an entire worldview in miniature.

Iwata Tetsuhiro

Clayware by Iwata Tetsuhiro in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

Okihara Saya

Wooden cutlery by Okihara Saya in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

Nishikawa Satoshi

Bowls and teapots by Nishikawa Satoshi in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

Isihara Toshihisa

Comic figures by Isihara Toshihisa in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

Sasakawa Kenichi

Glassware by Sasakawa Kenichi in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

Abe Hitomi

Stones wrapped in bamboo by Abe Hitomi in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

Seki Kenichi

Lacquerware by Seki Kenichi in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

Yoshikawa Kazuto

Plates and spoons by Yoshikawa Kazuto in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

Otani Tetsuna

Ceramics by Otani Tetsuna in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

Tokuda Masami

Vases made from raw wood by Tokuda Masami in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

Yamada Yōji

Patterned bowls by Yamada Yōji in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

Hidaka Naoko

Decorated ceramics by Hidaka Naoko in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

Ninjō Ikkei

Astonishingly smooth and gracefully bowls by Ninjō Ikkei in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

Moriguchi Shinichi

Thrillingly ribbed wooden trays by Moriguchi Shinichi in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

Jōji Yoshimichi

Beautifully moulded and frilled bowls by Jōji Yoshimichi in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

Merch

Works from over 30 of the featured makers are available to buy in the shop on the ground floor. They’re expensive, of course, but they’re exquisite. The risk is that, once you’d loosened your wallet, you wouldn’t be able to stop.

Worlds of exquisiteness in ‘Hyakkō: 100+ Makers from Japan’ @ Japan House (photo by the author)

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by Simon on January 9, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Design, Exhibition, Japan

Posted by Simon on January 9, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/01/09/hyakko-100-makers-from-japan-japan-house/

Hiroshige: artist of the open road @ the British Museum

This is a wonderfully beautiful show of pure visual, intellectual and aesthetic pleasure.

A leading US collector of Hiroshige’s work, Mr Alan Medaugh, has recently gifted 35 prints by Hiroshige to the American Friends of the British Museum and loaned a further 82 works, and it’s these – plus additions from the British Museum’s own collection and the more modern works in the final section –which make up the contents of this fabulous exhibition. Thank you very much indeed Mr Medaugh!

Ferry on the Fuji River, Suruga Province from Famous Places in Japan c. 1832 by Utagawa Hiroshige. Colour-woodblock print © The Trustees of the British Museum

Hence this exhibition, the first on Hiroshige to be held in London for quarter of a century, and the first ever to be held at the British Museum. The great majority of the prints in the exhibition have never been displayed before, and several are believed to be the only surviving examples of their kind in the world.

The title has two elements, Hiroshige, and the open road, and thereafter is divided into themes or topics. I’ll address them one by one.

Preliminary note

This review relies more than usual on the curators’ own words, which can be found in the large print guide i.e. the complete wall labels, for the exhibition. This is because it is a more than usually scholarly and academic exhibition. At exhibitions of Giuseppe Penone or even Arpita Singh, I can start from my knowledge of western art and the traditions those artists invoke and movements they work within, to generate my own thoughts about the design and style and themes of their work.

This is not that kind of exhibition. It is highly educational about a subject and style remote from most of us. It is a display of immense scholarship which digs into levels of detail – for example about different types of Japanese nature painting, or the subtle influence of Chinese schools of landscape painting on Japanese art – which you and I are just not informed about.

Did you know that a yūjo is the name for a Japanese sex worker or courtesan or that bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women) were one of Hiroshige’s most popular print subjects? Could you distinguish between Hiroshige’s style and the compositionally bolder style of the Kyoto Maruyama-Shijō school? Or that the tanzaku is the name for the tall, narrow format of a strip of paper used to record poems?

No. Me neither. This is a very information-dense exhibition which is why to write a meaningful review I need to repeat a lot of the scholarly commentary which informs the show.

Hiroshige

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858) was one of Japan’s most prolific and popular artists. People at every level of society embraced his calm, lyrical depictions of daily life, nature and the rural landscape. The work of modern and contemporary artists across Europe, the US and Japan reveals his lasting influence.

Born into a low-ranking samurai family in Edo (present-day Tokyo), Hiroshige was orphaned at the age of 12 and inherited his father’s title of fire warden. A superior in the fire department taught him to paint in the Kano school style. By the 1830s he was focusing on what were to become his best-known subjects: tranquil views of famous places, panoramic views of city life, and beautiful depictions of the natural world. Over time he became renowned for his innovative compositions and subtle use of graded ink tones (bokashi).

Hiroshige’s earliest series depict scenes in and around his home city of Edo, such as ‘Famous Places in the Eastern Capital’ and ‘Eight Views of the Eastern Capital’. They depict well-known sights around Edo Bay.

Pleasure Boats at Ryōgoku in the Eastern Capital, 1832-4 by Utagawa Hiroshige. Colour-woodblock print triptych. Collection of Alan Medaugh © Alan Medaugh. Photography by Matsuba Ryōko

Following a career spanning more than four decades, Hiroshige died on the 12 October 1858, perhaps the victim of a cholera epidemic then afflicting Edo.

Avoiding politics

Hiroshige lived at the end of the Edo period (1615 to 1868), when a samurai government ruled Japan from the city of Edo. It was a time of urban growth, but also of famine, social crisis and foreign military incursions. Hiroshige, however, avoided depicting turmoil in his art. On the contrary it was his realistic but beautifully stylised landscapes that earned him greatest fame in his lifetime and continue to win admiration today.

The open road

The samurai government of Japan had banned foreign travel since the 1630s but by Hiroshige’s time there was a growing interest in domestic journeys. Samurai lords with hundreds of attendants made their way to Edo to pay their respects to the shogun. Others set off on business, pilgrimage and sightseeing trips, independently or in organised groups.

Inspired by his own explorations, and by East Asian painting traditions and guidebooks, Hiroshige created landscape pictures that were visually inviting and filled with human interest. They offered an imaginative escape for those unable to travel. As the man himself wrote:

[My] drawings present completely true-to-life landscapes to give people just a moment of pleasure without the inconvenience of a long journey.

Landscapes and meisho (famous places) were a safe subject for publishers during the early 1840s, a period of severe censorship.

Evening View of the Eight Scenic Spots of Kanazawa in Musashi Province, 1857 by Utagawa Hiroshige. Colour-woodblock print triptych. Collection of Alan Medaugh © Alan Medaugh

The Eastern Coast Road

But the exhibition focuses on a couple of famous roads in particular. The 500-kilometre-long Tōkaidō (Eastern Coast Road) connected Edo (present-day Tokyo) in the east with Kyoto, the emperor’s capital, in the west. It was the most travelled highway in Japan. There’s a big map of the route of the road(s) on the wall which, like a numpty, I forgot to take a photo of.

The fifty-three post stations along its route provided travellers with places to rest and stock up on supplies. Accommodation ranged from simple guest houses to luxury inns reserved for daimyō (samurai lords). From around 1833 until the end of his life, Hiroshige designed more than 20 series of prints on the Tōkaidō, about 700 works in total.

Nihonbashi, ‘Morning Scene’, from the 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō, c. 1833-35 by Utagawa Hiroshige. Colour-woodblock print © The Trustees of the British Museum

The Central Mountain Road

Later in the exhibition there’s a work from a series depicting a different rout. The Kisokaidō (Kiso highway, also called the Nakasendō or Central Mountain Road) took travellers on a difficult journey through the mountain ranges north-west of Edo, today called the Japanese Alps. It crossed some of Japan’s most awe-inspiring scenery. Steep passes and heart-stopping suspension bridges made it an adventurous route through sixty-nine stations connecting Kyoto and Edo.

Hiroshige depicted the highway in only one major series, which he took over from another artist. It’s represented by a really evocative depiction of a tiny road winding among snow-covered mountains.

Wherever he travelled Hiroshige took a sketchbook which he packed with sketches of different landscapes, and several of them are on display here.

Prolificness

Mention of the 700 works raises a key fact about Hiroshige which is his astonishing prolificness. Hiroshige was commissioned by publishers. The publishers published works in series. If a series was popular, more would be commissioned.

The point of these colour woodblock prints is they were designed to be cheap, affordable, and popular, in subject matter and format. Late in the show they tell us about scientific forensic work which has been done on Hiroshige’s surviving woodblocks and so we think that his most popular designs may have been printed up to 15,000 times before the woodblocks wore down completely.

Throughout his life Hiroshige returned to depictions of Edo, capital of the Tokugawa government during the Edo period (1615 to 1868). He did so in more than 150 print series, including ‘One Hundred Famous Views of Edo’ which covered every neighbourhood, including areas that were not especially famous.

The mass-production of these colour woodblock prints during the Edo period met the demand from an expanding audience for inexpensive art and meant that ordinary people could buy beautifully made but disposable prints for a few pennies.

Print production began with the publisher, who hired the artist, block cutter and printer. Hiroshige worked for around 90 publishers! In a competitive business environment Japanese publishers needed to cultivate as wide an audience as possible. They may have issued variant designs of a single work as a way of appealing to different tastes, which explains the samples here of the same basic design (of a pheasant, say) being reversioned to appear as if in spring, summer and winter, by changing details of the design (adding snow for winter etc).

All this explains why the complete catalogue of Hiroshige’s work amounts to some 5,000 designs for colour woodblock prints, as well as hundreds of paintings and dozens of illustrated books.

Uchiwa (fans)

In Edo-period Japan, warm weather brought a demand for inexpensive, hand-held fans that people could use and enjoy for a season and then discard. A popular type was the uchiwa, an oval fan on fixed ribs with a handle. Unlike folding fans (ōgi), uchiwa are non-collapsible and so allow woodblock prints to be pasted onto their rigid bamboo frame. Uchiwa fan prints were disposable and only a few examples of each design survive.

Several examples are here along with depictions of them in works by Hiroshige and contemporaries, with a copy of a book of stories based on different types of fan by Hishikawa Moronobu.

Modern specialists in ukiyo-e (Edo-period popular prints) have counted every known uchiwa design by Hiroshige and concluded that he produced well over 500, far more than any other artist. The subjects range from rustic and urban scenes to still life.

The exhibition doesn’t have any fans decorated by him, but examples of his works which depict fan-bearing geishas, along with a very big portrait-shaped depiction of a young geisha with an older woman carrying different types of fan, by Kitagawa Tsukimaro.

Kachō hanga (prints of birds and flowers)

Hiroshige’s depictions of nature, especially his kachō hanga (prints of birds and flowers), show his intuitive bond with the natural world. Many include a Japanese or Chinese poem inscribed in flowing calligraphy, reflecting the connection between nature and poetry in Japanese culture and the high level of literacy at the time. Hiroshige’s kachō hanga contributed to a sudden flourishing of the genre in Japan from the 1830s and furthered the artist’s popularity.

Crane and asters, Three geese and full moon, Pheasant and chrysanthemums by Utagawa Hiroshige. Colour-woodblock prints. Gift from the collection of Alan Medaugh to the American Friends of the British Museum Centre © Alan Medaugh. Photograph by Matsuba Ryōko

This section was, for me, the most appealing. There are lots of works depicting a wide range of birds, plants and trees, including wonderful depictions of an owl, mandarin duck, cuckoo, parakeet, cockerel, Eurasian jay, heron, wagtail, kingfisher, falcon, pheasant, tit, oriole, you get the picture.

Also, there’s sound. The curators commissioned a 25-minute long audio track combining the sound of streams, waterfalls, rainfall and animals, including birds and crickets.

One of the most striking images is from late in his career when he experimented with putting objects in the foreground so that they dominate the image, and did so with an enormous carp.

Suidō Bridge and Surugadai

An enormous black carp appears to leap into the air high above the samurai neighbourhood of Surugadai in Edo. In popular East Asian belief, if a carp reaches the top of a waterfall it turns into a dragon, symbolising hard work leading to success. People in Edo displayed koi-nobori (carp banners) like this during the Boys’ Day Festival (5th day of the 5th month, now called Children’s Day).

Bijin

After his attention shifted to landscapes in the early 1830s, Hiroshige did not return to depicting bijin (beautiful women) for more than a decade. As government censorship restrictions started to ease in the late 1840s, he began designing bijin triptychs, depicting women beautifully dressed in kimonos which are depicting in loving and yet always stylised detail.

Cherry Blossoms on a Moonless Night along the Sumida River (1847-8) by Utagawa Hiroshige. Colour-woodblock print triptych. Gift from the collection of Alan Medaugh to the American Friends of the British Museum © Alan Medaugh. Photograph by Matsuba Ryōko

Videos and tools

The exhibition includes three or four videos showing modern craftsmen demonstrating the techniques of woodcarving, and painting, which Hiroshige used in his prints.

the artist Hiroko Imada demonstrates the bokashi (gradation) woodblock printing technique – this is an effect achieved in the printing process by the controlled application of ink to the woodblock
extracts from a film by the artist Kawase Hasui (1883–1957) showing him cutting the omohan or key block
Capucine Korenberg, scientist at the British Museum, discusses her work on the different versions of Hiroshige’s Plum Garden at Kameido prints

And, of course, display cases containing tools of the trade, woodblock-cutting tools like a mallet and chisel, an omohan or key or outline block, a baren or printer’s pad, and explaining the techniques

kimedashi or relief printing
musenzuri or contourless printing
kasanezuri or over-printing

Hiroshige’s influence in the West

In the late nineteenth century there was a vogue in Europe and America for Japanese prints, fashions and designs on vases, tea services etc which goes under the name of Japonisme. It was fed by the opening up of Japan to trade in the 1850s which led to the rapid dissemination of Japanese products in the West.

The exhibition has a modest section describing some highlights of this. Most notable are two big names from the end of the century, Vincent van Gogh and James McNeil Whistler.

In a fascinating little section, we are shown an original Hiroshige print – The Plum Garden at Kameido, 1857 – and told that Vincent van Gogh bought a copy around 1887 and then meticulously traced it onto a numbered grid which he used to enlarge the composition to scale onto the canvas for his oil copy, with van Gogh’s numbered grid placed net to it.

In fact Van Gogh and his brother Theo purchased over 400 Japanese colour woodblock prints and Vincent copied a number of them. Further along the wall is a large-scale sketch of ‘The Countryside along the Shore of the Rhône’ in which he consciously tried to adopt the Japanese approach to landscape, seeking harmony of composition over photographic realism.

The Whistler connection is less dramatic: American artist and educator Arthur Wesley Dow published a book which included examples of Hiroshige prints next to reproductions of works by Whistler to show the influence, namely abandoning the quest for photographic realism in an effort to create atmospheric compositions.

A bit more tenuously there’s a not very good 1895 print by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec titled The Passenger in 54 which may, or may not, have been influenced by Hiroshige’s strategy of placing the subject in the foreground so as to eclipse the background setting. This is the kind of thing we’re referring to where, pretty obviously, the tree is the focal point of the image, with the people in the background utterly eclipsed.

The Plum Garden at Kameido from 100 Famous Views of Edo, 1857 by Utagawa Hiroshige. Colour-woodblock print. Collection of Alan Medaugh © Alan Medaugh. Photography by Matsuba Ryōko

Modern homages

This final section brings together a dozen or so artworks by contemporary artists which pay homage one way or another to Hiroshige’s achievement. They include:

Julian Opie who produced a set of lenticular prints of the landscape around Mount Fuji (2009)
Koya Abe who digitally altered Hiroshige’s print Seba to convey the destruction caused by the Great Tōhoku Earthquake on 11 March 2011
Emily Allchurch who has digitally collaged hundreds of her photographs of Japan to create new interpretations of Hiroshige in Tokyo Story
Noda Tetsuya who noticed the similarity between the view from Tate Modern looking down on the Thames and Millennium Bridge and Hiroshige’s print, ‘Sudden Shower over Ōhashi and Atake’ and so did a Hiroshige-style treatment of the London view, titled Diary: Feb. 23rd

Thoughts

Magic. ‘Luxury, peace, and pleasure’ Japanese style. Go and see it.

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by Simon on June 21, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Japan

Tagged 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō, Alan Medaugh, American Friends of the British Museum, Arpita Singh, art, Arthur Wesley Dow, Bijin, bijin-ga, bird prints, bokashi, Boys' Day Festival, British Museum, calligraphy, Capucine Korenberg, carp banners, censorship, Central Mountain Road, Cherry Blossoms on a Moonless Night along the Sumida River, Children's Day, cholera, colour-woodblock print, contourless printing, Crane and asters, daimyo, Edo, Edo Bay, Edo period, Eight Views of the Eastern Capital, Emily Allchurch, Evening View of the Eight Scenic Spots of Kanazawa in Musashi Province, exhibition, Famous Places in Japan, Famous Places in the Eastern Capital, fans, Ferry on the Fuji River, folding fans, geisha, Giuseppe Penone, graded ink, Great Tōhoku Earthquake, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Hiroshige, Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road, Hishikawa Moronobu, James McNeil Whistler, Japan, Japanese art, Japonisme, Julian Opie, Kachō hanga, kasanezuri, Kawase Hasui, key block, Kimedashi, Kiso highway, Kisokaidō, Kitagawa Tsukimaro, koi-nobori, Koya Abe, Kyoto, Kyoto Maruyama-Shijō school, landscape painting, meisho, Millennium Bridge, Mount Fuji, musenzuri, Nakasendō, Nihonbashi Morning Scene, Noda Tetsuya, omohan, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, over-printing, panoramic view, Pheasant and chrysanthemums, Pleasure Boats at Ryōgoku in the Eastern Capital, Plum Garden at Kameido, relief printing, River Thames, samurai, sex worker, Sudden Shower over Ōhashi and Atake, Suidō Bridge and Surugadai, Suruga Province, Surugadai, tanzaku, Tate Modern, The Central Mountain Road, The Countryside along the Shore of the Rhône, The Eastern Coast Road, The open road, The Passenger in 54, The Plum Garden at Kameido, Three geese and full moon, Tokugawa government, Tokyo, Tokyo Story, triptych, Tōkaidō, Uchiwa, ukiyo-e, Utagawa Hiroshige, Vincent van Gogh, woodblock print, woodblocks, yūjo, ōgi

Posted by Simon on June 21, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/06/21/hiroshige-artist-of-the-open-road-british-museum/

The Craft of Carpentry: Drawing Life from Japan’s Forests @ Japan House

This is a beautifully designed, enlightening but at the same time quite demanding exhibition about the craft of traditional Japanese carpentry. Basically you learn about two topics: the different types of wood, derived from different trees, used in Japanese carpentry; and the myriad different types of joinery that allowed a country without iron, and therefore without nails or screws, to elegantly join wooden parts together to build up elaborate architectural structures.

Display of sashimono joinery, displaying techniques for 3-way, 2-way and board-to-board joints in ‘The Craft of Carpentry: Drawing Life from Japan’s Forests’ at Japan House (photo by the author)

Japan House in Kensington High Street is always a pleasure to visit because of the elegant and beguiling shop on the ground floor which showcases a wide range of Japanese products from jewellery, fabrics and stationery, to books and art. The downstairs floor includes a cinema, a small reference library and the main exhibition space. Usually the exhibition space feels light and airy, as it did for the exhibitions about the Ainu people and Japanese design. For those two exhibitions the space was essentially open plan. For this one there were more temporary partitions which made the space feel smaller and a bit cramped.

The Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum

I think this was for several reasons. The exhibition credits suggest that the show has been lifted wholesale from the Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum in Kōbe. The museum’s mission is to collect carpenters’ tools and conserve the daiku culture which has been in danger of disappearing since the second half of the 20th century.

Fair enough, but you can’t resist the thought that they’ve tried to cram an entire museum’s worth of artefacts and ideas into just one room; to, as the English expression goes, fit a quart into a pint pot, with the result that there’s a lot of raw fact to take in and quite a bombardment of technical artefacts to try and understand.

Some of the shapes and patterns used in sashimono joinery hanging on the wall, with in the foreground examples of immaculately carved blocks on the display table, in ‘The Craft of Carpentry: Drawing Life from Japan’s Forests’ at Japan House (photo by the author)

Types of wood

The stands of types of wood (and some bamboo) were easy enough to grasp, even if their Japanese names were less so. For example:

In sukiya architecture, Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica or sugi in Japanese) is often favoured over high-grade hinoki cypress for its softer texture.

And:

Logs with the bark left intact are often used in soan (thatched hut style architecture). The most popular wood for this purpose is Japanese red pine (aka-matsu).

Lots of information like that.

Examples of different woods and bamboo used by Japanese carpenters, alongside tools used to mark and cut them and photos of carpenters at work, in ‘The Craft of Carpentry: Drawing Life from Japan’s Forests’ at Japan House (photo by the author)

The main downstairs exhibition at Japan House always has a little outpost in an area set aside for it in the shop up on the ground floor, and in this show this little room is displaying examples of timber from 8 or so different Japanese tree species. You are encouraged to study these to observe the different types of grain they reveal, along with boxes containing examples of wood shavings from each species which you are encouraged to scrunch in your hands so you can smell the different aromas of the different species.

Lots of trees, no iron

The fundamental premise of the show is easy to grasp which is that, with forest covering two-thirds of the Japanese archipelago, and with few natural metal resources, the Japanese were forced to develop an advanced culture of carpentry based on cleverly interlocking parts. This has dictated the look and style of Japanese traditional architecture, made up of lots of cunningly interlocking parts.

So the centrepiece of the exhibition is a display of all the carefully shaped and perfectly carved pieces of wood which it takes to create the eaves of a wooden temple. First you see all the pieces and blocks laid out on stands, there are several videos showing schematics of how the pieces fit cleverly together, and next to all this is a full-scale mock-up of the eaves of a building the pieces fit together to make.

Not very good photo showing the tables, on the left, displaying various cunningly carved blocks, and then the full-scale mock-up of the complicated roofing which they go to construct, in ‘The Craft of Carpentry: Drawing Life from Japan’s Forests’ at Japan House (photo by the author)

The tea house and more

Just beyond these eaves is a full-scale construction of the Sa-an tea house, originally constructed in Kyoto’s Zen temple Daitoku-ji and considered an ‘Important Cultural Property’ of Japan. The wall labels give minute explanations of the different types of natural materials, weaving and carpentry techniques involved in its construction.

The full-scale Sa-an tea house from Kyoto in ‘The Craft of Carpentry: Drawing Life from Japan’s Forests’ at Japan House (photo by the author)

And beyond this is a series of stands which focus on particular types of join, with separate blocks laid out on display tables, the finished joins assembled at head height, and videos showing how the different pieces cleverly slot into each other.

There are several displays of ferocious-looking saws used in traditional carpentry, and more videos showing happy looking modern masters explaining the secrets of their craft, their deep understanding of the different types of wood, and their use in different buildings or the different parts of buildings (columns, walls, rooves). We learn that there are three core aspects of Japanese carpentry:

Dōmiya daiku (temple and shrine carpenters)
Sukiya daiku (teahouse carpenters)
Kigumi (wood joinery) ‘wood-joining without the need for nails’

And much more along the same lines.

Respect for the forests

The curators claim that traditional carpentry has always gone hand in hand with a profound respect for nature, and the woods and forests the wood is extracted from. Wise words from ancient masters are printed on the walls about respecting the forests, getting to know them intimately, understanding which parts of the forest produce the best trees for different purposes, and encouraging communication with the forest kami or ‘spirit-deities’.

Apparently, traditional timbermen have always sought harmony with the forest, apologising to the forest for pillaging its wood. This is especially true of Dōmiya daiku, the work of temple and shrine carpenters, as their role directly connects the material world of wood to the spiritual realm, as they construct their dõ (Buddhist temples) and miya (Shinto shrines). And so on.

Thoughts

If you’re a carpenter you will love this show. If you’re just an average visitor, like me, I think you will be impressed by the fundamental idea of nail-less carpentry, and pick up a strong sense of the respect for their materials evinced by Japanese carpenters, something I’ve never come across in my experience of real-life English carpenters or in western literature (apart, now I think about it, from John Updike’s novel Couples which features a carpenter who thinks a lot about his trade).

But many of the other concepts, and their Japanese names, demand more attention than I can give – no way could I remember any of the Japanese names for the specialised tools, types of wood and so on which throng the exhibition. Also, at the end of the day, once you’ve seen the first half dozen clever ways of slotting wooden parts together, your eyes tend to glaze over. Well, mine did.

I think it lacked variety. The exhibition at Japan House about the Ainu people had sections about their language, clothes, religion and gods, festivals, distinctive homeware and so on and was interesting because the objects and videos on display were all so varied. This was even more true of the show about Japanese design, which ranged from chopsticks to player pianos, rugby shirts and much more.

But here there are just a lot of saws and other woodworking tools (more than 80, apparently); an awful lot of wooden blocks laid out for you to savour their tonguing and grooving; a dozen or so videos showing how they cleverly slot together; and half a dozen full-scale mock-ups of the resulting rooms or eaves. And that’s it.

A display of traditional Japanese saws in ‘The Craft of Carpentry: Drawing Life from Japan’s Forests’ at Japan House (photo by the author)

After the first couple of displays of exquisitely-shaped wooden blocks I’m afraid my mind kind of glazed over. It turns out there’s only so many technical explanations of Japanese traditional carpentry techniques that I can absorb at one sitting.

Japan House is always a calm and sophisticated joy to visit. And this exhibition does offer insights into a whole world of traditional carpentry I knew nothing about. But, as I stated at the outset, I found it both more demanding, and less varied and delightful, than many of the other exhibitions I’ve visited here.

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by Simon on June 7, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, Japan

Posted by Simon on June 7, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/06/07/the-craft-of-carpentry-japan-house/

Japan: Myths to Manga @ Young V&A

Young V&A

Older readers may remember the Museum of Childhood sited near Bethnal Green tube station out in East London. This has always been part of the Victoria and Albert Museum but in the early 2020s was rebranded ‘the Young V&A’. They’ve cleared the central space with just a café at the far end, and moved all the exhibits onto galleries overlooking it.

The very open, uncluttered ground floor of Young V&A, just a cafe at the far end (photo by the author)

I remember going to the Childhood Museum decades ago and being disappointed at the array of old dolls in fusty wooded display cases. Nowadays they’ve made a big effort to make as many exhibits as possible interactive, with a build-your-own meccano ball rollerball thing, machines to make patterns in sand and more basic things like tables with pens and paper and stencils (I used one of the stencils to trace a guitar and then draw a silly face on it).

But I’d come to see the ‘Myths to Manga’ exhibition which has been running for almost a year and I’ve kept putting off. For some reason I’d got hung up on the word ‘manga’ and thought it was another manga exhibition which, after the good one at Japan House and the massive one at the British Museum, I was in no special rush to see.

Myths to Manga

But I was wrong. Manga takes up a small, almost imperceptible part of this exhibition. It is more like a review of Japanese myths, legends, folk tales and religion, told through a great miscellany of objects. And, given its location in a children’s museum, I think we can safely assume say that a lot of these objects were not chosen in order to give a dry scholarly overview of the subject, but because they’re FUN!

So, at the interactive end of the show, echoing the emphasis on interactivity in the rest of the museum, there’s a little ‘forest’ area with fake trees and beanbags to lie on and listen to a Japanese folk stories on headphones; there’s an origami table with books on how to do origami and lots and lots of squares of origami paper, and a separate table with paper and pencils and books on how to draw manga characters. And maybe most fun, certainly noisiest, there’s a trio of traditional Taiko drums for small kids to bang the life out of.

Installation view of ‘Japan: Myths to Manga’ at Young V&A. Note the drums on white stands in the foreground, and in centre frame, bean bags around a table covered in paper to do manga (photo by the author)

In display cases there are lots of toys, including Pokemon, Doreamon, Sylvanians, Hello Kitty, maneki-neku, all manner of dolls. There’s a stand of small Transformer toys from the 1980s (‘These are no ordinary toy cars!’) next to a more traditional V&A set of life-sized mannekins modelling the designs of Coco Pink Princess.

Installation view of ‘Japan: Myths to Manga’ at Young V&A showing street fashion designs by Coco Pink Princess (Photo by the author)

There are games and models based on a number of traditional Japanese characters or types of spirit or demons, such as this one about the Yōkai, shapeshifting supernatural beings that include spirits, creatures and demons.

Yokusai display case in ‘Japan: Myths to Manga’ at Young V&A (Photo by the author)

At the big end of the spectrum there are painted screens and decorated kimonos. At the tiny end of the spectrum there are a number of absolutely exquisite netsuke. There are decorated vases, plates and styled shoes. There’s dolls house furniture from the last century next to the model for a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Studio Ghibli films. And talking of films, there are half a dozen monitors showing clips from recent animé movies.

Themes

How is all this arranged and organised? I’m glad you asked. The curators have taken primal aspects of Japanese (and probably any ancient mythology) and arranged all the exhibits under these great big headings. They are:

Sky (flying gods, demons and heroes)
Sun (the country’s name in Japanese, Nihon, means origin of the sun’, so some flags; in the Shinto religion the most important god is Amaterasu no Okami, goddess of the sun)
Stars (in East Asia the stars Vega and Altair are unlucky lovers, the Cowherd and the Weaver Princess who only meet up once a year when their stars align, an event celebrated in the Tanabata festival)

The Seventh Month from the series the Five Festivals, woodblock print, by Utagawa Kunisada (1830s) in ‘Japan: Myths to Manga’ at Young V&A © Victoria and Albert Museum

Moon (moon-viewing festivals called otsukimi; in East Asian mythology the moon is home to a white rabbit who makes mochi cakes for everyone)
Sea Below (mermaids and the amabie, the whiskered catfish namazu)
Sea Above (14,000 islands, waves, beaches, fishermen)
Forest (ancient forests full of legendary creatures like the tanuki raccoon dogs and kitsune foxes and heroes with superhuman powers like Momotarō and Princess Kaguya)
City (400 years ago Tokyo was a small fishing village, now it has a population of 14 million)
Streets (skyscrapers soaring above Shinto shrines, with old folk stories about the demons which come out at night)
Home (a place to display a small number of beautifully designed artefacts)

Each theme is explored through half a dozen or so objects of – as I’ve indicated – very varied size, shape and medium.

Part of the ‘Home’ theme, in installation showing examples of manga, anime, videogames, Pokemon, Gameboys and so on, in ‘Japan: Myths to Manga’ at Young V&A (photo by the author)

To take an example utterly at random, the ‘Streets’ section includes a poster using traditional woodprint style to depict a woman so absorbed in her smartphone that she’s about to stumble off the platform at a train station. It’s a 2017 warning poster from the Tokyo subway, ‘Please do not use smartphones while walking’. Puts Transport for London’s poster to shame for style.

‘Please do not use smartphones while walking’, 2017 poster in ‘Japan: Myths to Manga’ at Young V&A © Victoria and Albert Museum

Under each theme there are summaries of traditional Japanese folk stories related to them. These include:

I liked the print of the Seven Gods of Good Fortune, six ugly men and a fair maiden, known for sailing round in a boat. I liked the idea that you should sleep with a picture of the seven gods under your pillow on New Year’s Eve in order to have a lucky year.

I was also very taken with the witch’s shoes. In Shinto, some animals are thought to be messengers of the gods, in particular cockerels and crows. These bird-witched shoes were designed by Masaya Kushino in 2014 using crocodile leather and cockerel feathers.

Bird-witched shoes by Masaya Kushino (2014) in ‘Japan: Myths to Manga’ at Young V&A (photo by the author)

Modern art

In among the toys and models, plates and kimonos, shoes and dresses, there are a number of contemporary works of art which could have dropped here from a completely different, entirely adult exhibition. These included:

a large black and white photo of magical lights in the forest, Hakkoda #2 by Tokihiro Sato
a large digital ‘painting’, Tokyo Dizzily Land by Shigetoshi Furutani
a large sculpture made from car parts, Double Spiral by Keita Miyazaki

Installation view of the Street section of ‘Japan: Myths to Manga’ at Young V&A’, showing (left to right) the smartphone poster, ‘Tokyo Dizzily Land’ by Shigetoshi Furutani and ‘Double Spiral’ by Keita Miyazaki (photo by the author)

Woodblock prints

Lastly, it took a while for me to realise that, in a way, the backbone of the show is provided by a series of beautiful woodblock prints, ranging in date from the 1770s to 1900, but with most of them coming from the 1830s, ’40s and ’50s. These also feel like they come from a different exhibition, a different world, one with far more artistic depth and resonance than the Transformers and Sylvanians. I counted 15 of them, by the following artists:

Utagawa Hiroshige (7)
Utagawa Hiroshige II (1)
Utagawa Kurisada (2)
Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1)
Totoya Hokkei (1)
Ishikawa Toyomasa (1)
Katsushika Hokusai (1)
Utagawa Sadahide (1)

Yes, this would be the same Katsushika Hokusai who did the famous Wave and it’s here, Under the Wave off Kanagawa from the series ‘Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji’.

But although all of them were interesting and half of them were really good, my favourites were both by Utagawa Hiroshige – Star Festival at Yanagishima (1856) and Moonlight at Ryogoku (1856).

Summary

If you’ve got small children they might like the interactive stuff, for a bit. If you’re interested to find out a bit about Japanese culture, their beliefs about the sun, moon, sea and so on, and to learn about some traditional folk stories accompanied by related prints and illustrations, games and toys, then it’s interesting enough. But if you’re an art lover then I think you’d go to see the prints, some of which are really beautiful – and also the half dozen or so miraculously small and intricate netsuke. In the example below, each ‘clam’ is the size of a fingernail. Even with my glasses on I couldn’t see the full details of each carving, it’s a miracle an artist ever carved them, so small, so precise and so beautiful.

Netsuke of clam shells with the eight famous views of Omi by Nagamitsu (1800 to 1850) in ‘Japan: Myths to Manga’ at Young V&A © Victoria and Albert Museum (photo by the author)

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by Simon on August 26, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Japan

Tagged amabie, Amaterasu and the sun, Amaterasu no Okami, anime, Bethnal Green, bird-witched shoes, Clam shells with the eight famous views of Omi, Coco Pink Princess, Doreamon, East London, Ishikawa Toyomasa, Japan, Japan House, Japanese culture, Japanese myths, Japanese religion, Katsushika Hokusai, Keita Miyazaki, kitsune foxes, maneki-neku, manga, Masaya Kushino, Momotarō, Moonlight at Ryogoku, Museum of Childhood, My Neighbour Totoro, Myths to Manga, Nagamitsu, netsuke, Nihon, origami, otsukimi, Pokemon, Princess Kaguya, production of Studio Ghibli, Royal Shakespeare Company, Seven gods of good fortune, Shigetoshi Furutani, Shinto religion, Star Festival at Yanagishima, Sylvanians, Taiko drums, Tanabata festival, the Cowherd and the Weaver Princess, The tale of Momotarō, The tale of the bamboo cutter, The tale of the rabbit and the moon, The tale of Urashima Taro, The tongue-cut sparrow, The wonderful tea-kettle, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, Tokihiro Sato, Tokyo, Totoya Hokkei, Transformers, Utagawa Hiroshige, Utagawa Kunisada, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Utagawa Kurisada, Utagawa Sadahide, Victoria and Albert Museum, woodblock print, Young V&A, Yōkai

Posted by Simon on August 26, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/08/26/japan-myths-to-manga-young-va/

Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking @ Dulwich Picture Gallery

This is a lovely exhibition full of really lovely and enjoyable images. Often you have to work a bit in an art gallery, especially with modern art, but most of the images here are delightfully easy to process and enjoy. It’s like being in a high quality ice cream parlour and faced with an embarrassment of riches.

Kumoi Cherry Trees by Yoshida Hiroshi (1926) Courtesy Fukuoka Art Museum

The show brings together artworks by three generations of just one extraordinary family, the Yoshida family from Japan who have each worked in the Japanese tradition of woodblock print art.

The father, Yoshida Hiroshi, was a leading creator of prints from the 1920s. He is represented by one room full of wonderful prints. His wife, Yoshida Fujio, was a renowned watercolourist, painter and printmaker in her own right, and is represented by six big lovely prints of flowers.

They had two sons who followed them into the family business, Tōshi and Hodaka, but who each followed different artistic paths and engaged with American art of the 1950s and 1960s in different ways with different results.

Hodaka’s wife, Yoshida Chizuko, was also an artist, co-founder of the first group of female printmakers in Japan, and is represented by works in her own right.

The fifth and final room is entirely filled by an installation by Hodaka and Chizuko’s daughter, Yoshida Ayomi, the third generation of this remarkable dynasty of artists, whose installation is closely modelled on one of the classic prints by her grandfather, which we saw in the first room.

The patriarch: Yoshida Hiroshi (1876 to 1950)

The first room is devoted to the life and career of Yoshida Hiroshi, one of Japan’s greatest artists. In his early career he was successful as a Western-style painter. It was only at the age of 44 that he began designing woodblock prints.

He became a leading figure in the shin hanga movement which aimed to revive traditional ukiyo-e print subjects by combining them with Western principles, techniques and aesthetic choices, resulting in a unique fusion of styles. The movement was characterised by its emphasis on naturalistic and realistic depictions, in particular in the genre of landscapes.

Hiroshi was remarkably cosmopolitan and travelled the world in the 1920s and 30s. It was his trip across America which inspired some wonderful depictions of dramatic landscape such as mountains, the Grand Canyon and so on.

El Capitan by Yoshida Hiroshi (1925) Courtesy Fukuoka Art Museum

He not only travelled the Western world but exhibited and sold his woodblock prints, gaining an international reputation in the US and Europe.

In fact there turns out to be an amazing fact which is that Hiroshi visited Dulwich Picture Gallery, way back in 1900, when he was just 23, and the room of his works displays his signature in the Gallery’s visitor book. More than a coincidence, I wonder whether it’s been a long-running ambition of the gallery to bring together works by the great man.

Hiroshi worked by creating clear black outlines of the subject and then filling them in with washes of paint. In the small side room (the Mausoleum) off to one side of the series of rooms at Dulwich, they’re showing a short film featuring interviews with Japanese craftsmen who explain the incredible care Hiroshi took with his prints. He overlaid multiple blocks of the identical same subject, sometimes as many as 20 (!), each one designed to bring out a different aspect of the design or to print different colours over each other. This helps explain the tremendous sense of depth and resonance they have, an amazing subtlety of coloration which disappears in online reproductions.

Installation view of ‘Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery showing the video ‘Hiroshi Yoshida and his woodblock prints’ and the display case of wood print tools (photo by the author)

It also explains why he made many prints in pairs designed to convey different times of day, such as the morning and evening prints of the Acropolis in Athens (1925) or the Taj Mahal in India (1932), the Matterhorn in Switzerland (1925) or the Sphinx in Egypt (1925). The images of the Taj Mahal used fourteen blocks (!) and 55 impressions to create the desired gradation of colour or bokashi.

This video (nothing to do with the gallery) gives you a sense of the graphic accuracy, the use of distinct black outlines, but the tremendous subtlety of colour in his works.

The patriarch’s wife: Yoshida Fujio (1887 to 1987)

Yoshida Fujio was a renowned watercolourist, painter and printmaker but this is the first time any of her work has been exhibited in the UK. Fujio was married to Hiroshi and travelled with him across the USA and Europe, exhibiting her delicate watercolours of Japan to acclaim. Upon returning home in 1907, she took part in the first exhibition organised by the Japanese Academy of Arts. In 1918 she set co-founded the Shuyokai or Vermilion Leaf Society, the first association of female Japanese artists.

It was with the death of her husband, in 1950, that Fujio, inspired by the experiments of her sons with abstraction, returned to artistic practice after a 30-year gap and created an iconic series of woodblocks in flowers in the early 1950s. Six big examples are on display here. In their hyper close-up transformation of vibrant colours into semi-abstract designs, they are pretty much the opposite of her husband’s long shots of realistically captured landscapes. Apparently, she achieved the distinctive optical effects by placing the flowerheads in a fishbowl.

Yellow Iris by Yoshida Fujio (1954) Private Collection. Photograph by Mareo Suemasa

The eldest son: Yoshida Tōshi (1911 to 1995)

The eldest son, Tōshi, started off in his father’s footsteps, depicting landscapes and cityscapes with fine examples on display here. But when his father died, in 1950, he became head not only of the family but the family business, the Yoshida Studio, and began experimenting with abstract art. The result is landscapes which achieve an abstract monumental quality.

Unknown (Michi no) by Yoshida Toshi (1968) Private Collection. Photograph by Mareo Suemasa

He was responsible for maybe my favourite piece in the show, a 1964 abstract titled Abstruse. As usual an online reproduction can’t convey the shimmering and entrancing effect of the multiple layers of colour. I kept having to go back to look at it again and each time got drawn deeper and deeper.

The younger son: Yoshida Hodaka (1926 to 1995)

In a break from his family’s established style the younger son, Yoshida Hodaka, expanded upon traditional printmaking to incorporate collage and photoetching. Like his father and brother, foreign travels influenced his choice of motifs, but he was also inspired by Pop Art, Surrealism and Abstraction. Here’s a characteristic work from the 1950s where you can immediately see the influence of Western abstraction, and the curators point out the influence of Juan Miro and Paul Klee.

Profile of an Ancient Warrior by Yoshida Hodaka (1958) Courtesy Fukuoka Art Museum

In the 1960s there’s a little explosion of Pop Art with images from magazines (often of 1960s glamour models wearing bikinis) in collages and assemblies. By the 1980s he’s morphed again to create collages combining realistic images of buildings and streets, rather American-looking, with figures of people or animals pasted in front.

The son’s wife: Yoshida Chizuko (1924 to 2017)

Hodaka married Yoshida Chizuko, herself a noted artist and co-founder of the first group of female printmakers in Japan, the Women’s Print Association. Chizuko often depicted landscapes, nature, and traditional Japanese scenes but she, also, explored aspects of abstraction and repetition. Her works combine Abstract Expressionism and traditional Japanese printmaking.

Tenryuji Garden by Yoshida Chizuko (1953) Private Collection. Photograph by Mareo Suemasa

Some of her works reminded me of the covers of 1950s jazz albums I own, so I wasn’t surprised to see one of them is actually titled Jazz (1954). One of my favourite works in the whole show was the one titled Rain (1953) because it’s so evocative of that era and its design.

The grand-daughter: Yoshida Ayomi (born 1958)

The youngest member of the Yoshida printmaking family is Yoshida Ayomi, Hodaka and Chizuko’s daughter. Her practice combines traditional Japanese printmaking techniques with modern elements, often utilising organic materials.

The final room in the exhibition hosts a site-specific installation created especially for the exhibition. It is titled ‘Transient beauty’ and completely covers three walls of the final room. On the right-hand wall the outline of the cherry trees exactly match the trees seen in the Yoshida Hiroshi print in the first room, ‘Kumoi Cherry Trees’ (1926). Just about 100 years later his granddaughter has lightly drawn the outline onto grey canvas and then stuck onto it hundreds and hundreds tiny pink petals made from fabric. These stray across onto the middle wall which has a completely different vibe. Rather than one complete piece of cloth as the grey wall is, the middle one is a set of 30 or so square wooden panels, and instead of being lightly painted onto it, as per the grey wall, here the outlines have been strongly graved into the wood, maybe a reference to the wood carving tradition of her family.

Installation view of ‘Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery showing two of the three walls which make up ‘Transient beauty’ by Yoshida Ayomi (2024) (photo by the author)

The left-hand wall was my favourite, although I only have this bad photo I took of it. I think I liked it because there was more going on: at the top the black silhouette of winter branches was, for me, far more evocative than the sketchy outlines of the trees on the right. I think most of the space is intended to convey a rainy sky with variegated stormclouds, but I read it as the surface of a pond or lake with shadows and light playing across it and dappled by a million tiny splashes of stormy raindrops. There was more to look at and enjoy in this wall-sized image than the other two.

Installation view of ‘Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery showing part of the middle and most of the left-hand wall of ‘Transient beauty’ by Yoshida Ayomi (2024) (photo by the author)

Video

DPG have released a video showing the speeded-up creation of the installation.

Thoughts

What an amazing family! What an imaginative world their works create and what a journey you go on as you walk through them. The majority of works by Yoshida Hiroshi are on loan from the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan and are travelling to the UK for the first and maybe only time. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Treat yourself.

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by Simon on July 13, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Japan, Prints

Posted by Simon on July 13, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/07/13/yoshida-three-generations-of-japanese-printmaking-dulwich-picture-gallery/

Japan reviews

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Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard (1984)
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by Simon on June 16, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Japan

Posted by Simon on June 16, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/japan-reviews/

Design Discoveries: Towards a Design Museum Japan @ Japan House

For decades Japan has been well known for its stylish modern design, across all kinds of products, machines and devices, but surprisingly it has no national design museum. In recent years curators and leading designers have embarked on a project to select and research products and objects which reflect the best of Japanese design, a kind of design museum of the imagination. So far some 19 leading designers have taken part, each selecting items which demonstrate their design tastes and ideals.

This lovely FREE exhibition at Japan House in Kensington is a selection of seven of these designers, from filmmakers to architects. Each has been allotted a stand or area displaying items they would put into a permanent collection of design treasures, ranging from 5,000-year-old Jōmon pottery to bang up-to-date sportswear, from electronic musical instruments to cartoon festival figures.

Installation view of ‘Design Discoveries: Towards a Design Museum Japan’ at Japan House © Japan House (photo by Jérémie Souteyrat)

The seven displays are each accompanied by a video documenting each creator’s research process – where they went, what they saw, and explaining the design principles behind the objects they chose – produced by NHK, Japan’s equivalent of the BBC.

In the process the exhibition raises broader questions about the nature and purpose of ‘design’: What is design? What is it for? Why do we need it? How do we know when design is good or bad?

The exhibition features an entire wall where visitors can answer the question ‘What does design mean to you?’ on (stylishly designed) sheets of paper, with the pencils provided, and then stick them onto the wall. The wall was already covered with hundreds of visitor ideas and comments by the time I arrived (you can see glimpses of it in section 5 below).

Seven Japanese designers

1. Tagawa Kinya

Tagawa Kinya is a design engineer and co-founder of international design agency Takram. For his project he explored the design process of a master of Japanese product design, Yanagi Sori (1915 to 2011). Sori had a long, wide ranging and distinguished career; Tagawa chose to explore Yanagi’s design principles by examining the numerous designs he developed for his cutlery collections.

Installation view of Yanagi spoons at ‘Design Discoveries: Towards a Design Museum Japan’ showing designer spoons at Japan House (photo by the author)

I enjoyed reading Yanagi’s thoughts about ideal cutlery. According to him any imperfection in cutlery affects the palate i.e. our perception of what we’re eating. As touch is the most sensitive of the five senses it follows that cutlery we put in our mouths not have even the slightest blemish or imperfection. Which explains why his cutlery, especially the spoons on display here, are all made from single strips of metal or wood.

2. Tsujikawa Kōichirō

Tsujikawa Kōichirō is a film-maker. He chose and researched the design of wooden spinning tops from Hyōgo because ‘a toy is the first designed object a human comes into contact with’. He explored tops in the collection of the Japan Toy Museum in Himeji, Hyogo Province.

Installation view of spinning tops at ‘Design Discoveries: Towards a Design Museum Japan’ at Japan House (photo by the author)

Toys nurture a child’s five sense and the primal desires to touch, see and hear. As such, they embody design in its most basic form. Spinning tops are one of the earliest and simplest types of toy with examples being found in 6th century sites in Japan. Possibly they originated as artifacts in religious ceremonies and might have been types of talisman. Obviously now, as documented at the Japan Toy Museum, although bounded by the original circular design and spinning functionality, they come in a world of designs and patterns.

It was a shame, I thought, that we couldn’t play with them, that there was no-one demonstrating how to spin them for the entertainment of the numerous kids and toddlers who were visiting. And for big kids like me.

3. Morinaga Kunihiko

Morinaga Kunihiko is a Fashion designer who works for the ANREALAGE brand. He chose to research the tradition of haburagin clothes. These are talismanic patchwork garments which were worn over 500 years ago by the noro village priestesses from the island of Amami Oshima in Kagoshima Province. The garments are thought to have been worn by 12 and 13 year old trainees. Since both good and bad spirits were present at these rituals the patchwork composition of the haburagin clothes was meant to ward off evil spirits and protect the girls.

Installation view of a haburagin jacket and explanatory video at ‘Design Discoveries: Towards a Design Museum Japan’ at Japan House (photo by the author)

Haburagin were made from cuttings from the kimonos of many people. Habura is the local word for butterfly or moth and referred here to floating spirits of the dead. The garment was a patchwork of triangles, each representing a butterfly or moth, and hence a coat that called on the combined powers of the spirit world to protect its wearer.

Decorative futameotoshi stitching was often used for the Haburagin. The alternation between long and short stitches was thought to exorcize evil spirits. It was particularly applied to openings such as the collar and sleeves where spirits were more likely to gain entrance. As Morinaga points out, ‘The detail is small but held enormous power and significance.’

4. Sudō Reiko

Sudō Reiko is one of Japan’s most influential textile designers, now president of textile design firm Nuno Co. She chose the shirts created by the Goldwin company for the Japanese rugby team for the 2019 Rugby World Cup. These used cutting edge 3D moulding techniques in which the fabric is created three dimensionally and shaped to the players’ bodies using heat. The result is that the shirts fit the body exactly, following the contours of the body and fitting like a membrane. They are tear-resistant, dry quickly and are extremely light. Believe it or not the shirts’ designer was inspired to develop the technique from a lifelong interest in the 3D lanterns which feature in the annual Tsuwaya Yokata Andon festival in Oyabe City.

Installation view of ‘Design Discoveries: Towards a Design Museum Japan’ at Japan House showing the 2019 Rugby World Cup shirts (photo by the author)

5. Hirokawa Tamae

Hirokawa Tamae is a fashion designer. Her Skin Series used the technology of no-sew knits to produce the experience of putting on a second skin. Work from the series attracted global attention after being worn by Lady Gaga and became part of the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) in 2017. In 2021, she collaborated with ASICS to produce the podium jackets for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games. She chose the 700-year-old Hakata Gion Yamakasa Festival in Fukuoka.

Installation view of ‘Design Discoveries: Towards a Design Museum Japan’ at Japan House showing yamakasa decorations (photo by the author)

The Hakala Gion Yamakasa Festival has been in existence for 700 years. Hakala Gion Yamakasa is a rite centred on the Hakala district’s tutelary Kushida Shrine. It has been suggested that in a time of pestilence, the townspeople are carried the priest Shoichi Kokushi, founder of the Jotenji temple, on a dais to calm the hungry spirits by sprinkling holy water through the streets.

From this derives the word Yamakasa which describes the portable shrines carried through the streets during the festival. Some used to be as much as 16 meters tall, but the installation of overhead wiring made that impractical in the modern era and the old Yamakasa have been replaced by the enormous but stationary Kazari Yamakasa and smaller Kaki Yamakasa floats, which are still paraded through town.

The Kaki Yamakasa portable floats can still weigh as much as 1 ton and be carried by more than twenty people. The base structures are held together by joinery and hemp ropes. The decorative themes cover a broad range from traditional symbols to contemporary cartoon characters which are all carefully crafted by local doll with a new batch created each year. It’s examples of these figures and figurines which are features in the display. The wall labels explain how design, shape, subject and colouring all bear symbolic meanings.

Installation view ‘Design Discoveries: Towards a Design Museum Japan’ at Japan House showing yamakasa decorations (note the wall covered in comments left by visitors, as described above) (photo by the author)

6. Mizuguchi Tetsuya

Mizuguchi Tetsuya is an architect and ex-Sega videogame designer. He chose the ‘transacoustic piano’ designed by Shizuoka, in which an embedded speaker creates a sonic experience that can be felt through the entire body.

Installation view of ‘Design Discoveries: Towards a Design Museum Japan’ at Japan House showing the TransAcoustic Piano: note the two electronic transducers outlined in blue (photo by Jérémie Souteyrat)

In an acoustic piano, sound is normally produced by striking the strings with the hammers extending from the keys. The resulting vibrations are amplified by the soundboard. The instrument has about 230 strings and a cast-iron frame which in turn are connected to a wooden soundboard.

By contrast, the TransAcoustic Piano resonates sound with the aid of transducers, devices fitted to the soundboard to convert the audio signals into vibrations. This construction makes the whole piano resonate, creating the sensation of being enveloped by sound. It is an unique design enabling the listener to experience sound through the whole body.

7. Tane Tsuyoshi

Architect Tane Tsuyoshi chose earthenware from the Jōmon Period which sheds light on people’s daily living situations in Iwate over 10,000 years ago and how this still impacts design today.

Installation view of ‘Design Discoveries: Towards a Design Museum Japan’ at Japan House showing 5,000-year-old artifacts from Jamon Village © Japan House (photo by Jérémie Souteyrat)

The Goshono Jamon Museum is part of the Goshono archaeological site, in the city of lchinohe, Iwate prefecture. Excavations there commenced in 1989 and revealed the first-known Jamon Period mud-roofed pit-houses in Japan. The remains of more than 800 pit-houses have been found so far.

At the museum they’ve reconstructed a dozen or so mud-roofed pit-houses as scholars think they would have looked. As people made the shift from the nomadic lifestyle to fixed settlements they developed designs that gave concrete shape to the soil, fire and other vital resources. The Jamon people designed based on a ring system. The structure of village society was a ring and for over 800 years other huts were added to the central ring.

The display includes anthropomorphic clay figurines (dogū) and earthenware vessels from 5,000 years ago, roughly contemporary with Stonehenge. Fascinating.

Summary

From state of the art musical instruments and cutting edge sports kit through to ancient villages and religious figurines, the exhibition is light and airy but has tremendous range. Above all, like the brilliant Ainu people exhibition which preceded it, this exhibition gives you a real sense of the astonishing diversity of peoples and traditions who inhabit the place most of us in the West thing of us as simply ‘Japan’. They reveal that ‘Japan’ is a whole cultural world of its own.

Map

Map of Japan showing locations of the seven designers’ chosen objects.

Map of Japan showing the locations of the seven design projects featured at ‘Design Discoveries: Towards a Design Museum Japan’ at Japan House © Japan House (photo by Jérémie Souteyrat)

Last call

It’s FREE. It’s beautiful, elegant and fascinating. Take the Tube to High Street Kensington, turn right and it’s less than a hundred yards away. Simple as spinning a top.

Installation view of ‘Design Discoveries: Towards a Design Museum Japan’ at Japan House showing colourfully-designed whipping tops © Japan House (photo by Jérémie Souteyrat)

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by Simon on June 15, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Archaeology, Art, Design, Japan

Tagged 2019 Rugby World Cup, Amami Oshima, ANREALAGE, Design, Design Discoveries: Towards a Design Museum Japan, dogū, exhibition, Fukuoka, futameotoshi stitching, Goldwin company, Goshono archaeological site, Goshono Jamon Museum, haburagin jacket, Hakala Gion Yamakasa, Hakala Gion Yamakasa Festival, Hakata Gion Yamakasa Festival, Himeji, Hirokawa Tamae, Hyogo Province, Hyōgo, Iwate prefecture, Japan, Japan House, Japan Toy Museum, Japanese culture, Japanese history, Japanese rugby team, Jérémie Souteyrat, Jotenji temple, Jōmon Period, Jōmon pottery, Kagoshima Province, Kensington, Kushida Shrine, Lady Gaga, lchinohe, Mizuguchi Tetsuya, MoMa, Morinaga Kunihiko, New York Museum of Modern Art, NHK, noro village priestesses, Nuno Co, Oyabe City, pit-houses, Shizuoka, Shoichi Kokushi, Skin Series, spinning tops, spoons, Stonehenge, Sudō Reiko, Tagawa Kinya, Takram, Tane Tsuyoshi, Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, transacoustic piano, Tsujikawa Kōichirō, Tsuwaya Yokata Andon festival, What is design, yamakasa decorations, Yanagi Sori

Posted by Simon on June 15, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/06/15/design-discoveries-towards-a-design-museum-japan-japan-house/

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All posts in category Japan

1. Threads of Life (2026)

2. Letters of Thanks (2026)

3. During Sleep (2026)

Another web work

State of Being (Dress) (2025)

Non-web works

Video: Wall (2010)

Try and Go Home (1997)

The Trainee (2023 to 2024)

Video of Shiota at work and explaining

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Debunking myths

Definitions and dates

Chronological structure

1. Civil wars 900 to 1600

2. From 1600 peace

3. Nineteenth century stories

4. Japanese empire

5. Commercial exploitation of the samurai image

Modern artworks

The paradox of civilised exhibitions about hyper-violence

Three ages of samurai

1. 800 to 1600: Rise of the samurai

2. 1600 to 1850s: The long peace

3. 1876 to the present: After the samurai

Part 1: 900 to 1600: war

Cuirasses and armour

Bows and arrows

Saddles

Swords

A surcoat

Beheading

Culture

Hosting

Part 2: 1600 to 1900: peace

Tokugawa shogunate

10%

Culture of peace

Staging and soundscape

A woman’s firefighting jacket and hood

Nostalgia

Abolition of samurai status

Part 3

Japanese imperialism

Fun, film and video games

Summary

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The Photographers’ Gallery Print Room

Michael Kenna

Shin Shin

An opinion

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History and context

Philosophy

The pieces

Iwata Tetsuhiro

Okihara Saya

Nishikawa Satoshi

Isihara Toshihisa

Sasakawa Kenichi

Abe Hitomi

Seki Kenichi

Yoshikawa Kazuto

Otani Tetsuna

Tokuda Masami

Yamada Yōji

Hidaka Naoko

Ninjō Ikkei

Moriguchi Shinichi

Jōji Yoshimichi

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