Sompo Museum of Art

Explore the roots of modern Japanese visual culture through the vibrant and ephemeral printed media of the early 20th century at the Sompo Museum of Art this summer. The Shinjuku museum’s ‘Taisho Imagerie’ exhibition features approximately 400 works from the collection of the late Toshiyuki Yamada, a noted scholar and collector, and the co-founder of the Taisho Imagery Society. The show offers a rare opportunity to trace the aesthetic evolution of Japan’s publishing industry from the early 1900s through to the late 1920s. The Taisho era (1912–1926) in particular marked a golden age of graphic design, where Japanese sensibilities intertwined harmoniously with the global currents of Art Nouveau, Art Deco and Western illustration techniques. Highlights include striking works by seminal artists such as Takeji Fujishima, Hisui Sugiura and Yumeji Takehisa, alongside a rich array of magazines, postcards and posters. Together they evoke the fleeting yet powerful visual language that defined an era – one where literature, art and music converged on the printed page, laying the foundation for contemporary Japanese pop culture.