The Wave That Never Stopped Breaking
Monet had a room in his house at Giverny dedicated entirely to Japanese woodblock prints—dozens of them, Hiroshige and Hokusai crowding the walls. Not decoration. Source material. The flat planes of color, the asymmetric framing, the insistence on ordinary subjects rendered with extraordinary care: all of it fed directly into the Impressionist revolution in Western painting. Japan had spent two centuries in near-total isolation from European contact, and when the Meiji era opened the country’s borders in the 1860s, what flooded out first was art. The West hadn’t seen anything like it, and the encounter rewired how painters thought about space, color, and composition for generations.
That was the starting point for an exhibition at the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, a converted train station on the Rhine near the German town of Remagen, which marked the 150th anniversary of the Meiji era with a show called Im Japanfieber—Japan Fever. The exhibition traced Japonisme from its origins in 19th-century painting through to its contemporary descendants, and the argument was simple but not obvious: the aesthetic impulse that arrived in Europe with those woodblock prints never stopped. It just kept changing form.
The contemporary end of the show was where it got interesting for me personally. A reading lounge stocked with manga, screenings of anime, a section devoted to cosplay—all of it framed as continuation rather than departure. The connection between ukiyo-e and manga isn’t metaphorical. Manga’s visual language—the flat lines, the expressive distortion, the panel compositions that owe nothing to cinematic perspective—descends directly from the same printmaking tradition that stopped Monet and Van Gogh in their tracks. Seeing both in the same space, laid out as parts of the same argument, is the only way to make that case convincingly.
Running through the tunnel between the old station building and the new wing was a mural by Christina S. Zhu, who draws under the name Pummelpanda: a chase sequence featuring Magical Girl Seven, rendered directly on the wall at full scale. It’s the right move architecturally and conceptually—the tunnel as transition, the mural as the thread that stitches the two spaces together.
Outside, garden designer Peter Berg created a rock garden in the Japanese tradition, which gives you somewhere to walk and let whatever the show stirred up settle before you get back in the car. Good exhibitions need exits. I always appreciate a curator who thinks about what happens after the gallery closes behind you.
I’ve had some version of Japan fever for most of my adult life—the visual culture especially, the way it treats seriousness and playfulness as the same register rather than opposites. What exhibitions like this one do is make the lineage visible, remind you that this obsession has a longer history than you might think, that Monet standing in front of a Hiroshige print and a teenager reading shōnen manga on the bus are, at some level, responding to the same thing.