Yurei Yokai Collection

The Fukuoka City Museum holds one of the foremost collections of ghost and yokai painting in Japan, with numerous works by leading artists including Ito Jakuchu and Kawanabe Kyosai. For the special exhibition “Yurei Yokai Collection”, around 100 carefully selected pieces are on display, centred on Edo-period holdings but extending to more recent works as well.

The exhibition asks why such unsettling figures were painted, displayed, and treasured in the first place. The answer, the museum suggests, lies as much in the people who made, viewed, and collected these works as in the paintings themselves. Both the images and their mountings (hyogu, the decorative fabric framing of a hanging scroll) were crafted with care and ingenuity, and the show invites visitors to feel something of the sensibilities of those who lived alongside them. The selection ranges from the fleeting and beautiful to the comical and endearing, offering a far more varied picture of the genre than the word "ghost story" might suggest.

Walking through the exhibition

The exhibition is structured as a journey in four parts.

The prologue, "Welcome to the Other Side", eases visitors across the threshold with images that are neither ghost nor yokai but unsettling all the same: skeletons and depictions of the dead.

The first act, "The Heart of Yokai Painting", treats the yokai as something people made sense of by drawing them. The act unfolds across three themes: representing painted terror, the growth of shared understanding around the strange, and the playful invention of new monstrous forms.

The second act, "The Heart of Ghost Painting", turns to the yurei, the spirits of the dead appearing in the form they held in life. Although Edo-period yokai compendia often classed ghosts as one type of monster, the ghost gradually became a subject in its own right. Its three themes move from the ghost of mourning and remembrance, to the ghost of fear and entertainment, to the ghost as wit and worldly commentary.

The epilogue, "Farewell, Until We Meet Again", gathers monster pictures used in everyday life and those that appeared on festival nights. Society and its beliefs change with the times, yet these figures still seem to linger in the space between the ordinary and the extraordinary.

Complementing the exhibition is a piece of participatory digital content created by anno lab, a Fukuoka-based creative studio whose work begins from curiosity and a sense of play, seeking to bring new experiences and value into everyday life. The installation is designed to echo the themes of the show.

Several events accompany the exhibition:

• A summer evening of "scary" rakugo (traditional comic storytelling) takes place on 25 July, from 14:00 to 15:00, featuring the storyteller Tachibanaya Bunta in the first-floor auditorium. No advance booking is needed, and entry is on a first-come basis from 13:30.

• A lecture, "Drawing Invisible Fear: A Japanese Art History of the Thrill of the Frightful", is given by Tanaka Keiko, Specially Appointed Associate Professor at the University Art Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts, on 2 August from 14:00 to 15:30, also in the first-floor auditorium under the same arrangements.

• For those who prefer to participate, a "Twilight Sketching Time" lets visitors copy and sketch works at their leisure within the exhibition room, with a lecture period led by Japanese-style painter Yoshie Tachiki. The sessions run on 26 July and 23 August, from 17:30 to 20:00, with visitors free to join or leave partway through. Pencils and coloured pencils are permitted, and easels and folding chairs may be brought in.

• Finally, the curators in charge offer a gallery talk every Wednesday from 14:00 to 15:00, meeting at the entrance to the Special Exhibition Room on the second floor.

Advance tickets are on sale from 22 May – 18 July through Artone Ticket, Lawson Ticket (L-code 84070), Seven Ticket.