“Japan Supernatural: 1700s to Today”, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Domain, Sydney NSW, November 2nd 2019 – March 8th 2020
I had been waiting for this for awhile. The Japanese approach to the supernatural is quite unique and this exhibition promised to get right to the bottom of things Japanese going bump in the night. The scope for this show ranges from 1700 through to the present and offers a good selection of material, covering woodblock prints, paintings, sculpture, books, film and installations – definitely something for everybody.
My reservation going in was coloured by my attendance at the “Alexander the Great” showing at the Australia Museum some years ago. That whole experience for me was ruined by the plague of small children washing around the place being ‘monitored’ by a decidedly lacklustre display of ‘parenting’. Witnessing the proud relics of history to the earsplitting background cacophony of sugar-jonesing, badly-behaved children and the murmured inconsequence of their un-engaged parents was not an experience I wanted to repeat, so I decided to wait until the school holidays were over before going anywhere near this event. Once I had determined that all of the hellspawn would be safely locked away for the day, I whistled up a friend and we agreed to meet at the Gallery.
My attendance was contingent upon a two-hour train trip into the heart of the city, so I left home pretty early on the day. As I departed, it was pleasantly foggy – after weeks of imminent destruction by fire, any kind of humidity is welcome at this stage. As we progressed down into Babylon however, that fog turned into drizzle, then rain, and then into a steady blatter which became the hallmark of the rest of the day. And, foolishly, I had decided that I could manage without an umbrella. Aided by all of Sydney’s connected underground and street-level shopping malls and covered thoroughfares, I managed to get as close to the Domain as I could before reconciling myself to dampness as I ran across Hyde Park. Fortunately, a fellow pedestrian heading my way took pity on me and offered me the shelter of her brolly; thanks to her I then only had to dodge from fig-tree to fig-tree along the drive to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and I was all set.
My timing had been excellent, and I had only a short wait beneath the Palladian portico of the Gallery until the place opened. Then I had my first intimation of disappointment: as I waited there for the doors to open and my friend to arrive, groups of school kids began to appear being ‘organized’ by teachers with the same degree of success usually discovered when herding cats. I had forgotten about school excursions! It seemed that even outside of the school holiday period I was doomed to be exposed to an unwanted amount of kiddage. As the teachers bawled uselessly though, I determined that these scions of the overly-moneyed from their exclusive school were here to see some other part of the Gallery’s offerings, so I pinned some hope on being relatively child free for the exhibition I had come all this way to enjoy.
Once the doors were open, my friend in attendance and tickets purchased, there was only one objective in mind – caffeine. I had come too far already without a single coffee onboard and I don’t function at all well when I’m pre-caffeinated. So, we went to the Gallery Café and got outside a light breakfast while watching the rain battering the windows from across Woolloomooloo. After that it was time for some Japanese horrors.
Sadly, while one of the groups of silver-spoon chewing schoolkids had been diverted to another section of the Gallery, the other – much younger – agglomeration of schoolboys was destined to come to Japan with us so, grinding my teeth quietly, we sauntered through the entrance and were on our way.
(And look, I understand the need to expose children early to the wonders of art and the creative process but these events are not free and these brats simply drift into corners where they titter and point at images of naked women, or they wander around in a self-absorbed daze getting in the way of paying guests. At this event almost every child simply stood in front of the artworks pointing their ‘phones at them – recording even the video presentations – as if by chance they might capture the answer to a question in an upcoming quiz while wondering vaguely when they were going to eat next. I got to the point where I deliberately walked in front of every child holding out their mobile phone while digging in their nose with a finger of their free hand, in order to just be a prick about it. And were their teachers present? Not that I could tell. Kids and I do not mix.)
*Ahem!*
Any one who’s done any kind of social history research about early Japanese culture knows that it quickly moved to a very refined cultural pitch. Artistic forms rapidly focused on subtlety and nuance and many creative outlets became ratified by various implemented structures and systems of imagery. Certain activities were confined to specific times of the day, or year, and a huge cultural mechanism of creativity was the result. One activity – the telling of ghost stories – became organized in this fashion, leading to an annual tradition of telling one hundred spooky stories over a series of evenings to entertain household or court members.
Inevitably, these stories were codified and written down, and then were illustrated in various fashions by notable artists of the period. The exhibition uses these scrolls as the jumping-off point for its raison d’être. These hyakki yagyō (“night procession of a hundred demons”) began to systematize the presence of supernatural beings within the culture. Some of these are exquisitely detailed renderings of all the creatures involved in the stories on long scrolls (emaki) while others are woodblock printed books depicting each creature and its behaviour; still others are collections of the stories from which they emerge.
Having determined the origins of this paranormal literature within the culture, the exhibition then traces the use of these concepts across all other areas of artistic expression. Thus, we see imagery of yokai and yurei (“supernatural phenomena” and “ghosts”, respectively) appearing in kabuki dramas, in fashion, in history – even in political discourse. Some narratives began to take precedence – the village headman crucified for speaking out against imperial cruelty summoned back to haunt his killers in the form of a gigantic skeleton; the demon posing as a samurai’s aunt trying to retrieve the arm he cut from her six days previously; the samurai approached by the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth begging him to look after her child – and were interpreted over and over in various ways.
At a point in the early 1800s, political opinion turned against ideas of folklore and superstition as Japan tried to modernize, in the face of increasing exposure to the West. Accordingly, discussion of supernatural creatures and events was banned, and those professing to have experienced such events were ridiculed and mocked. It was not until much later when foreign travelers began to collect Japanese folk legends and export them back to their own countries that interest was revived, and the Japanese began to reclaim these traditions and re-work them into their creative concepts. Most notable among these foreign collectors was Lafcadio Hearn, an American of Greek and Irish extraction who worked for a time as an American diplomat to Japan before moving there permanently. He is most renowned for his books of Japanese ghost tales, especially Kwaidan (1909), which was made into an award-winning movie by Masaki Kobayashi in the 1960s and which helped revive Japanese interest in mythology and folk traditions.
In the modern era all of this impetus has seen modern artists re-discovering these narrative traditions and using them as springboards for their own contemporary creative works. Thus we have Fuyuko Matsui reinterpreting a Buddhist tradition of realistically depicting the decomposition of the dead, in order to discuss the role of women in the modern world; Chiho Aoshima playing with the liminal notions of graveyards and childhood; and Miwa Yanagi’s disturbing Fairy Tale series of photographs which, just like Hearn’s reinterpretation of Japanese stories for the West, takes European and other non-Japanese children’s narratives and refocuses them through a Japanese supernatural lens.
Of course, the big noise of the exhibition is Takashi Murakami’s contributions to the show, which have caused some angry discussion in the local media. The main bone of contention is the 10m x 3m mural installation especially created for the Gallery entitled (only moments before the exhibition opened) “Japanese Supernatural: Vertiginous After Staring at the Empty World Too Intensely, I Found Myself Trapped in the Realm of Lurking Ghosts and Monsters”. This is a colourful series of vignettes surrounding a kabuki-inspired image of a cat (chosen for its appeal to children, apparently) and assembled by a 350-strong staff working for the artist. The disposable, last minute, group-effort nature of this work has thrown some critics into a tailspin, not the least for the amount of money that the Gallery forked-out for it. Personally? I found it garish and a bit haphazard, too much like glittery wallpaper at a catwalk fashion show. I did like his temple guardian-inspired statues, though.
All-in-all I thoroughly enjoyed this event from the tiniest netsuke to the largest club-wielding bakemono. I had to suffer the inconvenience of twice having some pubescent moron step backwards into me in order to get an artwork into frame on their mobile ‘phone, but that was a small price to pay overall. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition is lavish and well worth the cover price (although you can find it cheaper at Kinokuniya – heads up, locals!) and will repay re-reads into the future. This was a well presented and carefully constructed parade of night creatures that could be enjoyed on many levels and it’s a credit to the Art Gallery of NSW to have taken such a potentially-dubious notion and to have run with it so successfully. The exhibition continues until March 8th this year so, if you can, you should definitely make the effort to catch it.
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