chiba city museum of art + BIB

So like I said in my last post, I only moved to Chiba City about six weeks ago, but I have managed to visit a fair amount of interesting places already. In the interest of doing every place justice on the blog, though, I'm just going to start posting from the ones I've visited most recently, since I'll be able to recall/describe them better. So I'll start with my recent trip to the Chiba City Museum of Art, to see the Biennial of Illustrations Bratislava exhibit!

This was actually my second time at the Chiba City Museum of Art, and both times have also been work-related. The first time, I got to meet the Vice Director of the museum, who told me a little bit about the museum and the building that it's in. The museum opened in 1995, which means it's still relatively new. It's also actually in the same building as the Chuo Ward Office, which is actually a Neo-Renaissance style building built in the 1920s (plus the additional parts they added on top of it that actually house most of the museum and the ward office). I was really surprised to see that style of architecture in Japan, since with its marble and columns it looks very Western to me (apparently nowadays it's a popular place for cosplay photoshoots, probably for that reason!), but apparently they were pretty common before World War II, when most of them were destroyed (by bombs, I think). The part that was most surprising though, was when the vice director told me that the original building was somewhere else, and the entire building was moved to where it is now! I'm not really sure how you move an entire building from one place to another, but it certainly doesn't look any worse for wear. :D


So the exhibit I went to see was a collection of works from the Biennial of Illustrations Bratislava, which is one of the world's oldest and largest juried competitions for picture book illustrations. Picture book illustrators from all over the world submit their works to be judged at the event held every two years in Bratislava, Slovakia. The BIB awards 12 honors: a Grand Prix, five Golden Apples, five Plaques, and an Honorary Mention to a Publisher. There's also a children's choice award (which is pretty self-explanatory). It began in 1967, and actually the very first Grand Prix winner was an illustrator from Japan! This is in fact the fourth time that the Chiba City Museum of Art has hosted an exhibition of works from the BIB, which I think is really cool.

The current exhibit at the CCMoA involves works from the 2011 BIB: the winners, the Japanese entries, illustrations from Slovakia, and a special exhibit on rare Japanese pop-up books. It was really cool to see the original works that become the pages of a picture book; I don't think I (or most people, probably) had ever really considered picture book illustrations to be art like we usually see in museums. But looking at the pieces, I realized that they really are art - before they get resized and replicated and reprinted into books, the illustrator has to actually make the pictures that go in them, which are very much art. The Grand Prix winner, Eun Young Cho, makes this especially clear in her winning work, 'Run, Toto!' Almost every page uses a different medium, including a page using thumbprints in black ink, which I thought was really cool. They also had the actual published picture books available for people to read, which made me spend a lot longer in the exhibit than I had planned, because I just wanted to read them all (even though they weren't all in languages I could read, haha)!

The special exhibit on pop-up books was also pretty cool (though I'm not sure if pop-up books is really the right translation). They had works dating from as old as the Meiji period, centering around the three main themes of 'moving', 'understanding', and 'jumping'. There were works that looked more like traditional pop-up books but also some where you had to look through them from the front to see a scene (they had a name but I forgot what it was, oops), and more.

The Biennial of Bratislava exhibit at the Chiba City Museum of Art is going on until October 21, so if you get a chance I highly recommend you check it out! Apparently there is also a very small collection of traditional Slovakian corn dolls, crystal, and ceramics borrowed from the Embassy of the Slovak Republic located in front of the entrance to the exhibit. It wasn't set up when I saw the exhibit (since I went on the second day after it opened), but I'm sure it's definitely worth seeing too. :)

Here's the link to the museum's webpage (Japanese only, even though there is a link saying 'English' - it doesn't work): http://www.ccma-net.jp/index.html