Surrealism in Nagoya

also: Nagoya surrealism

movement c. 1934-1941 Japan Asia

In Nagoya, surrealism developed as a distinctive regional formation within Japanese Surrealism, especially from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s, taking shape across poetry, criticism, photography, camera clubs, and little magazines rather than through a single school. Its catalyst was the 1937 Exhibition of Foreign Surrealist Works at the Maruzen Gallery, which arrived after touring Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka and mostly showed works as photographic reproductions. Groups then organized under the safer label "avant-garde" - the Nagoya Avant-Garde Club (1937) and the Nagoya Photo Avant-Garde (1939) - around Chirū Yamanaka, Yoshio Shimozato, Minoru Sakata, and Kansuke Yamamoto. Yamamoto's journal Yoru no Funsui (1938-39) printed translated French surrealist poetry and reached Paul Éluard himself. Wartime repression closed in: the journal was banned in 1939, the club dismantled, and the renamed photography association dissolved in 1941.

The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)
The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)Public domain (credit: Johann Zoffany) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Photography at the centre: constructed, montaged, and dreamlike images over documentary realism
  • Juxtaposition of unrelated everyday objects to produce dream logic
  • Poetry and image intertwined - journals pairing translated surrealist verse with drawings and photographs
  • Little-magazine formats and handmade print culture as the primary medium of circulation
  • Displacement and distortion of ordinary things, from bent cages to floating forms
  • Surrealist and abstract tendencies coexisting under one "avant-garde" umbrella

Key figures

  • Kansuke Yamamoto (1914-1987) — Surrealist photographer, poet, and editor of Yoru no Funsui; interrogated by the Thought Police
  • Shūzō Takiguchi (1903-1979) — Critic-poet whose foreign surrealist exhibition catalyzed the Nagoya milieu
  • Yoshio Shimozato (1907-1981) — Painter who hosted a surrealist salon and drew for Yoru no Funsui

Example works

  • Reminiscence (Tsuioku) — Kansuke Yamamoto (1953)
  • Yoru no Funsui (Night Fountain) — Kansuke Yamamoto (editor) (1938-1939)

Sources

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