Hanauri. The Japan of the Flower Sellers

The new exhibition Hanauri. The Japan of the Flower Sellers, part of the project for the refresh of the Japanese gallery, is devoted to the practice of artist Linda Fregni Nagler, who was also at MAO last November, when she performed Things that Death Cannot Destroy.

The exhibition explores her painstaking method of collecting, selecting, reformulating and reactivating a type of Japanese tourist photograph known as Yokohama Shashin. The original photographs, collected by the artist over a period of twenty years and displayed at MAO for the first time, are paired with Fregni Nagler’s own works. Rephotographing the original albumen prints and then printing the resulting photographs in the dark room, she then coloured them by hand using a method similar to the one used at the time (1860–1910). The images thus take on new meanings, illustrating the history of a specific way of looking at exoticism and alterity.

The subject explored at MAO is that of flower sellers (hanauri), a highly appreciated type of street vendor (bōtefuri) active in Japan during the Edo and Meiji periods.

Given the influence of ukiyo-e prints on Yokohama shashin, the exhibition also contextualises and looks closely at the link between Fregni Nagler’s photographs and woodcuts of the same subject from the period right before the birth of photography.

The exhibition also includes 26 albumen prints from the mid nineteenth century from the Fregni Nagler collection along with 6 large-format silver prints hand coloured by the artist and 4 positives on glass, visible through two visors.

Alongside these works are three woodcuts on the flower seller theme: the representation of the spring months, with an illustration of the month of April by Utagawa Kunisada, from the Museo d’Arte Orientale, Venice; At the Entrance to the Temple of Kanda by Koikawa Harumachi, from the Museo d’Arte Orientale E. Chiossone, Genoa, and Toyokuni III by Utagawa Kunisada, from the series 'Six Sellers on Summer Evenings', from a private collection.

The plant and flower theme is also found in the refined kesa textiles from the MAO collection, dating back to the Edo period, and in the kimonos that also enrich the exhibition, one from Palazzo Madama and two from the Museo d'Arte Orientale, Venice, as well as three fine lacquer pieces and three kakemono by Yanagisawa Kien, Kawamura Bunpō and Tomioka Tessai (from the Edo and Meiji periods) on loan from a private collection.

The rehang of the Japanese gallery is part of the MAO exhibition programme which, through loans from Asian art collections – public and private, national and international – aims to stimulate  reflection on and develop new narratives around the Museum's collection. Hanauri is also part of #MAOtempopresente, a project that uses contemporary art as a means of interpreting and  the collections through the inclusion of contemporary works and site-specific projects created within the residency programme instituted in 2022.

Parallel to the exhibition in the galleries, the three Japanese suits of armour from the collection, dating from the late seventeenth to the first half of the nineteenth century, have been relocated to the Salone Mazzonis, where their restoration will be open to the public and begin in January 2025.

Exhibition admission is included with the ticket to the permanent collections.

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Linda Fregni Nagler works mainly with the photographic medium. She was born in Stockholm and lives in Milan, where she graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in 2000.
Her work explores the origins of the modern gaze, concentrating on the photographic medium and its history. Her practice intertwines the typical characteristics of the work of artists, scholars and collectors. Her studio is not so much a place of production as a place of reception where, after a process of meticulous collection and selection, the photographs converge, to then be reformulated and reactivated, thus taking on new meaning.
Her interests include the theory and materiality of the photographic image, the history of photography, the study of iconographic conventions and visual clichés, the anonymous, vernacular image and appropriation as contemporary artistic practice.
She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 55th Venice Biennale, Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, 2013, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, and other institutions in Italy (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, MAXXI, Rome, Fondazione Olivetti, Rome, Triennale Milano, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin) and abroad (Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble, Columbia University NY, Nouveau Musée National, Monaco, ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg).
Alongside her work as an artist, she has also cultivated her practice as a historical researcher, developing a project between 2012 and 2017 on the pioneering photographer Hercule Florence and co-curating, with Cristiano Raimondi, the exhibition Hercule Florence, Le Nouveau Robinson at the Nouveau Musée National, Monaco. In 2007, she won the New York Prize, awarded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Columbia University.
In 2008, she was awarded a residency at the Dena Foundation, Paris, in 2014, she was an artist-in-residence at Iaspis (Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Artists), Stockholm, and in 2016, she won the Premio ACACIA.
Linda Fregni Nagler is professor of photography at the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, and teaches ‘Photography: Theory and Method’ at IULM University, Milan.