I told you about our visit to Obuse last week, where the Hokusai museum was closed but we still go to see his work. In Tokyo we were able to go to a digital exhibit of Hokusai’s work. This meant heading across to Tokyo to Shibuya. We have stayed there in the past, and it is a happening place. But they have been rebuilding and generally renovating like no-one’s business and we have the darnedest time getting out of the metro station. After no small amount of time walking around in circles and arguing with Google maps we finally fought our way out and onto the street, where we could get our bearings.
Anyhoo. The Hokusai exhibit.
The exhibit began with many large panels in Japanese and English, telling the story of Hokusai’s life, of his work, and his influence within Japan and in Europe. There were examples of Van Gogh, Monet and Debussy work as influenced by Hokusai. As I’ve mentioned before he didn’t just create paintings to be reproduced via woodblock printing. He designed textiles and wrote books and painted painted painted. The rest of the exhibit centred on his ‘36 Views of Mt Fuji’.
The first room was called the Room of Earth. In this room several of his paintings that dealt with day to day working scenes were reproduced across the wall in front of us. A painting would appear on the wall and then grow and expand until we were standing inside of it. On the floor part of the painting was projected, and we could interact with it. A winter scene had us standing on a frozen pond, and if we tapped our foot the ice cracked and we could feel it shift. Another scene was of people harvesting crabs – we would find ourselves looking at the sandy shore of the river and the crabs scurrying along and pools of water, which at a tap of the foot would reveal fish in the water. The people in the painting would move about, the trees would bend in the wind. It was quite astonishing.
The next room was the Room of Wind. In this room the paintings were scenes where the wind was active. It was almost disorienting- the painting would appear all around us and then start to move as the sound of the wind whooshed around us. Then another scene would blow in and the images would shift.
The final piece was about water and waves. It began with a scene right outside the door of the exhibit – the Shibuya scramble – people walking across the intersection. And then the floor began to vibrate under our feet – like there was a train passing under foot. A scene of woodblocks being carved, the texture of the paper, the colours being applied and then zooming out to be a portion of one of the views of Mt Fuji. And then – the ocean. Towering waves, the room shaking as the water was all around us. And suddenly we are in the picture of the Great Wave, with the real waves freezing into the familiar patterns from the print itself. And then the painting began to move as the waves towered higher and higher and the boat of fisherman fought to stay afloat amongst the foaming ocean.
We both ran into problems with videos and pictures in the final room – the frame rate of the presentation did not agree with the camera which led to odd effects. A few stills….
I’ve mentioned the spectacle that the team labs digital art exhibits provide, and how I felt that they were not quite…… enough. The Hokusai exhibit had the story, the connection that made it a more complete experience. I found myself wondering if Hokusai would be amused to see his paintings come to life, all those people coming to life in the every day scenes he captured. Seeing the paintings in such detail, at such a scale, really brought home the hard work of life in those days.
And as a reminder – here are super high quality digital scans of the original woodblock prints to reinforce just how small they actually are (When they’re not being blown up on a 12’high by 20’ long wall)
And after such an amazing experience there was only one thing left to do…
Where I'm At 