Japanese art on show at Queensland Art Gallery exhibitions

Aspects of recent and contemporary Japanese culture are reflected in two exhibitions at the Queensland Art Gallery.

Namiyo at Hanauma Bay (1985) by Masami Teraoka.

Japan was the first Asian nation to modernise — in other words, to assimilate the new technology of the West — and to become a significant power, with dramatic consequences in the 20th century. In the post-war consumer world it was the first to become an economic powerhouse and to develop from being a cheap source of mass manufactured goods to its present status as a relatively expensive producer of high technology.

As the standard of living of its population increased, Japan lost the advantage of cheap labour and settled into the strange condition of an economic giant with little or no growth, being gradually overtaken by a China that in turn may settle into a similar stasis when its own population reaches comparable prosperity. Of course, given the fragility of China’s authoritarian political system, things may not evolve there in the same way, but that is another question.

What is distinctive about the Japanese is the way they have undergone, or more exactly undertaken, fundamental social changes twice in the past 150 years yet have retained such a strong sense of cultural tradition. The first occasion was in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when the emperor reasserted his power, ended the domination of the shogunate and initiated a radical process of Westernisation.

It was not just the new orientation that was remarkable but the effectiveness with which it was implemented. The Japanese set about imitating the leading Western powers in the fields in which they excelled, thus basing their army on the German one and their navy on the British. Within a generation they were in a position to destroy most of the Russian navy at the Battle of Tsushima (1905).

The extraordinary effectiveness of the Japanese military, combining the new technology with an ancient warrior ethos, unfortunately led to the rise of a militarism that escaped even the control of the imperial government — the invasion of China from 1937 was initiated by the local military command against the wishes of Tokyo — and that led Japan into the catastrophe of World War II.

Defeat in 1945 forced Japan to embark on a second wave of reform and modernisation, repudiating its military tradition and turning to democracy and a modern market economy. Once again, within a generation Japan had transformed itself beyond recognition, this time into an economic superpower, soon second only to the US in scale.

Neither of these remarkable renewals was achieved without stress, and in each case there were those who felt that precious traditions had been compromised. There were samurai revolts in the mid and later 19th century, and one of Japan’s greatest post-war writers, Yukio Mishima, led an abortive coup that ended in his own ritual suicide in 1970.

Yet Japan never went through the disaster of China’s Cultural Revolution, in which so many of the cultural elite perished, so much was destroyed and so many traditions lost. Japan maintained a deep respect for its own culture and for the people who embodied it, and its dominant classes never lost touch with their ancient values. Continuity was strained but never wholly ruptured.

More recently, however, the stresses have come less from rapid change than from stasis, not to say stagnation. In this environment of prosperity with little or no growth, no prospects, no apparent future, Japanese culture seems to have grown at once less confident in its own values and, paradoxically, more turned in on itself.

Japan has a long history of introversion, developed especially in the centuries of the shogunate, when contacts with the outside world were strictly limited if not entirely closed down and foreign trade was tolerated only in the strictly regulated port of Dejima in Nagasaki. But it sustained itself during this time, despite the increasing formalisation and ritualisation of many aspects of culture, by its profound belief in its own traditions and by a certain ethos of austerity, epitomised in the code of the samurai.

Today Japan is ostensibly more open to the rest of the world than ever, but its sense of relevance and its belief in itself have become more uncertain. This is what leads to eccentric cultural expressions in several domains, from cartooning to erotica, design and biennale-style art, a domain in which eccentricity is fortunately an advantage.

In cartoons, the Japanese have long been in love with big eyes, and an infinite number of kitsch characters and figures have migrated from comic books to children’s pencil cases and backpacks, notably contributing to the visual pollution in our environment. Children, in turn, easily pick up these graphic cliches and reproduce them in their own drawings unless taught anything better.

The infantile and regressive taste for large and ostensibly innocent eyes is supported by the Japanese idea of kawaii or cuteness, and not surprisingly is matched on the darker side by violent and pornographic cartoons, and by distinctively Japanese erotic themes, such as groping on public transport (chikan), a scenario appealing both to sadist and masochist and reflecting the oppressive reality of crowding with strangers.

Aspects of recent and contemporary Japanese culture are reflected in two concurrent exhibitions at the Queensland Art Gallery. The smaller of these, at QAG, is a survey of printmaking since 1950.

Much of the work is abstract in character and, like so much abstraction in those post-war decades, has not aged well. Matters are not helped by the proximity, in the next gallery, of several prints by Hiroshige and other older and far superior masters.

The more interesting artists are mostly working with traditional media and subjects but subtly transforming them, such as Kokei Tsuruya with his portrait of actor Danjuro XII (1985) or Toshi Yoshida with a series of views of Mount Fuji from 1962 that suffer from a certain post-photographic literalism in their treatment of the motif but are saved by the remarkable skill with which the artist handles colour in the complicated and painstaking woodblock ­technique.

Other notable individuals, such as Masami Teraoka, with his artfully erotic Woman with Iris (1980), are also represented in the larger exhibition at GoMA, which focuses on the period since 1989, coincidentally the year the Berlin Wall fell, but here chosen because it corresponds to the beginning of the Heisei period, that is the reign of the present Emperor Akihito.

The exhibition includes several international biennale-type favourites but also some who deal more intimately with Japanese concerns, traditions and sensibility. Among these are Teraoka, as already mentioned, whose contemporary versions of ukiyoe prints include one of a couple about to make love but terrorised by a cat-demon that emerges from a condom packet, and another of a blonde girl being pleasured by an octopus, his adaptation of Hokusai’s extraordinary erotic print Dream of a Fisherman’s Wife (1814).

There are a couple of works by Yasumasa Morimura, who never misses a chance to dress up in drag. One re-creates Marcel Duchamp’s famous photograph of himself in his punning feminine alter ego Rose Selavy, another is an elaborate photographic and digital montage in which he dresses up as each of the characters in his own version of Brueghel’s painting of The Blind Leading the Blind (1568, Naples, Capodimonte Museum). In the lower right-hand corner, where one might find an artist’s signature, he has included a reproduction of the original.

Morimura’s work satirises the consumer ­society, and in the middle a character holds a paper bag with the words “to funny”, one of those linguistic ineptitudes that used to be almost universal on Japanese youth fashion in the 1980s, with its addiction to vacuous and yet verbose slogans.

Coincidentally, Yuken Teruya’s work is made of paper shopping bags but with exquisite cut-out trees inside, showing how even when Japanese work draws on the anti-art tradition it tends to be instinctively refined.

Several more recent works allude to a new vein of fear and paranoia that has crept into the Japanese psyche in the years since the Fukushima tsunami and nuclear disaster of 2011.

One is a large woodblock print of the Hachiko crossing in front of Shibuya Station, where the busy junction has become the centre of a threatening dystopian world, crowded with warning signs and patrolled by rat police, security guards and decontamination workers.

Another is a set of photographs of roads in the country and along the seaside. The focal point of each, however, turns out to be large signs in LED lights that indicate wind speed and direction. The indicators had been installed for some time in areas exposed to high wind and gusts that could be dangerous to traffic, but they acquire a new and sinister connotation when winds can mean nuclear fallout.

By far the most significant and moving work in this exhibition, however, is a very recent video piece that revisits the memories and wounds of the war. Meiro Koizumi’s Double projection # 1 (2013) is based on the experience of a former kamikaze pilot, now seemingly in his late 80s, who set out on a mission with some other young men in the last months of the war (the kamikaze attacks began late in 1944) but, owing to a mechanical failure, survived when his comrades died.

It is touching and indeed tragic to see how the old man, after almost seven decades, is consumed with guilt about living on when his friends, and one close friend in particular, died. He looks at the photograph of the young pilot who died on that day, heartbroken. We see him repeating what we sense are the same words he has rehearsed to himself thousands and thousands of times through the years, remembering their joy and pride as they set out, wondering why his friend left no note behind, expressing his own shame and misery.

The artist asks the old man, seen on the right side of the screen, to speak to his dead friend, and then he has him, on the left screen, enacting the part of the dead pilot. In this role, the old man at first listens to his own voice, head bowed, without any visible reaction. But the artist — and this is his only presence in the work — is heard prompting him to respond. He tells him to say that he forgives him. Hesitantly, the old man, in the persona of his dead friend, repeats that he forgives him. And then Koizumi tells him to say he’s happy that he is alive. And then with more warmth: I’m really happy that you’re alive.

Hangs: Modern Japanese Prints

Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Until April 26.

We Can Make Another Future: Japanese Art After 1989

Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. Until
September 20.