The Shokkan exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum considers how the Japanese idea of touch includes emotions and memories.Paul Eekhoff/Royal Ontario Museum/Supplied
A museum, where precious things are displayed behind glass, might seem an unlikely place to mount an exhibition about the sense of touch in Japanese art. And yet curator Akiko Takesue is not daunted by her counter-intuitive project at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum.
She achieves success – in an engrossing show that draws largely from the ROM’s fine collection of historic Japanese art – for two reasons. One is that she is considering the concept of shokkan, how a kimono or a tea bowl offered its owner a soft or rough texture to feel, or the way an ukiyo-e print might depict skin-to-skin contact or a moment of pain. She explains that shokkan means not simply touch but the mental impression created by the sense of touch, so that the concept reaches beyond one sense to include the others, as well as language and memory.
The second reason is that the ROM’s exhibition team has gone to town on this show with hands-on stations where replicas or less valuable examples are available for the viewer to paw. Lift the weight of a samurai’s sword; unfurl a scroll or tie up a package correctly with a Japanese handkerchief. Takesue even allows visitors to handle a few of her own netsuke, miniature wood or ivory carvings of vegetables, animals and people.
Netsuke, like this pair of puppies by Kokei from the late 18th to early 19th century , became prized collectors' items.Paul Eekhoff/Royal Ontario Museum/Supplied
The exhibition includes more contemporary pieces such as this 1990s dress and trousers by Issey Miyake.Paul Eekhoff/Royal Ontario Museum/Supplied
Throughout, Takesue juxtaposes traditional examples with revealing modern ones. A simple summer kimono from 1929, so light that its pattern of autumn grasses under a full moon is almost see-through, is displayed beside a 1990s pleated suit by Issey Miyake that offered the wearer the flexibility of its moving folds.
A collection of woodblock prints from the 18th and 19th centuries include an image of a little boy clinging to his mother’s naked back as she combs her hair, and another of a woman biting a towel in pain as she receives a tattoo. Evoking the sense of touch, they are classic ukiyo-e, “pictures of the floating world,” a reference to the theatre, the brothel and the bathhouse of the Edo period. But there is also a 2000 lithograph by the Japanese artist and animator Tabaimo depicting a surprising scene in a bathhouse where a naked woman is apparently climbing over into the men’s side, an area dominated by a huge turtle. The sensuality of the ukiyo-e persists into contemporary art.
Tea bowls and noodle cups offered their users textured surfaces and a pleasing weight in the hand. One 17th-century example was a gift to the ROM from the Montreal magnate William Van Horne, who kept a huge collection of Japanese ceramics in his office, where he could pick them up and handle them. On the other hand, Makiko Hattori’s stoneware Cocoon from 2017, a round white form covered in thousands of tiny clay shavings like clusters of coral or wedding-cake icing, was not made to be touched but evokes a prickly fragility.
Collector William Van Horne regularly handled objects such as this stoneware tea bowl made by Nonomura Ninsei in the late 17th-century.Royal Ontario Museum/Supplied
Emma Nishimura also asks the viewer to consider the surface with small round bundles bearing the faint images of Japanese Canadians interned by the government during the Second World War, an ongoing project by the contemporary Canadian artist. They are quiet, contemplative – and deceptive: appearing like weighty rounded stones, they are actually made of paper.
Netsuke, the Japanese miniatures made yet more desirable as collectors’ items by the book The Hare with Amber Eyes, were designed to be handled. Indeed, the idea is that the owner’s touch eventually gives them more character, producing a patina in some spots or smoothness in others. The collection here includes tiny renditions of a camel, a mouse, two puppies, and two Chinese children. Because a kimono has no pockets, the wearer carried a purse or small box on a string, and the netsuke was a counter-balancing weight so the container didn’t slip from the belt.
Netsuke, like this 19th-century wooden mouse by Kokei, were intended as counterweights for kimono purses.Paul Eekhoff/Royal Ontario Museum/Supplied
Japanese literature is fond of the extended metaphor: Speaking of balances, this show is a much-needed counter-weight so that Japanese art does not slip from the ROM’s own belt. The museum’s ground-floor Japan gallery got lost in the shuffle of recent renovations, and this temporary exhibition is a good reminder of a delightful collection not currently on permanent view.
Shokkan: Material Encounters in Japanese Art continues to Sept. 7 at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.