Lighter than Air

The Flight of the Dragonfly

30 October 2024 - 2 February 2025

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One hundred years ago, in April 1924, while travelling in the Land of the Rising Sun during the cherry blossom season, Alfred Baur, an exceptional businessman and founder of the Museum of Far Eastern Art, discovered the ethereal poetry of the “images of the floating world” (ukiyo-e) associated with the landscapes created by the masters of woodcut prints and the delicate motifs that decorated the objects in his collection.

In keeping with his taste and pioneering spirit, and as part of the 160th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Switzerland and Japan, this exhibition reflects the aspirations to lightness that characterise Japanese culture, and which are found in the works of Uehara Michiko, a leading textile artist. In the sub-tropical light of her native prefecture of Okinawa, an archipelago at the southern tip of Japan, her symbiotic relationship with natural fibres gives rise to sublime fabrics as fine as a dragonfly’s wing, like “woven air”, to use her term. A pursuit and challenge not unlike that of explorer Bertrand Piccard, whose solar-powered aircraft – a giant carbon-fibre dragonfly that combines strength and lightness – threads a harmonious course between humanity, earth and sky.

Through the “woven air” of the Pacific, and in a world afflicted by wars, we may be confident that Alfred Baur would have celebrated, as we do, the virtuosity of the hand, the blossoming of cherry trees, and the free and agile flight of dragonflies…