The Veins of Japanese Art

This summer, the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka presents an ambitious and intellectually rigorous exhibition, The Veins of Japanese Art, a sweeping survey of artistic production from the Jōmon period through to the contemporary avant-garde.

Curated in thematic chapters that traverse time rather than follow it linearly, the exhibition invites viewers to trace not just stylistic transformations but the deeper cultural and aesthetic substrata that sustain and complicate Japanese visual expression across centuries.

The exhibition opens with a compelling celebration of Edo-period “eccentrics,” most notably Itō Jakuchū, whose inventive renderings of animals and spiritual figures blur the lines between naturalism, pattern, and metaphysical allegory.

The section features the digitally reconstructed Buddha and the Sixteen Arhats, a bold gesture toward technological mediation in historical scholarship, and juxtaposes Jakuchū’s works with those of fellow mavericks like Soga Shōhaku and Nagasawa Rosetsu, whose depictions of demons, deities, and everyday life push the ink medium to expressive extremes.

Subsequent chapters trace the meditative depths of Muromachi ink painting, with canonical masters such as Sesshū Tōyō and Shikibu Terutada represented in works that echo Chinese models while asserting a uniquely Japanese poetics of space and monochrome lyricism.

Here, curatorial choices foreground not only technical excellence but philosophical undercurrents—ink not merely as pigment, but as an agent of Buddhist emptiness and literati contemplation.

A particularly striking chapter titled Portraying History turns the viewer’s gaze to narrative painting and oil works from the late Edo to Meiji periods.

Paintings such as Kikuchi Yōsai’s Empress Lu Slays Qi Furen and Harada Naojirō’s study for Susanoo-no-mikoto confront history with dramatic flair, yet also speak to a Japan wrestling with its past in the face of modernisation.

The exhibition also offers a refined lens into the aesthetics of tea through displays of Momoyama-period ceramics, such as Chōjirō’s Raku ware, paired with conceptual reinterpretations by contemporary artists like Yamaguchi Akira, whose portable tea room merges modular design with ritual consciousness.

This deliberate cohabitation of historical and modern practices reactivates the tea ceremony as both artifact and living performance.

Perhaps the most provocative curatorial move is the bridging of Jōmon period pottery, its primal, flame-like vessels rich with animist symbolism, with contemporary works by Aida Makoto and Okazaki Ryūnosuke.

These modern pieces borrow from prehistoric visual tropes, filtering them through lenses of urban alienation, absurdism, and high-concept performance. The effect is not a collapse of epochs, but a recognition that the “veins” of Japanese art are recursive, branching, and genetically resilient.

The Veins of Japanese Art is a diagnostic project: identifying living currents in seemingly fossilised forms, encouraging international audiences to perceive Japanese art not as a monolith, but as a protean continuum shaped by disruption, dialogue, and reinvention.

For those who seek to understand Japan through the expressive surfaces of its culture, and the layered silences beneath, this exhibition is indispensable.