Strange, seductive tales from the great Olympic city
Exhibition
Tokyo: Art & Photography
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Ageisha pauses mid-dance, frozen in woodblock beauty. A 300ft lizard belches electric gunk on to the shattered cityscape below. And a lone athlete, carrying the Olympic torch, processes into a vast stadium where spectators are outnumbered by protesters outside. It’s impossible to reduce Tokyo to a single image.
So it takes Godzilla-sized gumption for Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum to mount an exhibition surveying 400 years of the city’s art and photography. Tokyo: Art & Photography, the museum’s first major exhibition since the pandemic began, takes visitors inside the Japanese capital. And it’s a treat.
The exhibition’s three rooms are divided thematically – the work of 18th-century woodblock masters jostles with pop art poseurs. It could have been a blaring mess; that it isn’t is testament to the subtle way history is interwoven with exposition. So we’re introduced to Tokyo’s development from the marshy samurai outpost of Edo to the world’s largest city via, say, how its artists responded to disaster or how its citizens got their kicks (and kinks).
One of the exhibition’s best artworks is its first. It begins with a blaze of cherry blossom, a hallucinatory pink tunnel, plastered floor-to-ceiling with Ninagawa Mika’s photographs of trees near her studio. After this introduction, you’re confronted with Nishino Sohei’s Diorama Map Tokyo, an angry whorl of thousands of street images.
Much more fun is the diorama of disaster nearby. Made in the mid1800s, it is an anonymous woodblock print depicting Edo’s citizens subduing the namazu, a bellicose catfish, believed to live beneath the city, whose tail flicks caused earthquakes. It’s a pleasingly Terry Pratchett-esque explanation for the fact that Tokyo is sited at the convergence of four tectonic plates.
Indeed there is an ambient, apocalyptic hum that permeates some of the exhibition’s most arresting art. Mohri Yuko’s photographic series Moré Moré Tokyo records the ad hoc fixes for subway water leaks with eerie wit: umbrellas catching rainwater glow like ectoplasmic growths, underwater life blurring the city’s concrete grid. In these images, the sense of Tokyo as a “floating world”, with one foot in reality, the other in imagination, is powerfully felt.
It is Tokyo’s contemporary artists, and especially its photographers, who command most attention. Partly this is a matter of design: the exhibition dedicates a large chunk of wall space to Tokyo’s post-war artistic boom. But it is also because these artists best capture the steamy press of the streets – and the sheer eclecticism of spirit that arises when 35million souls collide. I could have done with more of this. The Ashmolean’s collection of Japanese art dates to 1677, and there’s a slight hint of crinoline about their selection here. Where is the modern manga, for example? Also, none of the more odd, outré aspects of contemporary Japanese culture such as cat cafés are in evidence, things that have surely fuelled the modern artistic imagination.
Certainly, you can understand that the curators wanted to avoid the more gimmicky aspects, yet it’s worth remembering that, from the Sumida river to the billboards of Shinjuku junction, Tokyo is a city of surfaces.
Still, in these Covid-marooned times, Tokyo: Art & Photography is a splendid opportunity for imaginative travel. It reveals Tokyo to be a perpetual motion machine, an ever-evolving pageant of human experience.