The Room With Many Faces
Waiting for the Arts of Japan guide tour, I wondered if I would find anything of interest. The Arts of Japan section of the MET was located within the Chinese gallery. One exhibit that stood out was located in a small hallway towards the end of the tour. There were many woodblock paintings, by Toshusai Sharaku, lined the small golden walls. The pieces were created by tracing a pattern onto a woodblock and then carving out a relief, slathering with ink and imprinted onto a sheet of paper. The pieces capture the naturalness of human emotion. Many of the faces are distorted and unflattering in order to create expressions, emotions and realism on psychological levels. Sharaku used actual actors from a traditional Japanese theater to portray these characters. I found these images to be very interesting and I liked how they expressed the many feelings that the humans can portray. There are many sides to humans that are not pretty and it is hard to hide that. I like the way Sharaku portrayed these images all together to show the many expressions side by side.
November 19th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
The human range of emotions is very expansive that written language is inadequate to express them all. I think that’s one reason why we have art- to express things that cannot be adequately expressed in words. Sometimes its better to portray a human emotion with an image of a facial expression rather than words.