While painting is preeminent in the 90-odd works shown in ¡°Collection: The Aesthetics of Contemporary Japan¡± at the National Museum of Art, Osaka (NMAO), it is mostly peripheral to the better-known Japanese aesthetic concepts.
There is none of the rustic simplicity of wabi-sabi, the court elegance of miyabi, the Edo city chic of iki or the more restrained sui of Kyoto comportment. Nor are there fathomless ²â¨±²µ±ð²Ô depths to plumb, or even the limited-use kawaii. Most Japanese aesthetic concepts are historical and art form-specific. Postwar Japanese painting, it seems, exists in an aesthetic concept vacuum.
All the better then that the NMAO¡¯s exhibition nominally attempts to discern the ¡°underlying presence of Japanese aesthetics in contemporary art.¡± But rather than probing analysis, some of what results is merely cultural nationalism. The exhibition overview, for example, touts: ¡°All of the paintings share a uniquely Japanese sensibility that is unlike anything from the West.¡± And this despite the raucously insistent European-American parallels evident.
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