A Tale of Two Artists
Although they never met, Yukio Mishima and Pier Paolo Pasolini make for uncanny mirror images. Both began in literature before venturing into film, theater, criticism and the visual arts; both turned an unflinching eye on the contradictions of rapidly modernizing postwar societies; and both wrestled, in their respective Japanese and Italian contexts, with the erosion of tradition, memory and the body. This exhibition — the first to stage the two as a dialogue — traces their parallel trajectories to reflect on the resonances and frictions between them.
The show is structured around seven keywords: the body, responsibility, literature, cinema, theater, artistic connection and society. Where Pasolini mourned the disappearance of folk and rural culture under the rise of consumerism, Mishima interrogated the values destabilized by Japan’s headlong Westernization. Archival materials, photographs, books, early works, interviews and drawings fill out the exhibition, with particular attention paid to portrait photography — including that of Ken Domon, Kishin Shinoyama, Federico Garolla and Sandro Becchetti — showing how each man’s physical presence and public image were constructed and received.
