FLORENCE | MUSEO DEGLI INNOCENTI
13 JUNE TO 3 NOVEMBER 2024
YŌKAI
Monsters, Spirits and Other Hauntings
in Japanese Prints
curated by
Paola Scrolavezza and Eddy Wertheim
We are very excited to be collaborating with Vertigo Syndrome for a brand new exhibition at the Museo degli Innocenti in Florence Italy.
Yōkai: Monsters, Spirits, and Other Hauntings explores the fantastical world of monsters from Japanese tradition, featuring more than one hundred and fifty works produced during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among these are antique woodblock prints, rare books and hand-carved masks, as well as weapons and armour loaned from the Stibbert Museum in Florence.
The exhibition is curated by Paola Scrolavezza, one of the leading Nipponists in Italy and director of the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bologna, and Eddy Wertheim, director of Japanese Gallery.
YŌKAI
Feelings, anxieties and fears of the Edo era
Throughout the Edo period, the aesthetics of 'twilight', tasogare (黄昏) in Japanese, featured strongly in artistic production, both visual and literary. With connotations of mystery and intrigue, the interval between night and day gave rise to transformations and enigmas. Yōkai, yūrei (ghosts), monsters and spirits have their origins in Japanese oral tradition, being passed down through the retelling of stories and legends.These mythical creatures came to embody the sensations, anxieties, fears and desires of the Edo era.
Imagination led to visualisation, and so phantasms such as odokuro, gigantic hungry skeletons, bakeneko (化け猫), monstrous cats, kappa (河童), aquatic beings that pester boats, and the kitsune (狐), comely fox-women, began to pervade popular Japanese art and woodblock prints. In these works, they often mingle with the scenes and spaces of everyday life - city alleys, merchants' dwellings, major thoroughfares, pleasure quarters, theatres - blurring the lines between reality and fantasy. Yōkai embody the undercurrents of activity below the surface of society; things that lurk in the shadows of darkened streets or in pockets of countryside forgotten by the process of urbanisation. They break free of the strict codes of conduct imposed during daylight hours.
A HUNDRED CANDLES AND FEAR ENVELOPS YOU
An ancient ritual to find courage
The exhibition opens with an immersive installation that gives visitors the chance to experience the samurai's most legendary test of courage: the ritual of 100 candles.
This ritual takes place after the hour of sunset, with the samurai gathered in one room, lit by the light of a hundred candles. In turn, they would each tell a story of yōkai, with the aim of scaring their companions to death, thus testing their courage. At the end of each story, the narrator would extinguish the candle of one lantern, then take a mirror and mirror themselves in the corner furthest from the others. The gradual darkening of the room accompanied the narration of increasingly frightening and suspenseful tales.
Similarly, visitors will enter a dark room, lit only by the dim light of a hundred candles that, in a play of mirrors, will seem to multiply and cast red flickering shadows on their faces. The candles will then be extinguished one by one, accompanied by the hoarse voice of the ghost of an old samurai, who lost his mind and subsequently died after encountering a real monstrous yōkai in the night.
Once out of the hall of a hundred candles, making their way through the dim light of the exhibition, visitors will encounter the monster prints, surprised by voices, sounds, improvised stories and evocations that will recreate the fear, or perhaps the courage, of the ancient samurai.
THE EXHIBITION ROUTE
The centrality of the senses as the focus of stories about anxieties and fears
At the start of the exhibition, a selection of Japanese antique prints by masters such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861) and Utagawa Toyokuni III (1786-1865) will immerse visitors in the teeming atmospheres of life and pleasures of the Tokugawa era. This part concludes with a dive into one of the most beloved stories of the last part of the period; the Nansō Satomi Hakkenden by Takizawa Bakin (1767-1848). A famous river novel spanning one hundred and six volumes, the Nansō Satomi Hakkenden was written between 1814 and 1842. Here, it is splendidly translated into images by Utagawa Yoshitaki (1841-1899) and Utagawa Toyokuni III.
The whole exhibition is constructed to effectively portray the places, spaces, feelings and sensations that the yōkai embody. It aims to get to the heart of the creation of images that are deeply rooted in Japanese culture, and through it, explore its most intimate folds. Here lie the hidden, real and material sensations, anxieties, fears and desires.
Thus, in the section Trepidation - travelling with the imagination, we find The Extermination of Demons by Momotarō, attributed to Katsushika Hokusai or his school. The print depicts one of the most iconic moments of Momotarō's famous Japanese fairy tale, the 'pèsca child' who manages to defeat the terrible oni - mythological creatures similar to demons and ogres - on the island of Onigashima, handing it back to the lord of the place. Also exhibited here is Shoki capturing a demon in a dream, a work from the incredible series The New Forms of the Thirty-six Ghosts by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. Considered the last great master of ukiyo-e, Yoshitoshi Tsukioka illustrated thirty-six of his favourite tales inspired by Japanese stories and legends. His peculiar style made the works exceedingly terrifying.
From Katsushika Hokusai's never-completed Hundred Ghost Stories series comes the famous print The Sneer of the Demon Woman, in which the master takes up an ancient Buddhist legend about Hariti, a cruel and terrifying ogress determined to eat all the children in the city of Rajgir, India. The story ends with the conversion of the fearsome ogress into a benevolent divinity, protector of children, but Hokusai chooses to portray her in her most frightening version, making her a symbol of the dark side of the feminine and the threat it poses to male power.
Ghostly characters were also very present in kabuki theatre performances, inspiring print artists to immortalise them in many of their works. For example, the splendid triptychs by Toyokuni III Utagawa - a prolific woodblock print artist who became known as 'the actor's painter' - taken from some of the most popular dramas of the time such as Meiboku Sendai Hagi, written around 1780. The play was based on real events that took place in the 17th century: a dispute over succession within a family of military lineage. There are also various prints in the exhibition dedicated to the historical story of the forty-seven ronin of Edo who, in the 18th century, avenged their lord and then inflicted death on themselves through seppuku, a tale of loyalty and revenge. These include The Homage of the Forty-Seven Ronin to their Lord by Kuniyoshi Utagawa, a master of war prints.
For tickets and more information, please visit the official exhibition website:
YŌKAI, YŪREI, ONI, BAKEMONO, KAPPA AND TENGU
Fear on show
Bizarre amphibians…household objects brought to life…shapeshifters, skeletons and ghosts; the aesthetics of the eerie and grotesque have featured strongly throughout Japanese visual and literary culture for centuries. Their concepts and forms evolve over time, being reinvented and reincarnated into ever-new images and narratives.
Traditional representations of bakemono and yūrei, depicted in ukiyo-e prints of the Edo period laid the groundwork for many more recent works. From the apocalyptic exoskeletons of Evangelion, to the vast menagerie of Pokémon, to the unsettling protagonists of J-Horror and cyberpunk, the idea of the ‘monstrous’ continues to captivate audiences, playing a key role in popular culture. In the art world, Murakami Takashi’s ‘superflat’ monsters demonstrate the modern urban aesthetic of the kawaii monster.
The word yōkai is composed of two characters, 妖 (yō) and 怪 (kai): the former suggests charm, enchantment; the latter means appearance, mystery. The creatures that fall into this category are practically innumerable. After all, Japan is the land of eight thousand gods, because every natural element - tree, rock, stream of water - but also every object born of human genius or labour can contain a spark of the divine.
Japanese culture, therefore, is imbued with a form of spirituality already predisposed to the proliferation of creatures that arise from the intersection of fantasy, religion and everyday life.
THE AESTHETICS OF THE GROTESQUE IN TODAY'S JAPANESE CULTURE
From Son Goku to Demon Slayer
The exhibition is completed with a selection of contemporary illustrations, original posters and playbills created for today's anime, from Son Goku, the iconic protagonist of the animated series Dragon Ball, inspired by the Monkey from the famous Chinese classic Journey to the West, to GeGeGe no Kitarō, to Pom Poko and the worldwide success Demon Slayer. The masterpieces of Miyazaki Hayao, Toriyama Akira and other great authors show how the aesthetics of the grotesque and monstrous, which has pervaded Japanese culture since its origins, is still an undisputed protagonist in visual art today.