ASIAN ART IN PARIS
There are several Asian Art exhibitions taking place in Paris over the summer, here is a selection below.
Bamboo from Pattern to Object
The richness of the Japanese and Chinese collections at MAD features a wide variety of objects, many of which are presented for the first time. Nearly 100 works from the Museum of Decorative Arts’ (MAD) collections, such as katagami (stencils), prints, wallpapers, inro, tsuba, netsuke, as well as vases, ivory ceramics, tea accessories, and basketry, explore bamboo as a popular motif in decorative arts.
Seen as a symbol of strength and flexibility in both China and Japan, the characteristic shape of its form and foliage, as well as its species and qualities, make it a favourite material with crafts people and artisans. An inexpensive, strong, and flexible material, bamboo is widely used as an architectural element, but also as a simple plant in gardens.
The idea of pattern is central to the exhibition, its form used in a multitude of possibilities, from the forest to a focus on the leaves and knots on the bamboo canes. This versatility is shown through a selection of objects such as the use of bamboo to make fishing traps, as well as refined baskets made by skilled craftsmen who create shapes to inspire floral arts such as ikebana, as well as use in the ritual tea ceremonies.
Bamboo can often be charged with a multitude of meanings and symbols depending on the context, both in its shape and structure and in its qualities of lightness and strength. With its unique structure built around emptiness, bamboo is not only closely linked to Zen Buddhism, but also to tea practices associated with the ancient practices of Chado, the Way of Tea.
The plant is also linked with other plants such as pine and plum blossoms, as bamboo evokes certain qualities of an educated and literate person in both China and Japan. When bamboo is associated with snow, wisteria, and birds, it symbolises the seasons of winter and spring. In China, bamboo forests are both retreats for the Seven Sages, as well as the habitat of the tiger. For centuries, these qualities and symbolic meanings have made bamboo a popular symbol used by artisans and transposed onto porcelain, metal, ivory, and cloisonné enamels, as well as used to create tea ceremony utensils.
The exhibition ends in the museum’s 19th-century gallery, where stencils (katagami), netsuke, and Chinese and Japanese objects decorated with or shaped like bamboo were also sources of inspiration for French designers such as Hippolyte Boulenger (1836-1892), some of whose objects are also on display in the exhibition.
From 5 June to 14 September, Le Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, madparis.fr Catalogue available
A Passion for China
The Department of Decorative Arts at the Louvre, not known for its collection of Asian art, surprisingly holds more than 600 Chinese works, most of which come from the collections of Adolphe Thiers and Adèle de Rothschild, as well as from the royal collections. A number of these artworks have now come back into public attention due to the recent research undertaken on the collection of Adolphe Thiers, who was a journalist, historian, and a major political figure in the 19th century (as deputy, minister, president of the council and, ultimately, president of the French Republic). The exhibition is on view during Asian Art in Paris.
The Chinese exhibition at the Louvre aims to introduce them to a wider audience by putting them into the historical, diplomatic, and cultural context of their creation and their acquisition by Thiers for his collection. The show explores Thiers’s little-known passion for China and presents over 170 works dating mainly from the 18th and 19th centuries, including scrolls, album pages, engravings, prints, porcelains, jades, lacquers, and precious objets d’art in ivory, bronze, or wood inlaid with gems and mother-of-pearl.
The opening section presents Adolphe Thiers, his vision of art, his collecting practices, and his passion for the Renaissance. The second section, the heart of the exhibition, presents his full collection of Chinese art. Thiers, in view of publishing a work on Chinese art, concurrently collected books, documents, and objets d’art related to the subject. The exhibition highlights the major areas of his collecting and publishing ambitions that includes ancient and contemporary history, images of China (landscapes, architecture, and dress), works on Chinese culture (language, literature, and the literati), the ‘Three Teachings’ (Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism), Chinese porcelain (of which he was considered an expert in the filed), and, finally, imperial art. The collection contains several ceramic masterpieces, including an imperial scroll, Qingming shanghe tu, originally created for the Qianlong emperor.
From 14 May to 25 August, Louvre, Paris, louvre.fr
Taro Okamoto: A Reinvented Japan
This exhibition, also on show during Asian Art in Paris, portrays one of the central figures of the Japanese avant-garde: the multidisciplinary artist Taro Okamoto (1911-1996). It focuses on the period between 1930 and 1970 to look at the unique vision of this total, resolutely avant-garde artist. Arriving in Paris in 1930, Taro Okamoto gravitated toward abstract and surrealist movements and trained in 1938 at the Musée de l’Homme’s ethnology laboratory, alongside Marcel Mauss and Paul Rivet. At the same time, he became close to Georges Bataille and joined the secret society Acéphale.
In 1940, he left France to return to Japan, where, within a decade, he became one of the central figures of the artistic avant-garde, uniting several think tanks in a country undergoing rapid reconstruction. The exhibition covers a broad spectrum of Taro Okamoto’s career, from his time in Paris in the 1930s to his role as curator of the theme pavilion at the 1970 Japan World’s Fair in Osaka. This event marked Japan’s expansion into the global economy. Especially for the fair, he designed the iconic Tower of the Sun, a monumental sculpture in the depths of which the ‘Forest of the Mind’ grew, bringing together several contemporary works and hundreds of ethnographic objects collected from around the world. It became the unexpected symbol of the World’s Fair.
Included are the artist’s works in the collections of the museum: four masks created in 1970, three photographs of a mysterious underground exhibition entitled Inori (Prayer), as well as several archival documents. Through an investigation, visitors can discover Okamoto’s work, as well as explore Japan’s Neolithic period through Jomon ceramics and the survival of certain folk traditions in post-war Japan.
Taro Okamoto was the son of writer Kanoko Okamoto (née Kano Onuki, 1889-1939) and illustrator Ippei Okamoto (1889-1948). He accompanied his parents on their trip to Europe and settled in Paris in 1930. Close to Jean Arp and Kurt Seligmann, he pursued a career as a painter and was involved with the Abstraction-Création group and the Surrealist movements. In 1938, he studied at the ethnology laboratory of the Musée de l’Homme. At the same time, he became close to Georges Bataille and joined the secret society Acéphale. Back in Japan, he was mobilised in 1942 and demobilised in 1946, he lost all his pre-war work, destroyed in the bombing of Tokyo.
Within a decade after the Second World War, the artist would become the central figure of the Japanese artistic avant-garde. He was also the author of numerous texts. He pursued a unique reinterpretation of certain Japanese traditions, taking care to frame this renewed interest within an ‘anti-traditionalist’ perspective. Okamoto was a tireless worker and turned his hand to many artistic endeavours as a painter, sculptor, muralist, photographer, writer, and researcher. Toward the end of his career, Okamoto began to receive many more solo exhibitions of his work. In 1986, several of his early paintings were included in a major exhibition of Japanese avant-garde artists, Japon des Avant-Gardes 1910-1970 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Until 7 September, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, quaibranly.fr
