From Geisha to Grunge - Grey Art Gallery, New York University, Sepia International In

Art in America, Feb, 2001 by Janet Koplos

A recent exhibition profiled changing notions of beauty and women's roles in Japan as seen in the advertising and product design of the country's largest cosmetics company.

A cosmetics firm would seem to be an unlikely subject for an art exhibition, and if that company has made a substantial financial gift to the exhibition venue--$500,000 to endow its "cultural and artistic activities"--sophisticated viewers might think the worst. But the donor is Shiseido, a Japanese company, and in Japan the line between commercial concerns and art is not sharply drawn. Department stores include galleries and corporations sponsor museums. Shiseido, in fact, opened a public art gallery in 1919 that is today the oldest existing free-admission gallery in Japan; the company's boutique in Tokyo's fashionable Ginza shopping district includes an exhibition space that focuses on design, photography and fashion. Shiseido also maintains a corporate museum for its collection of 1,700 paintings, sculptures and craft objects and, significantly, for showcasing its product designs, posters, print ads and commercials--from which the show in question was drawn.

"Face to Face: Shiseido and the Manufacture of Beauty, 1900-2000" at New York University's Grey Art Gallery justified itself. It was, in fact, a visually and intellectually engaging show that provided an opportunity to consider esthetics, modernization, international influences and the evolving roles of Japanese women over the 20th century, to say nothing of its claimed focus on "how notions of beauty and identity have changed."

Japan's intersection with the West is always a fascinating subject. In the mid-19th century, that ancient and complex society, which had been isolated for centuries, was suddenly exposed to the products of the industrial revolution, different systems of commerce, new scientific concepts, as well as foreign clothing, languages, manners, attitudes and social roles. Books and exhibitions such as Paris in Japan and The World of the Meiji Print(1) have previously addressed Japan's conflicted, start-and-stop absorption of all this newness.

The Grey Gallery show, curated by director Lynn Gumpert, examined a particular slice of the modern female experience. The exhibition started with turn-of-the-century woodblock prints and lithographs that showed a traditionally coifed woman in kimono talking on a crank-type wall telephone and women in elegant Western dress strolling the sidewalks outside the shops in the newly Europeanized brick buildings of the Ginza. A sample store advertisement offered a kimono-clad woman playing a violin. Advertising of new products--on posters or in periodicals--helped speed the process of change through illustrations and written instruction on how to create Western hairstyles or combine Western clothes.

Early ads were text-heavy, and the Grey exhibition likewise made skillful use of wall labels to explain contexts, define issues and point out details in the works on view. Yet the full panorama of the changing image of women was wordlessly presented in a sequence of black-and-white photographic portraits and candid photos that wrapped around the backs of the freestanding display cases in the middle of the main room, making a loop something like an infinity symbol. In the exhibition design by Marble Fairbanks Architects, this display was the heart of the show. Its physical centrality was a kind of pun on one Japanese word for wife, okusan, which means "inside person" (her world was the home). The faces ranged from geisha to grunge, showing "the typical Japanese woman" on a trajectory from defined to defiant.

The Shiseido company, founded in 1872 by Arinobu Fukuhara as a Western-style pharmacy, shifted its focus to cosmetics late in that century and is now the largest beauty-aid company in Japan. Its first product was a skin lotion called Eudermine (from the Greek for "good for the skin"), which has always been labeled in roman letters rather than the Japanese phonetic characters for foreign words. The exhibition included several clusters of Eudermine bottles from various eras, nearly all of them modeled after European glass styles (the viewer's perspective was aided by a few displays of European cosmetics in bottles by Baccarat, Lalique and other famous designers). Exemplary of the ironies the show documented is that the most Japanese-looking bottle in this line was conceived for Shiseido in recent years by Serge Lutens, a French designer.

An irony of a different sort is that makeup was traditionally a part of an upper-class Japanese woman's toilette, whereas in America in the early 20th century, manufacturers had to overcome the negative stereotype of a "painted" woman to sell their product to the masses. (In the U.S., after World War I makeup began to be sold in such outlets as drugstores and also door-to-door. In movies, pulling out a compact became an image of modernity, and Max Factor stressed his "secrets" as a Hollywood makeup man in marketing his commercial line.(2))