The exhibition dedicated to Katsushika Hokusai at Palazzo Bonaparte stands as one of the most significant recent exhibitions for the critical re-evaluation of Japanese art within a European context, not so much for the quantity or fame of the works on display, but for its ability to reconstruct the internal complexity of Hokusai’s visual language, ultimately freeing it from the iconic reduction to which its Western reception has long confined it. In this framework, the artist emerges not as the author of isolated images, but as a system in constant transformation, traversed by formal and conceptual tensions that interrogate the relationship between vision, nature, and representation. The celebrated series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji forms the structural backbone of the exhibition, yet its function is far from merely celebratory: works such as the so-called “Red Fuji” (Fine Wind, Clear Morning) reveal a conception of landscape as a mental construction prior to being a natural phenomenon, in which the mountain is not an object of contemplation, but rather an organizing principle of the image, a constant presence that structures atmospheric variability without being altered by it. In other prints, such as Ejiri in Suruga Province, the landscape dissolves into event, and the wind—by definition invisible—becomes perceptible through the effects it produces on bodies and objects, introducing a temporal dimension that disrupts the fixity of representation and transforms the image into a fragment of duration. This attention to movement finds a theoretical counterpart in the series devoted to water, particularly in the waterfall views, where the liquid flow is translated into a system of rhythmic and modulated signs that do not describe reality but interpret it, transforming nature into a visual structure. In Hokusai’s hands, water thus becomes a grammar, a generative principle that traverses waves, rain, and currents, revealing a dynamic conception of the world in which every form is unstable and continuously redefined. Alongside this analytical dimension stands the encyclopedic one embodied by the Hokusai Manga, presented in the exhibition as direct testimony of the artist’s creative process: far from being mere collections of sketches, they constitute an open visual archive in which reality is broken down into a multiplicity of fragments—figures, animals, gestures, architectures—that can be recombined endlessly, revealing a conception of knowledge based on variation and repetition. In this sense, the Manga represent Hokusai’s theoretical laboratory, the place where the image is never definitive, but always in potential. Within this curatorial framework, the immersive video installation with mirrors assumes a role of particular importance, positioning itself not as an accessory element but as a critical device capable of translating the structural principles of Hokusai’s aesthetic into contemporary experience. Through the reflective multiplication of surfaces and the dynamic projection of images, the exhibition space is transformed into an unstable environment devoid of a privileged point of view, in which the viewer is drawn into a network of visual echoes that fragment perception. The mirror, in this context, is not a mere scenographic tool, but a theoretical element that challenges the very notion of the image as a unified surface, restoring it instead as a field of forces in continuous expansion. Hokusai’s forms—waves, lines, profiles—lose their fixity to become luminous flow, reiteration, visual echo, in a condition that fully reflects the logic of ukiyo-e, understood not as the representation of the floating world, but as the very practice of floating. From this emerges a significant continuity between historical work and contemporary interpretation: the installation does not update Hokusai, but rather reveals his intrinsic modernity, demonstrating how his research had already anticipated central issues of contemporary visual culture, from the loss of a centralized gaze to the multiplication of viewpoints, and the conception of the image as a process rather than an object. Ultimately, the exhibition at Palazzo Bonaparte restores a complex and profoundly theoretical Hokusai, whose work can be understood as an unceasing investigation into the possibilities of the visible, inviting the viewer to engage with a vision of the world in which nothing is stable and every form results from a tension between permanence and change.
Hokusai in Rome: Form and Dissolution of the Image in the Sign of the Floating World
