ART : Japanese Photo Exhibit Wallows in Arty Visions

It’s a cliche by now that photography is a universal language. Actually, as Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski pointed out 14 years ago in his catalogue for “New Japanese Photography,” photography is a universal technique. There are still significant variances in the ways different cultures use it.

Through Dec. 2, the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman College is showing the work of 11 young Japanese photographers--the oldest was born in 1953--who tend to work in vapidly romantic styles quite unlike anything current in America.

But even more surprising are the marked stylistic differences among these prints, selected by Japanese curator Mayumi Shinohara, and those of the 15 photographers (then mostly in their 30s and 40s) whom Szarkowski introduced to the U.S. audience in 1974.

The older work marked a liberation from the soft-focus prettiness of pre-World War II photography and an intense involvement in describing the visual details of a country whose shift from wartime devastation to economic superpower was rapidly under way.

Back then, there were old things to see with new eyes: rice bowls in the sink, serene stone walkways, a whore in an alley, a stray dog. There were bitter living memories, like that of a bomb survivor’s face pulled grotesquely into a wrinkled sludge of scarred skin. There were signs of the times: a girl in a miniskirt holding hands with a man on the street, a pictureless TV frame dumped in a reclamation area. And there were modish, abruptly stylized variations on aspects of the nude body.

The current crop of photographers turn their back on all this to wallow, for the most part, in self-consciously arty visions, sometimes bathed in the romantic effect of extreme darkness.

According to Hiroshi Osaka’s text, his “SyZyGy” series has to do with the ancient notion that man and woman were split asunder by a vengeful god and impelled to seek each other to make themselves whole again. But his imagery seems to proceed along its own naively ponderous track, more suggestive of a vaguely soft-porn perfume ad than the depths of a mythical realm.

We see a nude woman standing under a tree, sitting at the water’s edge, posing under a clinging sheet or with a thin piece of paper draped over her face. A male torso seems to be pierced with an unrecognizable object. There is something annoyingly precious about such scenes, many of them patterned with droplets of water and little floating spheres.

“Hasta La Vista,” Ryoichi Saito’s soft-focus gelatin silver prints of foreign sights, have a wearisome retro look. He may not realize it, but the lone sheep in the grassland long ago became a cliched way to describe the landscape of Scotland.

Kiyotaka Tanino’s “Zoological Encyclopedia Series” are immaculate but rather dull shots of life at the zoo. He observes the slender, curving posts of white signs punctuating a clump of dark bushes. He sees a balloon rising exactly in the middle of two low hills planted with spiky trees. He watches a hippo calmly bathing in a pool within sight of city buildings. All very tidy, but awfully up-tight stuff.

Happily, some of the photographers in the show avoid the bloodless outlook of their colleagues.

Noriyoshi Suzuki blows up portions of magazine photos with a half-frame camera that yields 1 7/8-by-1 7/8 Ektacolor images. The cold anonymity of these untitled images of antlike silhouettes standing or walking is emphasized by the huge, black mats that enclose these photographs. In another untitled series, Suzuki offers nine tiny black-and-white glimpses of objects--a tiny flame, a man’s hat, an askew lamp shade. The suggestion is that even the most banal elements of life seem wondrous and unusual when seen in such a minuscule format.

In his puckish double photographs of people in outdoor settings, Gunji Suda seems to be isolating a secret force--or perhaps a latent bogyman--that inhabits their souls. In one image, the person poses as if for an ordinary candid shot; in the other, he wears a mask representing the spirit of Japanese village-dwellers. Other details remain tantalizing mysteries to the Western viewer.

Miki Kojima’s images of mossy rocks, old roots, flurries of dark leaves and spidery branches looming out of the darkness or blurred by the sun’s gleam are the work of a master photographer capable of manipulating a gloriously full, rich range of blacks and whites.

Toshio Yamane, the one photographer in the show whose work has an international flavor, seeks out industrial settings amenable to his crisp Type C color prints.

Tatsuhiko Tanaka’s “Tide Series” is the one body of work in the show that seems at once quintessentially Japanese and also genuinely poetic, not just politely ornamental or jejunely romantic.

He builds a distinctive rhythm through the repetition of images and alternating horizontal and vertical formats, “jump-cutting” like a film-maker between nature shots and images of a woman. Trees lushly pomponed with foliage sway in a dark sky. A woman makes a tent of her fingers in her hair. Lanterns in trees gleam like ivory dots against a pale sky. Long, thin strands of the woman’s hair create an abstract, landscape-like pattern. Water glows beyond a hill of porous sand.

The reason so many of these younger photographers have turned their backs on the vivid poetic realism of their older colleagues to flounder in uncertain waters may be related to the unsettled aesthetic climate that makes art in the West so volatile these days.

But the frankly exotic appearance of much of this work suggests that the particular look of a photograph is no more universal than a craving for uncooked fish.

“New From Tokyo: 11 Japanese Photographers” remains on view through Dec. 2 at the Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman College, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Gallery hours: Monday through Friday, 1 to 5 p.m. Information: (714) 997-6729.