More Louvre
September 22, 2009
Taking advantage of Silver Week, a five-day long weekend that hasn’t happened in a long time, we hit yet another art museum today. This is my third artsy place this month. Today we went to the National Museum of Art, Osaka, located next to the science museum in Nakanoshima.
The line was a breezy 20 minutes, compared to the 55 minute wait at the Kyoto exhibit. We did encounter an Osaka baba, an old lady hailing from Osaka known for her impatience and line-budging-in skills. Her skills were impeccable. Unfortunately I have not been blessed with the ability to punch old ladies in the face. Yet.
The theme of this Louvre exhibit was, “Children from the Louvre collections” and there were pieces from Egypt, Rome, Greece, and a few Middle Eastern countries as well. There were paintings as well as statues and other gadgets and gizmos. I think the piece with the most impact was the child mummy in the sarcophagus.
Alongside the Louvre exhibit was a very interesting and strange Po-po Nyang-nyang exhibit by Miwa Yanagi. She took a couple dozen models and took pictures of them “in which female models dress up as the person they would ideally like to become in 50 years”. The pictures were quite surreal but I thought they were an interesting take on modern society and what we think of beauty and tradition.
The strangest of all were these four giant pictures of a women with her breasts baring and legs showing. In each picture, she had different body parts: old woman breasts, fat woman legs, and the combinations you can create with it. I’m not really sure what the message was but it sure was strange to be standing in front of a picture more than two times my height of a women with giantic breasts flopping about. You can see this picture at the Miwa Yanagi Po-po Nyangnyang exhibit website. It’s too creepy to download and paste here.
