Dreamed Japan

An immersive journey into Japanese art!

Between two screenings of ‘Van Gogh: Starry Night’, discover a short programme focusing on Japanese art.

‘Dreamed Japan, Images of the Floating World’ offers visitors a journey into the Japan of the collective imagination—the Japan of the geishas, samurai warriors, and spirits. This production was inspired by the Japanese prints that began to circulate in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, when trade opened up between the West and Japan.

The discovery of Japanese art had a profound effect on Western art: the painting of the Impressionists and the avant-garde artists, and also the decorative arts, music, and dance. Among them, van Gogh gave free reign to his interest in japonisme. In Paris, he studied and bought Japanese prints from the art dealer Siegfried Bing. The culture of the Land of the Rising Sun influenced the use of line and colour and composition in his works. In Provence, he told his brother Théo that ‘everything has become Japanese in the southern light’.

This production by the Danny Rose Studio, which highlights van Gogh’s fascination with Japan, is a contemplative and audio journey into the environment of the masters of Japanese prints.

The ephemeral beauty of the cherry blossoms is replaced by a magical and mysterious forest inhabited by the ‘yokai’, the spirits of Japanese folklore, and then by the sea: Hokusai’s iconic great wave submerges the Atelier des Lumières accompanied by music by Claude Debussy
The faces of the charming geishas, dressed in their kimonos decorated with elegant and colourful motifs, emerge from behind the rice paper screens as in nature, where everything is about contrasts; after all this ethereal beauty, visitors are captivated by a samurai warrior dance and eventually brought back down and carried away by the wind, among the lanterns floating in the night sky.

The Danny Rose Studio provides a glimpse of the great diversity, richness, and modernity of these works (the Japanese artistic movement known as ukiyo-e, which began in the seventeenth century and did not end until the nineteenth century) and their authors (some of whom are well known by the general public, such as Hokusai, and others less so, such as Kuniyoshi, Utamaro, Kunisada, etc.). The Danny Rose Studio also carried out considerable production and creative work in order to bring to life the imaginary Japan evoked by these works for visitors.

Particular attention was paid to the choice of music, from Ryuichi Sakamoto to Claude Debussy’s La Mer (‘The sea’), inspired by Hokusai’s Great Wave, and the incredibly fast rhythms of Japanese drumming.

Danny Rose is a visual creation studio that creates and produces immersive audiovisual works, in various contexts such as architectural projection, interactive installations, museography, the theatre, music, the opera, and the animation of public spaces. The studio is a collective of multidisciplinary artists.