Published on: Thursday, March 24, 2011

By Wanda Jackson

Anywhere you start is a good place to begin, when viewing a new exhibition exploring the nude in contemporary Japanese photography.

The exhibition titled “Modernity Stripped Bare: Undressing the Nude in Contemporary Japanese Photography” opened March 16 and continues through April 23 at the University of Maryland’s Art Gallery in College Park.

Curator Elizabeth Johnson’s selection and arrangement of photographs no doubt will stir “conversations” and raise a few eyebrows. The exhibition conjures memories of 1980s Calvin Klein ads. Remember 15-year-old Brooke Shields purring, “Nothing comes between me and my Calvin’s,” and the giant billboards featuring perfectly chiseled models hawking must-have jeans and underwear?

What has resulted, however, is a selection and arrangement of photographs that is visually impressive and philosophically engaging to the viewer, according to director of The Art Gallery John Shipman.

“The exhibit forces us to stand, sometimes uncomfortably, in front of works and contemplate ourselves, our bodies, and our humanity — in short, it is an exhibit of art at its finest,” Shipman said.

The exhibit features the work of five established contemporary photographers — Ryoko Suzuki, Yurie Nagashima, Ryudai Takano, Riichi Yamaguchi and Manabu Yamanaka — who currently live and work in Japan. Their works confront a wide range of issues including gender, sexuality, physical deformation, aging and isolation.

“By revealing what is often left unseen, these photographers normalize the bodily experiences that are common to all of humanity and expose how isolation and prejudice are systems that operate by making certain populations invisible or visible only in socially prescribed ways,” Johnson said. “The photographers in this exhibition are united in their assertion that we can only come to understand one another if we are willing to see one another.

“For example, Yamanaka recounts how he had once believed that people living in bodies marked with deformity, either from birth or by later accident, are ‘pathetically unfortunate’ or that they are paying for ‘bad deeds in a previous life.’ However, in the process of meeting and photographing people living with such afflictions, Yamanaka discovered that ‘when I looked upon them without cringing, I saw how truly natural was each one of their lives.’ Thus, for Yamanaka, the exchange that occurs between him and the subjects of his photographs as they offer their bodies up to the gaze of his camera stimulates positive growth through the development of a mutual understanding and acceptance.

“The photographs of elderly women that comprise Yamanaka’s ‘Gyahtei’ series are the product of a gradually cultivated trust between the artist, the subject, and the subject’s family that developed over the span of a year while Yamanaka volunteered in a nursing home. By granting Yamanaka permission to photograph their bodies, at times mere days before their death, the subjects and their families offered the photographer a rare glimpse of what he recognizes as ‘the final corporeal form of the human being before this release.’By photographing bodies that are rarely seen by the general population, Yamanaka hopes to proffer a deeper understanding of what it means to exist in the liminal zone between life and death, visible and invisible.”

In the 1990s, Nagashima, widely recognized as a pioneer in her field, set the tone for a new generation of artists, many of them women, who used photography as a visual strategy for self-representation. Nagashima inserts “the unexpected” into her images.

In her 1993 “Self-portrait” series, a group photo of the Nagashima family is strongly reminiscent of a “typical” family photograph. In what looks like the living room, Nagashima photographed herself along with her parents and brother — all four of them are sitting, unclothed and looking straight into the camera. The mother sits in a traditional formal position in which her hands are folded in her lap — a position expected of a woman even while dressed.

What Nagashima wants the viewer to see is the structure of the family, the resemblance of family members, the representation of hierarchies within the family and the family being the first place where gender differences and asymmetry are socially defined.    

According to Johnson, the five photographers in this exhibition turned to the nude as part of a larger personal project to establish deeper connections with others. While the use of art to build interpersonal relationships is not new, it has become the driving force of art since the 1990s with advancements in technology and changes in social structure or relationships.

In conjunction with the exhibition, The Art Gallery will host “Reading the Body in Contemporary Culture: A Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference” from April 22 to April 24. The conference will provide a forum in which participants can explore ways in which people use the body to communicate with others and mediate contemporary experiences. Photographer Ryoko Suzuki will address the conference on April 22 from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., followed by a dance performance by “butoh” choreographer Naoko Maeshiba and composer Yoko Kamitani (butoh is an avant-garde performance art with origins in 1960s Japan). Maeshiba also will lead a movement workshop on April 24 that requires preregistration with The Art Gallery.

Johnson is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park campus. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Integrative Arts specializing in modern dance performance and choreography in 1998 and a master’s degree in 2004 from Pennsylvania State University. Johnson has lived in Kyoto, Tokyo and Kanazawa. She has taught art history at Knox College and Carl Sandburg College in Galesburg, Ill.

She is the first person selected for a new Graduate Assistantship program, which provides an opportunity for a Ph.D. student from art history to gain experience in curatorial practice and exhibition management. Over the course of a year-and-a-half, Johnson has been the lead in all aspects of the exhibition according to Shipman.

“This is a true ‘soup to nuts’ experience, a real education in the ‘A to Z’ of curating an exhibition,” he said. “This is the first in this series of biennial exhibitions. It’s hard to imagine a better exhibition to begin this program.”

Proceeds from sales of the exhibition’s catalog are being donated through the American Red Cross to benefit Japan’s earthquake and tsunami victims. Each catalog is $5.

The University of Maryland’s Art Gallery, located in the Art-Sociology Building, is open to the public Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. except spring break March 21-26. The Art Gallery is supported by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts and by The Dorothy and Nicholas Orem Exhibition Fund. For additional information about “Modernity Stripped Bare: Undressing the Nude in Contemporary Japanese Photography” and The Art Gallery, call 301-405-2763 or visit artgallery.umd.edu.