Reading Rämistrasse #181: Anna Angelica Ainio on Japan de Luxe at Museum Rietberg

Approaching Museum Rietberg on a spring day, one is struck by the park blooming in pinks and whites that feel almost staged — a living Japanese postcard. The promotional posters of Japan de luxe scattered across Zürich strike a somewhat different note: a bold, almost aggressive font wrestles with the bijin (noble woman) depicted in the print, deliberately evoking the visual language of manga. Its ambitions are clear: to introduce the Zurich public to these ‘rare’ surimono prints and to establish a line of continuity between them and the western reception of Japanese popular culture. These prints’ conditions of production are specific: intimate gifts, made in small series on hōsho paper; they were intended to be enjoyed in private. The display’s emphasis is on the ideal of Japanese craft and highly refined art, adding a modern twist. However, it ends up emphasising the desirability of these prints as a luxury item.

Descending the stairs into the exhibition, the visitor is met with a slight surprise: walls painted in flashy blue, bright pink and pea green. These choices sit in uneasy contrast with the restrained palette — natural wood, white linen, muted earth tones — that the Western imagination tends to associate with traditional Japan. The curatorial intention behind this might be to create a link between ancient and contemporary Japan, presenting surimono or Japanese prints more generally as the precursor to the modern culture of manga and anime. Though not stated explicitly in the exhibition, this claim is made in the museum's media work for the show that informs potential visitors that surimonosare considered ‘the ancestors of manga and anime’.

The curatorial narrative moves between different typologies of surimono without offering a coherent thread to hold them together, and the exhibition’s architecture reflects this. It does not suggest a clear journey through the prints, looking more like a variété selection of them, with historically informative captions. Perhaps delving into the alleged historical continuity between these prints and manga would have served the exhibition, which instead only hints at this vaguely through its aesthetics. The informative potential of the exhibition is incomplete without a reflection on the way in which this tradition has been heavily exoticized by the West. The hinted-at link between the prints and Japanese anime could have been a good entry point: showing how consuming manga and anime in the West is a reiteration of what happened at the beginning of the 20th century with Japanese prints and Impressionist art.

The material on display is, despite the modest scale of the show, genuinely remarkable. All the prints come from the collection of Gisela Müller and Erich Gross. Gross was a designer by training who, captivated by these works, started collecting them in the 1970s. Together, the couple assembled an impressive body of Kyōka-Surimono (private greeting cards bearing comic verse) and Haiku-Surimono, their more contemplative, poem-bearing counterparts, as well as Shijō Surimono (printed haiku poem sheets with lyrical, humorous illustrations). Indeed, the connection between the written word and the image is perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of surimono and of the exhibition.

All the prints in the exhibition are dated from the 18th to 19th century (Edo-period), when surimono became a popular genre in Japan. This moment also corresponded with their commodification. The very smallness of these cards proves to be one of the exhibition's quiet revelations: forced into proximity, the viewer begins to notice what a fleeting glance would miss — the intricacy of an embroidered robe, the layering of a kimono collar, the delicate gradation of a dyed sleeve. Indeed, the specific techniques of paper embossing, together with the application of metallic pigments, rendered the prints especially tactile and refined. The show rightly highlights the technical history behind these prints but abstracts them from the broader one of Japanese printmaking, which would have required further expansion into the wider Asian context. Clearly, the exhibition cannot satisfy all kinds of historical ambitions, but it walks a dangerous fine line between valuing an artistic tradition and falling into the aestheticization inherent in excessively emphasizing these prints’ rarity, their exclusivity, their status as tokens of refined taste at the expense of a more critical outlook into the complexity of the material culture around them. A critical perspective, along the lines of Edward Said’s Orientalism critique, might suggest that these prints can only be accepted under the Western category of ‘art’ by highlighting their refined technique and their connection to poetry. All in all, the exhibition raises questions which are left unanswered. Perhaps this is reason enough to make it worth visiting.

Japan de luxe – The Art of the Surimono prints, Museum Rietberg, 26 September 2025 – 12 July 2026