Artful Adventures: Wa No Akari

In The Gospel According to the Evil One, my best friend explains that, "Going to museums is totally a worthy Sabbath day activity."  Apparently at BYU she had a professor who was a stake president or something who even told her so.  Although I'm not exactly the best Mormon ever, I am actually trying (because somebody named Me promised she would if God did her the favor of helping me get this job, and even if I'm not the best Mormon ever, I kind of do take that sort of thing seriously).  At the same time, I'm not quite ready to go full tilt, especially when the Evil One has given me a great justification for spending my Sundays in museums, so I've decided that after church gets out each week, I'm working my way through Tokyo's vast array of art institutions and exhibitions.

(For the record, no, The Gospel According to the Evil One is not an actual book, but if I ever find myself writing her memoirs, I'm totally calling it that.)

My first adventure was to the Wa No Akari.  For the past few years it's celebrated Japan's celebrations  (festivals) and crafts in the Hyakudan Kaidan, a registered tangible cultural property built in the 1930s as Tokyo's first dedicated wedding venue.  This year the focus was on Japan's colors and designs.  But after I learned about it, I promptly forgot exactly what it was about, just remembering that I wanted to go.

Words don't really do it justice, anyways.

Beyond "that looks cool," I'm not sure what I was expecting.  When they gave me a bag for my shoes, I kind of knew it was going to involve a proper Japanese building.  Then I got into the swankiest elevator I've been in my whole life (and also one of the biggest).  After taking off my shoes, I found myself at the bottom of 100 stairs, on each of which resided a kokeshi doll, and at intervals, led off into rooms.  And in the rooms...

Well, for starters, the rooms themselves were priceless works of art.  I would normally never say that covering every surface with decoration was tasteful, but somehow they pulled it off.  If I'd needed confirmation that I've actually arrived, that I'm in Japan, after all, this would be it.

Knowing now, after the fact, that they were representing festivals through Japan's crafts, the whole experience makes a lot more sense.  Walking through it, though, I found myself thinking that this wasn't an art exhibition in the truest sense - it was a series of installations.

My first experience with installations was at the Joslyn Art Museum - Babysis and I used to check out whatever they had displayed when I came home from college, and that trip it was Sandy Skoglund.  Walking up to the actual room she created for Revenge of the Goldfish actually made me laugh - it was that beautiful, and I felt like I was interacting with the art more fully than when you walk through a room full of paintings.

I got the same feeling walking through the Wa No Akari.  The paper cuts in the above picture were arranged in a room that had been carpeted in astroturf, creating the feeling that you were actually deep in a forest, surrounded by animals.  There were definite displays, but overall I felt immersed in the works of art, surrounded by them.

Nearing the top was a room that had ceramics in it.  I heard a flute playing, and realized it was the soundtrack to a video.  And then I realized that the video was an animation, made with images glazed in cobalt on porcelain, and I had to watch the thing several times.  It was actually that cool.  My favorite part, which you have to watch carefully to see, is that the flute player's facial expression changes.

The Wa No Akari is also meant to be an illumination.  This is another one of my favorite things about Japan - they light that shit up.  Last fall I got to see one of these at Kodai-Ji, the temple grounds lit up at night to show off the trees in all their glory (okay, so it wasn't that glorious yet...I felt like I was about a week too early).  They also do it for the sakura in spring, and in winter, too...but summer seems like it wouldn't be a great time, since it's light out so late.  This isn't a problem is you have a nice, dark room, though.  The festival lanterns were great, but the lit up leaves were actually my favorites.

The final room, at the very top, was full of windchimes, and I kind of thought my heart would stop.  I've been a sucker for windchimes ever since my childhood - my grandparents had one on the patio outside their house, and even now I can hear the sound of it, and feel the summer heat, and hear the cicadas singing in the trees.  These are a different kind of windchime, but their sound made me feel at home, especially when I returned to reality, stepping out of the hotel into the summer heat, to be greeted by the song of cicadas.