I recently went to an amazing art exhibition at the Takashimaya department store in Kyoto. It's now moved on from Kyoto, currently showing in Yokohama for a couple of weeks. Highly recommended for kids and adults alike. Fumie had brought Anthony earlier in the week, and loved it so much that they'd recommended it to me.

It's a selection of the prolific art by Tatsuya Tanaka, the guy behind the 2,500 works at Miniature Calendar, works which are amazing both for their simplicity (we all could have thought of that), and for their level of wit, which (in my case) are better than I could have thought of.

At the exhibition I attended, some works were there live, and some only as photos....

Photography and social-media sharing were both encouraged, but it was not a situation where one could make good photos... I had no tripod, and it was crowded, so anything more than a few-seconds pause to take a photo would have been unsociable.

Also, the lighting for the displays was not well thought out (or, were perhaps the best that could be done with what was available). The lighting for the physical display of the large “Calm Broccoli World” seen above consisted of harsh spotlights directly above each broccoli tree, meaning that the actual points of interest (the people) were all in dark shadow making photography of them by exhibit visitors fairly meaningless.

Time and time again I was struck by the wit of his creations, all just a little better than I could have come up with, yet, as a photographer, I couldn't help but lament at some of his photos.

For example, consider this work that combines a motherboard and rice planters:

His photo of this work looks very much like the one above, and the first thought that comes to my mind when I see it is “he didn't use a polarizing filter”. (I've written about polarizers many times, such as “The Effect of a Polarization Filter on Wet Rocks, Etc.”.)

So, I put on a polarizer for a few shots, to get more of the deep blue of the motherboard...

These pictures are still no good, but in a controlled environment I thought they could have been very nice.

Here's one that has an aspect that was totally lost on me until Damien pointed it out.

As presented, my eye first went to the right half, which I now realize is a “making of” kind of photo, with the left half being the final product. But because I didn't see it in the correct order, I didn't really pay attention that the edges of the books were meant to impart a sense of speed.... I just saw books being used as a road. I hope my presentation here lets you get the full effect.

The “Victory” figurine is in the lower-left of the frame.

This work demonstrates another thing about his art: they have English titles, but all the wit is in the Japanese titles. The English title for this work is simply “Spurt”, which like most of the English titles are a simple factual word or two, devoid of wit or pun.

The Japanese title, as you can see in the phtoo, is “本”気の走り, which might be translated as the boring “earnest riding”. The pun is that the first character of the word for “earnest” also happens to be the character used for “book”, so with the quotes around that character it might give the sense of “feels like riding on a book”.

This was probably not the best example because this pun is so corny. Let's try another:

Here's the title card for it:

The Japanese title is a multi-lingual pun. It's nonsensical on the face of it, but it combines the word for “dish/tableware” with some seemingly-nonsensical sounds to make something that sounds like the English word “Shocking”, all followed by “Accident”. Perhaps the wit is lost in the need for an explanation, but it's a fun title to look at and figure it out.

The title for this one, 新パン線 (shinpansen, “new bread line”) is a play off the word for bullet train, 新幹線 (shinkansen, “new trunk line”).

There was often a difference between the live instillation and the photo of record for the work, with many differences likely because of how the parts are arranged during setup. In the case above, though, the long distance between the bride/father and the groom/priest makes it all the more funny, but such a distance can't easily be accommodated in a close-up photo, so they're much closer for the photo of record.

Anyone in Japan recognizes this as a rice harvest, complete with post-harvest field stubble, and rice plants hanging to dry like this.

There must have been 100 different works on display. It was thoroughly enjoyable.

The exhibit exits to a gift-shop kind of area where you can buy all kinds of miniature things, and the artist's three books.

I was disappointed to find that two of the three books had only English titles (they're both available on Amazon US, here and here). Since the Japanese titles add so much, I bought the only one that actually had them.