手で見る美術展 — Art for Touching (The Seibu Museum of Art, 1988)

Notes

Exhibition catalogue, Seibu Museum of Art, 1988, 92 pp. Artists include Yutokutaishi Akiyama, Takako Araki, Shoichi Ida, Kenjiro Okazaki, Yoichi Onagi, Lee Ufan and Kimiko Mishima. Worn and stained. Physical copy in the collection, on order. Bought 2026-10-12 through ZenMarket (womh47) from Yahoo! JAPAN Auctions: item ¥1,940, ZenMarket commission ¥800, shipping within Japan ¥300. International EMS shipping not yet billed. IN TRANSIT — awaiting the Osaka warehouse and shipment to the USA. Received 3 November 2026 and photographed: cover, the English foreword, both spreads of the Nakamura essay, and Akiyama's page. Cover foxed and stained, as bought. Softcover catalogue, 92 pp., Japanese and English throughout. The Seibu Museum of Art's "Art Exhibition of Appreciation by Hand", on the theme of plastic art and the sense of touch: the museum asked contemporary Japanese artists what art would be if it were made not only for the eye but for the hand, and showed the answers so that visitors could handle each one. The foreword notes that in the West an interest in touching art objects was already growing, and that the show was planned with the 16th World Congress of Rehabilitation International, held in Japan in September 1988 on the theme of social enlightenment for the handicapped. Exhibition databases list a September 1988 showing at Tsukashin Hall (18 September – 4 October) with a tour to the Yurakucho Art Forum, and a November 1989 showing at the Oita Prefectural Art Hall. The lead essay is by the philosopher Yujiro Nakamura (中村雄二郎), "On a Sense of Touch: Five Philosophical Fragments" (触覚について — 断章風に), printed in both languages. He traces the sensus communis (Aristotle's koinē aisthēsis) that unifies the five senses, Kenji Miyazawa's synaesthesia ("birds singing is a blue braid"), Herder and Merleau-Ponty's "sensorium commune", the 18th-century case of Berkeley and Condillac that nothing but touch can teach the eye to see space, McLuhan on television rearranging the ratio of the senses, Kant's "the hand is the brain made external", coenesthesia and Minkowski's "loss of vital contact with reality", and ends with touch as the hidden faculty of sculpture, which is made to be touched but is only ever looked at. Each artist then has a page with a statement in both languages, a chronology and a plate.