Chongqing- From April 23 to June 24, the exhibition "Akira Kurosawa, The Painter" is on display at the Yuelai Art Museum in Chongqing Liangjiang New Area. The exhibition presents the "painter" side of Oscar-winner Akira Kurosawa and explores the role of painting in his films.
Nearly 500 paintings by Akira Kurosawa were selected for this exhibition, involving the storyboards of six of Kurosawa's late films as well as his landscape paintings. This is by far the most numerous in scale, the most comprehensive in category, the most diverse in form, and the most influential internationally among all of Kurosawa's painting exhibitions.
The exhibition "Akira Kurosawa, The Painter" is on display at the Yuelai Museum. (Photo/Chongqing Yuelai Investment Group)
Kurosawa is better known as a filmmaker. He directed thirty films in a career spanning over five decades and won numerous awards. In 1982, Kurosawa received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Venice Film Festival; In 1990, he accepted the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Posthumously, he was named "Asian of the Century" by AsianWeek magazine, cited as being among the five people who most prominently contributed to the improvement of Asia in the 20th century.
In fact, Kurosawa's dream as a teenager was to become a painter. He attended a painting school specializing in Western painting and later joined an art club, but eventually, for various reasons, he did not choose to become a professional painter but entered the film industry.
The storyboard of Kurosawa's movie Dream. (Photo provided to iChongqing)
Although the exhibition takes the discussion of Akira Kurosawa's paintings as the starting point, the focus is not to recount his journey from painting to photography to film, nor his dream of being a painter, but to explore the differences in Kurosawa's creations in the face of different media and the role of painting in his films.
He usually thought out the scene visually before producing the movie. When conceiving a film shoot, Kurosawa's mind often conjured up vivid pictures. To take Rhapsody in August as an example, Kurosawa had this "scene" of the old lady walking against the storm with an overturned umbrella in his mind first, thus building the structure of the whole plot.
From the film manuscripts in the exhibition, we can gain insight into a brilliant director's careful study and arrangement of the construction of scenes and atmosphere, the distinctive portrayal of characters, and the orientation, costumes, and props. From the equipment of the scenes, the psychology of the characters, the actors' movements to the application of light, just as his films themselves incorporate multiple elements like literature and music, painting becomes the operating table on paper for him to dispatch these many elements.
These pre-visual images enabled him to communicate more effectively with the production team and helped him arrange the plot structure more accurately.
If you still have questions such as "how do his paintings relate to his films" and "what do they reveal to us." Please come to the Yuelai Art Museum and find the answers yourself.
Tips:
- The opening time of the Yuelai Art Museum is from 10:00-17:00 from Tuesday to Sunday, and the entrance is closed at 16:30.
- It is closed on Mondays except for national holidays.
(Mei Xuhang, as an intern, also contributed to this report.)