A Trio of Museums

I am embarrassed to admit that I have been to Kyoto on two other previous occasions but did not step into even one museum.  Gardens, cherry blossoms, autumn leaves, ponds and streams (and one cat cafe), but no museum.  This time round, it would be different.  We started off with one museum on our planned itinerary but ended up seeing two more, partly because there was quite a bit of rain on our last two days in Kyoto so we moved our activities indoors.

The Great Wave - taken off the museum poster,
not the original print

The museum we had put on our agenda was the Kyoto Ukiyo-e Museum.  After looking so hard and failing to see Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" in the Tokyo National Museum last year, I was so happy to find out that the Kyoto Ukiyo-E Museum had a special exhibition on Hokusai's work.  To recap, ukiyo-e are Japanese wood cut prints.  The word, "ukiyo-e" literally means "sadness of life", but the prints typically depicted scenes of every day life, and of nature.  Because it also commonly was used to make posters advertising performances of Japanese kabuki performers, geisha and teahouses, or the places and scenes of the “floating world”, ukiyo-e also came to describe life’s impermanence.  Nothing however could be less impermanent than these prints.  The ukiyo-e artist first draws out the print on paper, and it is then transferred to a wooden block.  In fact, depending on how detailed and how colourful each picture is, it could be transferred to many wooden blocks, each translating to a different layer of colour.  The wooden blocks are then covered with pigment, and carefully stamped on a piece of paper, layer by layer making the prints.  In this way, numerous prints could be made. It was art for the ordinary man.

At the same time, it was also highly influential.  Ukiyo-e and the Japanese sensibility towards nature and art inspired western artists - in particular the  Impressionists. Monet, for example, had a roomful of ukiyo-e which I saw when I visited his home in Giverny earlier in 2018.

Hokusai is one of the great ukiyo-e artists and he is famous, in particular for his "Thirty-six views of Mt Fuji" of which "The Great Wave" is one.  Unfortunately the museum was very small - it is literally one room and a shop so it is not really worth the 1000Y I paid.  If it was not for the special exhibition, I would have been rather disappointed.  But I managed to see not only the "Great Wave" but “Black Fuji” and “Red Fuji”.  Whilst these three prints were enclosed and behind glass, I could also see most of the other prints up close.  Sadly we were not able to take photos but it was really so impressive to see how the wood carver must have delicately carved each line, each curve of the outline.

Today, ukiyo-e continues to influence artists from all over the world.  I watched a video on the flight back to Singapore, on how this US artist started drawing a series of prints, entitled "Ukiyo Heroes", which was subsequently transferred on to the woodblocks by a craftsman based in Japan.

Yayoi Kusama

Our second museum was the Forever Museum of Contemporary Art's Yayoi Kusama : “Pumpkin Forever” exhibition.  The "Forever Museum" is in Gion Corner, beside the theatre where I watched the annual Spring Dances or Miyako-Odori in Kyoto.  Now, Kusama had held an exhibition in Singapore, at our National Gallery, but at that point in time I didn’t have the time to make a visit.  So it was destined that I view her art here back in her home country.

Again, we were only able to take photos of selected exhibits. Yayoi is quite a controversial character and artist; she left her native Japan to go to the US in the 1950s where she tried to break into the art world, a difficult feat for a Japanese woman.  In the liberal air, love and sunshine of the 1960s, she became a performance artist, in addition to her work as a painter and in creating soft sculptures (they look like sea anemones to me, although they are apparently soft phalluses).  She returned to Japan, but the stresses of life got to her and she admitted herself into a mental institution.  There she continued to paint.   Today, her fame and popularity has spread across the world and her work is exhibited in many countries.

Infinity Room

There is a Yayoi Kusama Museum newly opened in Tokyo.  Here in Kyoto, the exhibition is held across a few rooms in the Forever Museum.  She is famous for her polka dots and pumpkins, infinity rooms and mirrors and the combination of all three.  So of course the exhibition includes an infinity room of a mirrored pumpkin with polka dots and a wall with mirrored polka dots.  There are rooms full of polka-dotted flowers, of polka-dotted pumpkins (apparently no two are alike) of varying dimensions and colours.  I have to admit that there's a certain compelling quality to her art.  Sadly photography is not allowed of most of her works.

(Postscript: Apparently the Forever Museum of Contemporary Art closed in Feb 2019.  Sadly it was more ephemeral than the name suggests.  Anyway, for more info, click here.)

The third and last museum we visited was Kyoto International Manga Museum.  Totally something I never expected I would go to!  But it was a rainy day and googling "things to do in Kyoto on a rainy day" resulted in the manga museum coming up multiple times, on multiple lists.  So I decided to give it a go!  My brave attempt to understand the Japanese youth culture.

Inside the Manga Museum

This was indeed a very educational visit for me, especially as I have never opened a manga comic in my life (till now).  The museum is sited in a former school building and this history is apparent in the wide staircases leading up to each floor, the steps low and broad to accommodate the little legs of the younger children, the regular rooms where the classes must have been held. The museum traces the history of manga, and how it evolved over the years. Here I learnt too about the different types of manga - violent tales of the samurai warriors, stories of ghosts and spirits living side by side humans in the modern world, some really more fantasies and others of school days (cos they are targeting at a youth audience, obviously). Anyone can take down a manga and read!  Of course much of it is in Japanese, but there is a foreign language section, including an English section so I actually browsed through a few volumes worth of popular manga, “Natsume’s Book of Friends”. But even the English manga are printed Japanese-style, in other words you start reading from the back of the book, and it goes right to left not left to right.  Takes a little getting used to.

So that's it - a trio of museums, each portraying aspects of Japanese culture, ranging from traditional ukiyo-e to the modern manga and the polka-dotted world of Yayoi Kusama.

More photos will be put up when ready.