It was a refreshing experience to see For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography at the MFA Houston, not only because I was a introduced to so many new artists, but because of how little this show behaves like a typical museum survey. Wonderfully handled by curator Yasufumi Nakamori, this exhibition does not offer clean, easily digestible didactics, nor does it attempt to apply a retrograde hierarchy to participants based on their subsequent level of commercial success or international visibility. Instead, lesser known artists are given equal footing alongside art-household names like Daidō Moriyama or Shōmei Tōmatsu.
The exhibition brings together nearly 250 works by 29 artists and photographers working in Japan during a period of social strain and cultural uncertainty. This was a time marked by widespread protests, massive cultural shifts, and economic development in which Japan transformed from an industrial nation to a post war global superpower. This level of rapid change is difficult to comprehend and here, Nakamori’s curatorial strategy absolutely shines, whereby he minimizes the museum’s intervention and instead produces an exhibition that feels more like a collection of work by an entire generation of artists thinking out loud.
While there is no single or highly specific issue at stake–the individual artists are collectively wrestling with a wide range of conceptual pursuits–one commonality is the degree to which older forms of expression were rendered inadequate for communicating the complexity of these artists’ lived experiences. During this time, the use of photography in particular, the focus of the exhibition, underwent a shift from a vehicle for documentation to something else entirely. The artists in this show not only employ the camera to interrogate their own cultural landscape, but their work questions the potential of the medium itself, leading to a selection of highly authored imagery that markedly departs from the predominate modes of image making common to photographers working in the US at the time.
Keizo Kitajima’s provides a stunning example, as he traverses similar realms as his US based counterparts like Winogrand and Meyerowitz—dense urban scenes that read as much as theater than anything—but his active use of the camera, wide field of view, surprising perspectives, and close physical proximity to his subjects imbue the images with a deeply charged pathos. A similar darkness can be felt via Masafumi Maita’s “Situation 1,” a sculptural piece which incorporates a glowing fluorescent tube into a large format photograph of the sea. The artificial, electric brightness of this image contrasts the reserved demeanor of the whole installation and carries a surprisingly contemporary resonance given the 2011 tsunami, evidence of the enduring power and depth of this generation’s explorations.
In the end, what actually stayed with me after the exhibition wasn’t a single image or the work of one artist, but a more general question about a human condition: what happens when familiar ways of seeing stop working in the face of monumental cultural change?