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For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968–1979
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
March 7 – July 12, 2015

What first struck me about this exhibition was the strategy behind the installation, which challenges expectations about how this type of survey is typically handled, how little it behaves like a standard museum show. The exhibition doesn’t offer a clean, didactic story or prop up single participants as heroes. In fact, some of the most well known artists like Daidō Moriyama or Shōmei Tōmatsu are treated here in much the same way as the trove of unknowns and discoveries (unknown to US audiences at least) who receive relatively equal footing. Instead, the curator, Yasufumi Nakamori, has crafted an exhibition that feels more like a room where an entire generation is thinking out loud, rather than a hierarchical presentation of individual artists.

The show brings together nearly 250 works by 29 artists and photographers working in Japan during a time of social strain and cultural uncertainty. These were years characterized to a great degree by protest, economic recalibration, and widely adopted notions that older forms of expression were inadequate for communicating the complexity of these artist’s current experience. The use of photography in particularly, the focus of the exhibition, underwent a great shift from a vehicle for documentation to something else entirely.

The artists in this show not only employ photography to interrogate their own cultural landscape, but their work questions the potential of the medium itself, leading to a selection of highly authored imagery that markedly departs from the predominate modes of image making common to photographers working in the US at the time. Keizo Kitajima’s provides a stunning example, as he traverses similar realms as his US based counterparts like Winogrand and Meyerowitz—dense urban scenes that read as much as theater than anything—but his active use of the camera, wide field of view, surprising perspectives, and close physical proximity to his subjects imbue the images with a deeply charged pathos.

And this is what makes the exhibition so especially compelling. Nakamori has done an incredible job of bringing together works that reflect the connection between artistic experimentation and the artists’s own lived instability. Japan in this period was dealing with a confluence of issues ranging from the aftermath of war, rapid modernization, and the pressures of global visibility. These artists respond not with grand political statements or heavy handed illustrations, but instead lean into experimentation, thus questioning preceding systems and ultimately producing images that are characterized by a visual restlessness. Much of the work seems to be asking, or attempting to answer: in such a rapidly changing world, what kind of image could possibly keep up?

What ends up staying with you after the exhibition is not a single image, or the work of one artist, but a feeling that looking, or perception, is not only less stable than it seems, it may be completely unreliable. These are photographs that do not preserve a single moment in time, rather, they expose how fragile our sense of time already is. In that sense, the exhibition is not only about Japanese art in the 1970s, but a more general human condition–one that explores what happens when familiar ways of seeing stop working in the face of monumental cultural change.