The Final Day of the Exhibition
Even though I’d been wanting to go the whole time, I ended up slipping into the Mitsui Memorial Museum on its very last day. The final day is crowded everywhere, and sure enough the line for the elevator was long—about 20 minutes just to get in. On top of that, the galleries were extremely crowded, so I couldn’t make my way around as freely as I’d hoped.
The Miracle of Craftsmanship!
“The Miracle of Craftsmanship!” is the second installment of “Superb Craftsmanship! The Essence of Meiji Kōgei,” held in 2014–15. This time the exhibition pits Meiji craft arts against contemporary art in a face-off, presenting them side by side for comparison.
It is an exhibition of works by a wide range of Japanese artists spanning genres such as cloisonné, metalwork, ivory carving, wood carving, lacquerware, embroidered painting, jizai (articulated figures), and ceramics.
Numerous Astonishing Works
Only two works were permitted to be photographed.
First is a superb vase featuring a cat rendered in such fine detail that even its tongue is depicted, right down to the meticulous recreation of the roses. Kōzan Miyagawa I, “Vase with Cat and Flower Ornamentation.”
The contemporary work, on the other hand, is “origin as a human” by Kengo Takahashi, born in 1982. It uses “aluminum,” a material that did not exist in the Meiji era.
The other works, too, were displayed one after another with astonishing technique, leaving me utterly knocked out. Imagining the endless, unending battle against time, I felt nothing but respect. Truly.
What surprised me most was this Pacific saury. Astonishingly, the plate and the fish are joined together, and the whole thing is said to have been carved from a single cherry tree. It’s so incredible I can’t even comprehend it. Even the concept is beyond superb!
The aforementioned aluminum work, too, is apparently cast by molding fresh flowers in plaster and pouring aluminum into the mold.
There was also a work on display by Satoru Aoyama, whose solo exhibition I had seen before.
Aoyama creates embroidered works that glow in the dark using luminous thread. His extremely fine embroidery technique is simply astounding, but it’s also fascinating to wonder in what kind of environment they were made. How did he stitch in lines and letters that can only be seen in the dark?
https://art-on.jp/satoru_aoyama-2017/
Summary
It was an exhibition well worth slipping in at the last minute to see.
The concentration poured into every minute detail of the works was simply superb, and it was a show that left me intoxicated by that technique. And before expressing that technique comes the question, “Why did you decide to make this in the first place?”—in other words, imagination. It was an exhibition where I was thoroughly showered with the artists’ energy and power. Bravo!
