"Japanese Photography from Postwar to Now," the second photography show to open at SFMOMA's Pritzker Center for Photography in the last two weeks, is a tsunami of images, if that's not too indelicate a term given the catastrophe that struck the country in 2011.
It's reflexive to think of Japan as a purveyor of innovative camera equipment rather than as a center of a thriving photography culture of its own, but this exhibition, which features over 200 works from the museum's collection recently infused with a donation twice that size from a Tokyo collector, should go a long way toward altering that narrow preconception. While an exhibition of this breadth may sound daunting, the viewing experience is not, thanks to cogent organization of the material by curator emerita Sandra S. Phillips. The lean, well-written text panels that summarize eight thematic sections, ranging from personal photography and visual ruminations on cities by contributors to the radical zine "Provoke," to the cramped interior dwellings of an overpopulated country, offer concise descriptions of the purview of individual artists, plus elucidation of particular works or series.
Throughout the exhibition, whether in the work of young or veteran photographers, the presence of the past is palpable. The gravitational pull of old world traditions resisting the relentless forward press of modernization, as well as the aforementioned earthquake, which drove home the precariousness of existence on a vulnerable island, make for fertile artistic territory. A gallery titled "Disaster" eyes the poetic and literal effects of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant meltdown.
The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 devastated the land and the psyche of the population, who bequeathed visceral memories to the next generation. That legacy of grief, hostility and suspicion is manifested in works found in the opening gallery, where artists utilize arresting, largely symbolic imagery to comment, in some instances sardonically, on the history of their nation's ambivalent relationship with the U.S. Two color photomontages by the late Tsunehisa Kimura are especially striking. In "Untitled"(1977), the Statue of Liberty, clasping her torch, barely keeps her head above ocean waters threatening to engulf her, while in "Americanism" (1982), a couple raises a bottle of that all-American export Coca-Cola to a benign-looking, puffy white mushroom cloud in the distance, taking in the spectacle as if they were at a fireworks display. Miyako Ishiuchi's mournful pictures of a tattered blackened dress and a lone shoe abandoned by its mate poignantly represent the remains of lost relatives and reflect on the aftermath of nuclear holocaust.
Yasumasa Morimura, "An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Collar of Thorns)" (2001), chromogenic print, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein. Photo: Yasumasa Morimura
A provocative section highlights staged photographs that mine Japan's deeply rooted theatrical heritage. In "Objet" (1950), where Kiyoji Otsuji channels the spirit of Marcel Duchamp, a nude woman, her head obscured by white gauze, stands in front of a spider-web construction. But the show's scene-stealer has to be the gender-bending prankster Yasumasa Morimura, a student of Western painting who dabs acrylic paint and transparent gel on his photographs to mimic finishing varnish; a mistress/master of sexual ambiguity, he assumes a variety of guises, mostly, but not always, female. Simultaneously accurate and a sham, his "Shonen" triptych (1988) is a take-off on Edouard Manet's "The Fife Player" (1866), albeit with a naughty, subversive twist. The first "canvas" approximates the original, somewhat playing it straight, so to speak; the second catches the soldier boy literally with his pants down and a hand with painted fingernails grabbing his crotch from behind; the third is a rear view of a similarly compromising position. Morimura also masquerades as an aged Rembrandt (if only!) and the Dutch master's pious mother, as well as Frida Kahlo surrounded by emblems of transformation.
Ever feel like you can't get enough of an artist to whom you've just been introduced? The perverse, delightfully imaginative Lieko Shiga, a former dancer in her mid-30s, fits the bill for this writer. She's but one example of a growing number of emerging Japanese women in the field who are producing exciting work. Her hallucinatory, frankly creepy "Tomlinson, FC " (2005), from a series of portraits done in concert with her neighbors in a London public housing project, shows a man whose disembodied head is encircled by multiple hands striving to touch him. She seems to be referencing Japanese horror movies in the cosmic, metallic blue, wonderfully weird "Out of Eden" (2007) (as in, cast out of paradise). A monster seated on a couch, alone in a darkened room - perhaps having crawled out of the television set - waves a single tentacle over its head in a cry for help, or maybe an attempt to phone home. And in "Portrait of Cultivation" (2009) - a Japanese answer to "American Gothic" or an outtake from "Children of the Corn," a movie about a kiddie cult that made human sacrifices for the harvest - a couple has lugged a bloodied wooden cross with what appears to be a gnarled octopus at its center into a field after nightfall. In "Fishman," a series of black & white self-portraits, Ken Morisawa, a Japanese Olympic swimmer, expresses an affinity with creatures under the sea, whose depths, lest we forget, harbor Godzilla.
Through March 12