If you change the angle, a picture looks different. Perhaps your world, too.
Deceive your eyes
YOU may think that you want to increase your creativity and create new ideas. But you don’t know how to do so. Going to museums is instrumental because it gives you inspiration. But sometimes looking at a different style of art may work.
“Tokyo Trick Art Museum” is currently open in Odaiba, Tokyo. Many trompe-l’oeil pictures and parodies of masterpieces and the like are exhibited there. The museum has different sections; an Edo area, a not-scary horror mansion, a masterpiece area and a brain training corner. Each of them is entertaining.
Most of the paintings there are inspiring. Pictures portraying a town in the Edo era and ones of a dinosaur and a shark, both of which open their big mouths wide, are drawn in three dimensions. They make visitors think hard about how to take funny pictures.
Depending on the angle and the place where you look at them, pictures and their impressions change. For example, an odalisque. The lengths of her legs become longer or shorter if seen from different angles.
These trompe-l’oeil pictures have a good effect on us. This style of art uses perspective and chiaroscuro in a bid to make two-dimensional pictures three-dimensional. The way we think or perceive things is often fixed. It is like a method of painting, which has a great influence on your world. But, like trompe-l’oeil, if you change your thoughts and the way you see things, you can change your world. Many western psychologists say that.
Paintings in Tokyo Trick Art Museum are drawn by artists of S.D Co., Ltd. in Tochigi prefecture. The aim of the company is to make arts more entertaining and closer to ordinary people. Using trompe-l’oeil, it also helps revitalise regional communities prosper and promotes Japanese culture abroad. The company has worked with many regional tourism agencies and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan.
If you want to increase your creativity or change your world, visiting Tokyo Trick Art Museum will be good. If you don’t like this kind of art, try it just for the heck of it.
Ryo Kubota is a staff writer at Transpheric Management in Tokyo as well as a freelance writer. He has covered Sports for the Nippon Newspaper Company in Tokyo and teaches at a private tutoring school in Iruma, Japan. Having studied in both Tokyo and England in the areas of sociology, he has a keen interest in the world at large.
