2024年12月25日 更新
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Greetings
Introduction
Chapter1
Chapter2
Chapter3
Special
Greetings
Since its opening in 1999, the Morohashi Museum of Modern Art has developed and continued various activities as well as exhibitions under the philosophy of ‘contributing to society by proposing enriched lifestyles through art’.
The exhibition ‘Totonou: Museum Linked to Health Care’ will reconsider what an ‘enriched life’ means to us in today’s fast-changing society, and will focus on the keyword ‘Totonou’, a popular word in the context of health consciousness, from the viewpoint of health care, We propose the use of museums as places to “Totonou” the body and mind.
In recent years, research on “museum bathing”, which focuses on the health-enhancing effects of the viewing experience in art galleries and museums, has been attracting attention. This exhibition introduces the possibilities of healthcare in museums from the perspective of scientific knowledge, and proposes a way of enjoying “tootling around in museums” by drawing on the keyword “tootling around” to describe the craving for the unusual and nature that was behind the outdoor production of the artworks, and the ideal world seen through the depiction of heaven in the artworks. The exhibition will be held at the Cocorro Museum of Art, Cocorro, Italy. We hope that this exhibition will help you to live a more fulfilling life, and that it will be of help to your mind and body.
Finally, we would like to take this opportunity to thank Professor Izumi Ogata and the people at Kyushu Sangyo University for their special cooperation in organising this exhibition, manga artist Tanakatsuki for his valuable works, and everyone who has contributed to this exhibition.
Organisers
Morohashi Museum of Modern Art
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Introduction
Introduction
Exercises for ‘totonou’
Nominated as a buzzword for 2021, ‘totonou’ is a term used by sauners (a common name for sauna enthusiasts) to describe the state of feeling very good in body and mind after a sauna. It has also become widely known due to the popularity of sauna-themed comics and TV dramas.
In addition to the Chinese character for “totonou”, the word “totonou” can also be rendered as “to be in tune”, the former referring to the state of having everything in place or being organised, and the latter to the state of being in harmony. This exhibition introduces a variety of artworks using the word “totonou” as a key word for both of these meanings.
Before you enjoy the exhibition, this chapter introduces three exercises that will help you enjoy the appreciation of “totonou” more.
The first is an “eye” exercise. We are constantly using our eyes in one way or another – driving, looking at our smartphones, reading books, etc. – before we come to the museum. So, the first is an “eye exercise” to relax your eye muscles and then enjoy the rest of the viewing experience.
The second exercise is for “seeing”. When we look at things, we seem to use only our eyes, but in fact we use our whole body to look at things. The concentration of seeing can be greatly affected by the way we are aware of things such as our posture and breathing when looking. Here are some exercises for seeing, applying the theory of mindfulness (deliberate, present-moment, non-value-judgmental attention). Once again, you can focus your attention firmly on your mind and body.
The third is an exercise for “seeing”. When we view a work of art, we may unconsciously make assumptions and preconceptions about it. However, this way of seeing can change with the slightest trigger, and if our “way of seeing” changes, our “way of seeing” will also change. Finally, through the viewing of artworks that provide hints for changing our “way of seeing”, we invite you to actually enjoy the experience of changing your “way of seeing” when you change your “way of seeing”.
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Chapter1
Chapter 1
‘Museum bathing ®︎’ to ‘totonou’
Why do we go to museums? There are many reasons, but have you ever been to a museum for your health?
Many people have commented on the healing and refreshing effects of visiting museums, but in recent years it has become clear that museum facilities, including art galleries, and the cultural arts, have a positive impact on physical and mental health, even scientifically.
In the 2000s, when studies of stress levels and blood pressure levels before and after viewing museums and cultural arts facilities around the world began, all confirmed significant results with potential health benefits. In response to these studies, a world-first initiative was implemented in Canada in 2018 in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Canadian Medical Association, in which doctors prescribe free admission to museums to their patients; in 2021, in the Belgian capital Brussels, doctors also prescribed “free admission to museums and galleries” to their patients. A pilot project was also implemented in the Belgian capital Brussels in 2021, in which doctors prescribe “free admission to museums” to patients.
In Japan, from 2020, Dr Izumi Ogata of Kyushu Sangyo University advocated “museum bathing”, an initiative to utilise the healing effects of museums for improving people’s health and preventing illness through museum tours, and has so far conducted demonstration experiments (as of March 2025) with over 1,200 people at 88 museums nationwide to demonstrate the effects. The demonstration of the effects of the system is underway.
In this chapter, Dr Ogata and Kyushu Sangyo University will give an overview of the latest research results on “museum bathing”, which they are researching, and introduce the possibilities for museums in the future that “museum bathing” research will lead to.
It also introduces artworks by classifying figurative paintings (landscapes and still-life paintings) and contemporary art with reference to the experiments on the health effects of art appreciation practised by the research team of the University of Tre in Rome, Italy, in 2019. The University of Torre study showed that the experience of viewing figurative and contemporary art had different effects, indicating that viewing figurative paintings may lead to lower blood pressure. On the other hand, the study also mentions the possibility that viewing contemporary art can arouse curiosity and lead to social influences and improved cognition, pointing out that both types of viewing have the potential to increase people’s sense of well-being.
Instead of viewing art from the point of view of the commentary on the artwork, why not use your healthcare thinking in this chapter to find the artwork that will enrich your mind and body?
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Chapter2
Chapter 2
‘Totonou’ to the artist’s impression
In the mid-19th century, when metal tubes of paint were invented in England, they quickly became popular and many artists moved their production out of the studio and into the open air. In France, impressionist painters such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir went outdoors to capture the changing aspects, light and atmospheric tremors of the landscape in their paintings. This innovation in painting materials enabled Impressionist painters to capture the beauty of nature with a pure gaze and to depict it with their own senses.
There was another important innovation behind the outdoor production. In 1825, the world’s first railway was opened in Britain, followed by France in 1827, and by the 1860s, a network of trunk railways had been built from Paris, which continues to this day. The lower Seine, which ran from central Paris to places such as Argenteuil and Bougival, now regarded as Impressionist meccas, were also areas along the railway line. Impressionist painters used the railways to travel from modernising urban areas to places of natural beauty and pleasure, opening up a new world of landscape painting.
They were active in the second half of the 19th century, a time when central Paris was undergoing significant modernisation and many middle-class people were seeking work in Paris. Despite the economic turmoil of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, Parisians and Parisiennes took the train at weekends, forgot about their daily work, and went to the suburbs for a short break and solace, enjoying their leisure time in the natural beauty of the countryside. This period saw the birth of today’s tourism culture, and Impressionist painters also began to depict resorts with leisure as their subject matter. Their gaze echoed that of Parisians and Parisiennes, who enjoyed scenes of leisure that provided a brief respite from the reality of daily urban labour.
This chapter introduces the works of the Impressionists and other painters who went outdoors and depicted fleeting moments of beauty in the turbulent age of modernisation, together with the words left behind by the painters, and interprets their works as the fleeting “to-and-fro” scenes of the artists and people of the time.
How do we perceive the scenes depicted by their eyes today?
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Chapter3
Chapter 3
‘In Heaven’
We often use “heaven” as an analogy for special joyful and healing experiences, but one book that has had a great influence on today’s image of ‘heaven’ is the masterpiece of literature, The Divine Comedy, written by the Italian poet The Divine Comedy, a literary masterpiece by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). The Divine Comedy is a long epic poem in three parts – Hell, Purgatory and Heaven – and is highly regarded as a literary embodiment of the Christian worldview of the Middle Ages, which had a profound influence not only on later literature, but also on political thought, art and music. The Heavenly Arc features great sages and naturalistic, philosophical, theological and historical discourse. Heaven here was not a world of peace and rest, but a place of debate where knowledge and theories came and went in abundance. Dante lived in medieval Italy, where bloody political battles were raging and Dante himself, a politician, was exiled from Florence and sentenced to death. Dante’s heaven reflected his strong feeling as a politician that debate with the right intellect would make people happy.
The worldview of The Divine Comedy was visualised by earlier masters of beauty, such as Botticelli and Michelangelo. The Spanish artist Salvador Dali was one of the artists who depicted the world of The Divine Comedy: in the 1950s, he produced around 100 original watercolours for The Divine Comedy, which were published in 1961 and 1963 as a collection of woodcuts with the text of the Divine Comedy. The angels in Heaven are depicted as geometric and particulate, due to the influence of quantum mechanics, such as “protons” and “neutrons”. These representations derive from Dali’s 1951 “Manifesto of Mysticism”, in which he attempted to incorporate scientific theories into religious representations, believing that scientific theory could reach the divine during the chaos and unrest of the post-war years and the Cold War.
Although Dante’s and Dali’s “heaven” was created in a different era and with different values, the world they represented as “heaven” may have been a world similar to the wish that truth transcends everything in an absurd reality and brings the world into harmony. In today’s modern society, where social unrest cannot be dispelled even in the post-Corona era, we invite you to dream about what kind of world we are looking for in “Heaven” through the works of Dali.
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Special
special exhibition
This exhibition has introduced a variety of artworks with the keyword “totonou”. In the introduction, we have looked at appreciation as preparation for “totonou”, in chapter 1 we have looked at the possibilities for “totonou” that appreciation of the works brings, in chapter 2 we have looked at the “totonou” scenes that the painters sought, and in chapter 3 we have looked at heaven as a “totonou” world.
This special exhibition introduces the world of “tonou” in saunas, which is also the reason why “totonou” became a popular word, together with original drawings from the essays “Sa-do” and “Manga Sa-do” by Tanakatsuki (manga artist), who was instrumental in sparking the sauna boom of the day. In addition, “Totonou at the Museum”, drawn especially for this exhibition, will also be on display.
In addition, the exhibition introduces two special ways of appreciating sauna art: “Sa-appreciation”, supervised by artist and appreciation designer Yu Sato, and “Mindfulness Art Appreciation”, supervised by Professor Hiroki Komuro, who conducts research and practice in education and mindfulness at Kansai University.
Sa-viewing” is an attempt to appreciate art for a longer period of time, inspired by the experience of being steamed for several minutes in a hot sauna room, which is repeated several times. Through this unusual viewing experience, which takes place while sitting on a sauna bench, visitors can enjoy carefully appreciating the details of artworks that they would otherwise tend to miss.
In “Mindfulness Art Appreciation”, we introduce a method of appreciation that applies the theory of mindfulness. By becoming aware of what is happening to “me” when I am looking at a work of art, you will be able to “see” yourself through the art.
The word “totonou”, which combines the words “tonify” and “tonou”, is now often used in situations other than saunas. This may be due not only to the sauna craze, but also to the way people today, in the midst of fast-paced social change, seek to adjust their mind and body to avoid being overwhelmed by daily stresses. We hope that now, at this time, will be an opportunity to face our own mind and body through art. We also hope that you will make use of the museum as a place where you can spend precious moments to face your mind and body in the days to come.
