The West was trending in Japan 150 years ago.
That might seem like a silly way to put it, but it’s also true. After two centuries of isolationist policy, Japan was forcibly opened up to foreign visitors and trade. What ensued was an era of modernization in architecture, fashion, industry, government and art like no other, gloriously evidenced in “Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan,” a building-wide exhibition currently on view at the Smart Museum of Art.
The Emperor Meiji, restored to power in 1868 after more than half a millennium of shogunate rule, wore radical change on his very being. He suited up in European military dress for his official photographic portrait, an image that appears here in the guise of a hand-colored photograph pasted into a U.S. consular report. The Empress Haruko, though depicted early on in layered kimonos, issued a memorandum in 1887 proclaiming that traditional Japanese garments were unsuited to modern life. From then on, she and her entourage sported only the frilly, French-style dresses seen in a war print illustrating an imperial visit to a field hospital during the First Sino-Japanese War. Not everyone agreed, however, that Western customs were the way to go. “Temptation,” a large hanging scroll, is of unclear authorship but has an unmistakable message: in it, a filthy foreign devil leads a blindfolded Japanese woman, enveloped in flowing obi-tied robes, off a cliff toward hell.
Much of the most exciting material on view in “Meiji Modern,” curated by Chelsea Foxwell and Bradley M. Bailey, falls somewhere in between these extremities, exhibiting a fusion of old and new, traditional and modern, Japanese and foreign. Cloisonné artisans like Hattori Tadasaburo innovated the already complex decorative technique to achieve new effects of translucence, relief and color blending, elegantly demonstrated in a phoenix-and-paulownia patterned globe lamp and a vase enveloped in leaves of bok choy. Kobayashi Kiyochika’s moody prints capture the bowler-hatted crowds, gas-lit streets, and devastating fires that defined Tokyo in the late 1870s and early 1880s, updating the old-fashioned medium of woodblock to produce new effects like chiaroscuro, sketchiness and shading. A wastewater bowl by Shibata Zeshin appears to be made of metal alloy but instead is lacquerware, rendered featherlight due to his decision to replace its traditional wood substrate with paper.
Zeshin also contributes a simple bowl for serving sweets, turned from conifer wood and minimally decorated with three exquisitely rendered poem cards, imitated in lacquer. A couple of objects throughout “Meiji Modern” are decorated in a similarly clever, picture-in-a-picture sort of way: a sake ewer from the Kinkozan Studio of Kyoto features four overlapping landscape paintings superimposed atop a glitzy array of patterns, while a large ivory-colored vase by Kintozan illustrates 110 individual types of vessels produced throughout the country, like a ceramics catalog — made of ceramic! These wares feel almost postmodern, in the uncanny way of certain artworks of the past, as if they’ve somehow slipped through dimensions to fit with contemporary visitors.
Not everything on view is so exquisitely refined. Much of what isn’t falls into the category of ephemera — woodblock prints and lithographs made quickly and cheaply, to provide ordinary Japanese viewers with news and entertainment, not unlike the illustrated press of today. Dozens are on display throughout “Meiji Modern,” and they make for fascinating viewing, bursting with the hairstyles, political exploits, famous buildings, popular pastimes, theater stars and trendy accessories of the times. Umbrellas were the travel mugs of 1882.
Harder to appreciate are all the tchotchkes. Crystal balls held aloft on minutely rendered metal waves, a trompe-l’oeil incense burner of a hawk on a perch, a finely carved ivory of a god sitting on a lotus riding a boar — these are small objects of incomparable quality but, in my view at least, about as much aesthetic interest as Royal Doulton figurines or Patek Philippe watches.
Far better natural and unnatural scenes can be found in the many folding screens that are a highlight of the show. Utagawa Kokunimasa’s sprawling “Hell Courtesan” is as witty as it is macabre, scattering across its silver-leafed panels anatomically correct skeletons who promenade, play music and board games, even get acupuncture treatment. A pair of golden screens by Takeuchi Seiho renders a white heron on a branch and a trio of black crows pecking at the ground with brushwork of extraordinary deftness and grace. Noguchi Shohin paints a monumental vista of poets gathered amid craggy mountains in a style associated with the Chinese literati, evidence that not all influences during the Meiji era came from Europe and America. The first female painter to become an Imperial Household Artist, Shohin is also the only woman creator named in the exhibition, though many more had a hand in producing the workshop wares on display throughout.
In addition to painted screens, “Meiji Modern” also features a rare surviving hand-embroidered example. Produced by Nishijin Studios, its idyllic woodland grove emerges from hundreds of thousands of stitches in colored silk floss, the effect part Romantic landscape painting, part photographic realism. Not on view at the Smart but included in the traveling exhibition’s first installment at the Asia Society in New York was an even more astonishing screen by Hashio Kiyoshi that used some 250 shades of blue and grey thread to translate a photograph of waves into a stunningly realistic tapestry.
Kiyoshi’s screen won a Medal of Honor at the San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915, one of many successes achieved by Japan at the world fairs that at the time were so important to a nation’s global standing. “Meiji Modern” contains numerous items associated with these events, interspersed among artworks created for both the export and domestic markets, as well as all the print ephemera of modern daily life; together they form an exceptionally well-rounded vision of an era, all of it now belonging to American collections.
Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.
“Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan” runs through June 9 at the Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave., 773-702-0200, smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/exhibitions
