Impressionism Reimagined at Hakone
Set in the forests of Hakone, a two-hour journey outside Tokyo, the Pola Museum of Art’s current exhibition is a great choice for art lovers looking to escape the city for a day. Marking both the centenary of Claude Monet’s passing and the museum’s 25th anniversary, the exhibition is displaying 19 of its Monet oil paintings — one of the largest collections of its kind in Asia — alongside works by 18 contemporary artists from around the world.
Spanning Monet’s career from early riverfront scenes and Venetian waterscapes to his later Water Lilies, the show traces Monet’s radical approach to light, movement and perspective. His bold, almost cinematic compositions — which prefigured camera zooms, aerial views and shifting temporalities — are set in conversation with modern installations, photography and sculpture by artists like Roni Horn, Wolfgang Tillmans, Pierre Huyghe and Fujiko Nakaya. Bridging 19th-century Impressionism with present-day reflections on ecology and perception, it’s a stunning depiction of how Monet’s ways of seeing have endured and evolved.
View of “The New Vision: Monet and the Contemporary Gaze,” Pola Museum of Art, Hakone, 2026. © Ritsue Mishima, Courtesy of ShugoArts. Photo: Shu Nakagawa.
