France / Japan

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From the Edo and Meiji dynasties, to the present day with the Showa dynasty, Japanese culture has always influenced the West and a cultural bridge has rapidly stretched between East and West.

During the 30s, some artists emigrated to Europe, bringing their talent imbued with their millennial culture and many were influenced by French painters and sculptors.

Today, the Dutko Gallery highlights contemporary Japanese artists like ceramicist Shoko Koike, who immortalizes flowers in pure white sandstone with an opalescent heart;Setsuko Nagasawa, a ceramist whose encounter with American artists definitively influenced his work using a freer technique; Chieko Katsumata, specialist of Chinese beef blood, combining a technique of colored engobes giving a particular texture; Hitomi Uchikura and her subtle works of paper, glass and leather; not forgetting Kaneko Haruhiko, a member of Ishigaki-Yaki pottery, a master ceramist, whose work uses the ancient technique of the "oil drop" for making bowls used in the sixteenth century by the shoguns.

At the time of this digitized, accelerated, sometimes dehumanized century, these Japanese artists have lost none of their poetic philosophy, happily combining beauty with usefulness and sometimes even the useless which is undoubtedly the greatest luxury. So there is another world to see, another reality, one that can carry us into a larger universe. Through their vision of art, these Japanese artists invite us to decipher this other purified and spiritualized world.

The Japanese works will be put in confrontation with some French artists for whom Japan remains an inexhaustible source of inspiration by its poetry and its ancestrality. The event "Japanismes 2018" also refers to the first craze of French artists for this culture, especially among painters, who were largely influenced by Japanese prints in the nineteenth century.

A century and a half later, this great cultural season will strengthen the bonds of friendship between the two peoples and highlight their common sensibility: a deep interest in a harmonious aesthetic and a taste for the art of living.