New exciting exhibitions at the Manggha Museum | Poland

The Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology is currently presenting 3 exhibitions that will be on till March 2020. The exhibitions have been launched in conjuction with the 2019 celebrations for the 100th Year of Polish-Japanese relations and the 25th Anniversary of the Manggha museum.

Leave the Door Ajar - Masato Tanaka x Gabriela Morawetz
Exhibition on till 08.03.2020

Leave the Door Ajar is a joint project created by two contemporary artists in cooperation with the prestigious art festival Biwako Biennale, which has been held in Japan’s Shiga Prefecture uninterruptedly since 2001.

It is an excellent example of the kind of activity that the Europe–Far East Gallery has been involved in for years – a collaboration of two artists coming from places quite distant from each other and representative of different generations, and yet capable of finding the same language through art to write a joint script.

Nihontō. Swords from Japan from the collection of the Bizen Osafune Japanese Sword Museum
Exhibition on till 01.03.2020

The Manggha Museum has decided to celebrate 2019 – a year of double jubilee, in which we celebrate the centenary of establishing Polish-Japanese relations and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Museum – with an exhibition of Japanese swords from the collection of the Japanese Sword Museum Bizen Osafune. Swords in the land of Bizen, now the prefecture of Okayama, have been manufactured from very ancient times - from the Heian period (794-1185) - on a large scale and were of exceptional quality. Famous for the quality of its products, this region was included in Gokaden ('5 traditional regions'), the most important centers of sword production in Japan.

This exhibition – a unique undertaking, organized from the beginning in close cooperation with the Japanese side- gives our audience the opportunity to admire the precious swords brought to Krakow from Japan. We want to emphasize this aspect of the exhibition, which for the first time shows the Japanese sword in Poland from the perspective of country of its manufacture.

Andrzej Wajda. Japanese Notebook
Exhibition on till 29.03.2020

One of the most valuable parts of the collection of the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology is a unique assembly of works of paper – sketches and drawings – by Andrzej Wajda. Some of the most interesting among these are those made during his trips to Japan. He visited that country seven times – in 1970, 1980, 1987, 1989, 1992, 1993, and 1996 – including six times with his wife, Krystyna Zachwatowicz-Wajda. During each of these trips he took notes, made sketches, trying to remember the most significant elements of that different, foreign culture of a strange land. The land that, over time, the couple would call ‘Our Japan.

In fourteen notebooks and sketchbooks we find a ‘picture story’ of not only Japan but also, or perhaps primarily, of a painter-director, of his artistic preferences, inspirations and discoveries. As we know, to Andrzej Wajda sketching was a form of communicating with the world, a function of memory.