MAM Collection 019: Viewpoint - Haruki Maiko, Katayama Mari, Yoneda Tomoko

As part of the “Festival Normandie Impressionniste 2024,” Mori Art Museum presented 34 works by 17 artists from its collection in a co-organized exhibition entitled Floating Worlds: From Japonism to Contemporary Art.

The year 2024 marked 150 years since the birth of Impressionism, a movement strongly connected to painterly innovation, but also linked to photography, which emerged in parallel during the 19th century. Images could be captured and preserved as they appeared on the human eye, and this had a dramatic impact on painting, undermining its domain of historical representation with a new image technology suggesting “visual truth.”

MAM Collection 019 spotlights artworks by three artists from the Mori Art Museum collection featuring in that exhibition. While the practice of each is linked to photography, the works are less concerned with the classic documentary style than the involvement of the viewer in the creation of images. In her series “either portrait or landscape,” Haruki Maiko destabilizes and opens the viewer’s perspective from a formal standpoint, also by thematizing the relationship of photography to abstraction. Katayama Mari reverses the power relation between image and viewer, challenging conventional ideas of diversity, normativity, and agency. Finally, Yoneda Tomoko’s series "Between Visible and Invisible" refers to the correlation between the image on the surface, and the narrative beneath.