In Search of Prince Genji

Ferenc Hopp Museum of Asiatic Arts

Péter Peti, Boglárka Cziglényi

High-resolution digitisation of 64 Japanese artefacts with the Phase One IQ280 system

In 2015, within the framework of a cooperation with the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, we digitised 64 artefacts from the collection of the Ferenc Hopp Museum of Asiatic Arts using the Phase One IQ280 system and Profoto and Lupo lighting equipment. The large volume of resulting images is still awaiting processing, but the exhibition of the Ferenc Hopp Museum of Asiatic Arts, open until 17 April, In Search of Prince Genji – Japan in Words and Images (Gendzsi herceg nyomában – Japán képen és írásban), is a good occasion to show a few possibilities for using the resulting high-resolution images.

Japanese image and novel – The prince who is in love with the world

Boglárka Cziglényi’s text on the exhibition:

And with whom the world, too, is in love, so radiant is his beauty and so refined his spirit. This perfect Japanese man has lived since the early 11th century in a novel and in countless paintings, drawings, on the stage and in card games. His story is unknown to the average European. It is long and branching, with a great many characters and a great many lovers, who bear names such as “the lady of the misty moon” or “the safflower” (the latter discreetly alluding to the lady’s reddish nose). The exhibition takes this story as its basis, but its aim is not for us to get to know thoroughly the monogatari known in Hungarian as “Gendzsi regénye” or “Gendzsi szerelmei” (in English, The Tale of Genji, Genji monogatari), the epic work written in the early 11th century by the noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu. Rather, it is to try to see and look with the eyes of the original recipients of the text and the images.

For the literary text and the pictures depicting its individual scenes have existed side by side as equals from the very beginning. There is even a hypothesis according to which it was not the picture that was the illustration, but the text that was born so that, listening to a reading, the viewers of the picture could immerse themselves more deeply in the scene they were looking at. The entire exhibition of the Ferenc Hopp Museum is about this interplay of the senses: it presents works and games in which image, symbol, poetic text, narrated story, and even scents come into contact with one another. The task of the recipient is to experience their harmony, to immerse themselves with their whole being in the sensory, emotional and intellectual beauty they offer.

In one chapter, one of the novel’s main characters, the court lady Murasaki, is dying. A religious ceremony is arranged so that she can prepare for the journey awaiting her. The assembled company begins to play music, and the blossoming spring garden is so beautiful that a handsome general bursts into dance. Coloured cloaks are thrown over him to make him even lovelier. “I see a mayfly, I take it into my palm: oh, so here you are – and you are nowhere any more.” The topos of Prince Genji, and the exhibition too, wishes to catch this mayfly and enclose it in its palm. The concentrated, cultivated experiencing of attention and of the moment seizes the fleeting world; in a delicate balance it teeters between passing and surviving, between nothing and something.

The main object of the exhibition, the Budapest Genji Album, shows reserved, inner events in the first room, where we can walk through the novel chapter by chapter. The figures in the stunning 17th-century paintings are about to fall in love, have their hearts broken, meet for the last time, be tempted by ghosts, or perhaps become pregnant – a minute after or before the moment of the picture. Everything is a dramatic moment wrapped in lyricism; in a film, in our part of the world, the strings and trombones would already be sounding. But here we see little figures with peaceful faces playing the lute, deeply absorbed in each other or in admiration of the sea. In front of them, museum visitors wandering peacefully.

This exhibition is the imprint of an aesthetic practice that is often missing today amid the flood of images. Anyone who wants to look at the exhibition quickly will already get stuck in the first room. One has to read the accompanying text, to unfold the often moving inner world of the little gold-leaf pictures. To slow down and delve deep. From the first room we enter the second with focused attention. How suddenly significant the small objects decorated with natural patterns become!

The third room continues the journey through cultural history, with witty and surprising pieces. Finally, what we have seen is complemented by the photographs of Zoltán Gaál and the writings of László Krasznahorkai, which create a world of their own in the closing room.

The exhibition is an ideal meeting of tradition and modern technology. Thanks to the high-quality digitisation, on the copies we can admire the pictures even more than on the leporello on display, which, evidently for conservation reasons, does not receive sufficient lighting. The beautiful wealth of detail of the digitised images enriches with a new dimension the many modes of perception into which the exhibition draws us.

Anyone who feels like celebrating their love of the world can still do so until 17 April.

In Search of Prince Genji – Japan in Words and Images

Ferenc Hopp Museum of Asiatic Arts