Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Milan, September 30 2019 – The “Oriente Mudec” project kicks off tomorrow, Tuesday 1 October, a program of initiatives that will involve all the Museum's exhibition spaces to narrate the exchanges between Japan and Europe from different points of view - artistic, historical and ethnographic (especially Italy and France) through time and the cultural encounter between the two worlds. 
The project - coordinated by a scientific staff made up of international experts, by the conservators of Mudec and the Gallery of Modern Art, by prof. Flemming Friborg and the staff of 24 ORE Cultura-Gruppo 24 ORE - is divided into two exhibitions, which will open on 1 October 2019 and end on 2 February 2020, and in a program of initiatives dedicated to exploring the many different aspects of Japanese culture .
“For an entire season all the spaces of the Mudec will be inhabited by the same project, strongly connected to the mission of the Museum itself: conservation, valorisation and research are in fact inseparable activities for any museum that carries out its activity as a tool for the cultural growth of the whole community – declares the Councilor for Culture Filippo Del Corno –. 'Oriente Mudec' is also the result of great networking, achieved by weaving scientific relationships and establishing important collaborations inside and outside the Museum. In this way the Mudec can offer visitors a project enriched by a plurality of views and perspectives, thus offering the public a unique and original experience".
“When Japan discovered Italy. Stories of encounters (1585-1890)” is the title of the exhibition which investigates and illustrates the first relationships between Italy and the country of the Rising Sun, delving into the history of Ito Mancia and the first Japanese embassies between 1585 and 1615; and displaying in the second the collection of Count Passalacqua, one of the most precious nuclei of the Museum's permanent collection. Purchased by the Municipality of Milan in 1898-99, the Passalacqua collection constituted a true 'private Japanese museum' in the 70s.
The exhibition “Impressions of the East. Art and collecting between Europe and Japan" instead traces the profound fascination that Japan has exercised on Western culture and delves into the dynamics of artistic exchanges between 1860 and 1900, focusing on the major artists who were enchanted by Japonism, both in France – from Rodin to Van Gogh, from Gauguin to Fantin-Latour, from Toulouse-Lautrec to Monet – and in Italy. In fact, Italian Japonism includes among its ranks great artists such as Giuseppe De Nittis, Galileo Chini, Vincenzo Gemito, Federico Zandomeneghi and Giovanni Segantini. Through a large and diversified selection of works from Italy and abroad, the itinerary will show the development of that taste oriented towards Japan that pervaded Western artistic culture between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. 
Works from various Japanese schools and artistic movements between 1890 and 1930, rarely exhibited or contextualised, will also be on display in the exhibition, with the aim of showing how, after the reopening to the West, there was also in Japan a great fascination for 'Europe and modernity.
To accompany the exhibitions, two catalogs will be presented, published by 24 ORE Cultura, with unpublished and research materials that delve into the themes connected to the two exhibitions and which see the close collaboration between 24 ORE Cultura, the Municipality of Milan, Mudec and the Trivulzio Foundation. 

INFO
MUDEC – Museum of Cultures of Milan (Via Tortona, 56) 
EXHIBITION TIMES 
Mon 14.30pm_19.30pm | Tue, Wed, Fri, Sun 09.30 _19.30 | Thu, Sat 9.30_22.30 
The ticket service ends one hour before closing
Infoline: tel. 02/54917 (Mon_Fri 10.00_17.00) mudec.it | c.museoculture@comune.milano.it

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