In a first for the Pola Museum of Art, this exhibition focuses on Hakone itself. Beginning with the major ukiyo-e collection held by the Hakone Museum of History and Folklore and with paintings designated as Important Cultural Properties by the town of Hakone, the exhibition presents works inspired by the landscapes of Hakone and other places along the Tokaido route linking Edo (present-day Tokyo) and Kyoto, from the Edo period (1603–1868) to today. It explores, in depth, what has drawn travelers to Hakone and sparked the imaginations of artists across the centuries.

The exhibition features art that explores the depths of the earth, the forces of nature, and the myriad forms of life connected to them, with the works shaped through dialogue with these elements. It includes a large installation by Ohmaki Shinji that resonates with Hakone’s natural environment, as well as new work by the internationally active contemporary artist Sugimoto Hiroshi and the ceramic artist Ogawa Machiko. Through approximately 120 pieces, including paintings, sculptures, crafts, and installations, the exhibition presents a diverse array of approaches and creative practices.

From the Pola Museum of Art’s collection of modern Western painting, the exhibition presents work by painters who reshaped the medium. The selection includes paintings inspired by travel to unfamiliar places and by inward exploration, such as those by Monet, who immersed himself in the shifting effects of light and color; by van Gogh and Gauguin; and by Seurat and Signac, who made a scientific study of chromatic principles. The museum’s remarkable group of paintings by Henri Rousseau is among the exhibition’s highlights.

Volcanic activity in Hakone began approximately 500,000 years ago, and the landscape assumed its current form about 3,000 years ago. Often described as a museum of volcanic topography, this area contains some of Japan’s most varied natural environments. Set within this landscape, the Pola Museum of Art has organized many exhibitions grounded in the concept of “a symbiosis between Hakone’s natural beauty and art.” The prologue to this exhibition returns to the museum’s founding principles by presenting a synthesis of forest and art that conveys the richness of the surrounding environment. Ohmaki Shinji’s installation incorporating fabric and moving air continually shifts its shape, rising and falling, expanding and contracting, while evoking the immense forces that move the earth. As these movements unfold, viewers can feel themselves becoming one with the work.

The rugged mountains of Hakone and the area around Lake Ashi, which offers views of Mount Fuji, long attracted worshippers as a site of Shugendo (mountain ascetic practice). Post stations were later established at this key point along the Tokaido route, and traditions of hot-spring healing and travel developed in the area. In Utagawa Hiroshige’s ukiyo-e print of travelers crossing the Hakone pass, the hardship and strain of the journey are visible in the figures who left Odawara before dawn and climbed steep slopes by the light of lanterns and torches. By the late 19th century, foreign travelers were also visiting, and Hakone became one of Japan’s earliest international resort destinations. Japanese painters, together with artists traveling from abroad, brought a sense of exhilaration to their depictions of Hakone, shaping the popular image of its widely admired landscapes. The scenery of Mount Fuji in particular has been depicted in a wide range of media, including ukiyo-e, watercolor, oil painting, and photography. From painters of the Edo period (1603–1868) to contemporary artist Sugimoto Hiroshi, this section presents a panoramic view of how artists have engaged with this timeless symbol of Japanese beauty.

Hakone, the setting for myths and folktales since ancient times, continues to serve as an enduring source of inspiration for contemporary artists. In dialogue with Utagawa Hiroshige I’s Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, Ikemura Leiko depicts a fantastical lakeside in the mountains where otherworldly creatures and spirits dwell, presenting poetic tableaux that unfold across time and space. Maruyama Naofumi visited and researched Sengokuhara, an area of Hakone known for its underground water veins, and produced luminous landscape paintings brimming with newly stirring light and color. In the work of both artists, stories rooted in the land are interwoven with the rhythms of nature, inviting viewers into moments of repose and quiet reverie.

Now, let us attune our senses to a subtle pulse rising from deep within the earth. Ceramicist Ogawa Machiko, captivated by the beauty of minerals, explores in her vessels and crystalline sculptural forms the ways in which clay and glass change under the effects of heat, gravity, and long spans of time. Painter Pat Steir pours paint onto canvas and lets gravity do its work, pursuing rhythms and forms that arise through chance. What links their approaches is a shared intent to draw beauty forth from the abyss of time, allowing materials such as clay, glass, and paint pigment to shift through the hands of the artist in concert with the forces of earth, water, fire, and wind to reveal a beauty that transcends the order of the everyday world.

The Echo is a video work set against the vast landscape of the majestic Alps, in which sounds played by the artist Tse Su-Mei, who is also a cellist, strike the rock faces and ripple unpredictably through the space. As the echoes intersect, their growing complexity gives rise to the feeling that the timeless, immovable mountains themselves are singing. The small figure of the artist standing amid this rugged natural environment registers as a symbol of humanity seeking to commune with the sublime. Through the interwoven sounds and images, viewers are drawn into a sweeping dialogue between nature and humanity, and between past and future.

This section focuses on the Pola Museum of Art’s painting collection, examining how painters pushed their work in new directions during Europe’s long period of upheaval and renewal from the late 19th century to the present. Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin responded to the shifting qualities of light and color, expressing in their paintings both the transience of passing moments and a yearning for permanence. Georges Seurat and Paul Signac engaged with the science of color, reconstructed waterside scenes through the technique of pointillism, and uncovered rhythms that anticipated later digital technologies. The fantastical visions that Henri Rousseau and Odilon Redon drew forth from the depths of the mind show us glimpses of an unbounded world. Anselm Kiefer, one of the central figures in post-World War II German art, layers themes of death and renewal with the memory of the earth and the scars of history, revealing a sustained and resolute quest for meaning. The pulse of life within these works resonates with the viewer and beckons them on a journey to the beyond.

Nawa Kohei generates a wide range of imagery by harnessing the properties of diverse materials and exploring relationships between life and the cosmos, perception, and science and technology. His sculptures give concrete form to his concept of PixCell, which combines the pixels of digital images with the cell, the smallest unit of living organisms. He creates novel visual experiences by covering taxidermied animals, which represent the natural world, with artificial crystal spheres attached using advanced adhesive techniques, and blurring the boundary between nature and artifice. The shifting sense of distance depending on the viewer’s position elicits reconsideration of the relationship between viewer and work as well as the meanings that arise from the work. Two PixCell-Deer face one another, and a space that renders the unseen visible brings the exhibition to its close.