At the Hiroshima Museum of Art, the exhibition ZIPANGU—Contemporary Artists Who Have Run Through the Heisei Era unspools like a poignant tapestry, threaded with the ineffable dualities of Japan itself: destruction and rebirth, reverence and reinvention, the ancient and the achingly new. Curated by Sueo Mizuma, this is not merely an art show—it is an odyssey through the last 35 years of Japanese visual culture, now casting its gaze outward to the global stage.

The name Zipangu, borrowed from Marco Polo’s gilded fantasies, shimmers with a mix of allure and irony. It calls to mind the West’s eternal fascination with Japan, a country both fetishized and misunderstood. But this exhibition turns the mirror inward, examining the so-called “lost decades” of economic stagnation under Emperor Akihito’s Heisei reign and finding, instead, a treasury of cultural resilience.

Anchored in Hiroshima—a city that wears history like an unhealed wound—ZIPANGU pairs reflection with bold reinvention. Makoto Aida’s Ash Color Mountains (2009–2011) rises like a macabre Everest, composed of thousands of toppled salarymen, their exhaustion metamorphosed into commentary on Japan’s relentless modernization. Meanwhile, Manabu Ikeda’s Foretoken (2008) and Rebirth (2013–2016) swirl with apocalyptic grandeur, their tidal waves of debris capturing the cataclysms of natural disaster and human folly.

The artists here weave a startling dialectic between peace and peril. Miwa Komatsu’s radiant The Day the Earth Shed Tears (2022) channels dialogues with Hiroshima’s hibakusha, the survivors of atomic tragedy, into her mythical komainu figures, guardians against both spiritual and worldly ills. Takahiro Iwasaki’s Reflection Model (Rashomon Effect) (2015) transforms the legendary Kyoto gate into a ghostly echo of itself, a reflection that questions the very nature of reality.

These works do not merely ask us to look; they demand we see. They summon the past and future into a single breath, whispering truths about fragility, endurance, and the perpetual becoming of art.

ZIPANGU is, at once, an act of memory and an act of defiance. It reclaims the Heisei years from the shadow of economic despair and celebrates the alchemy of grief and beauty that only art can offer. As Mizuma hints at ambitions to take the show abroad, one feels the quiet thrill of Japanese contemporary art stepping confidently into the global spotlight—not as a curiosity, but as a force.

This exhibition doesn’t just explore time—it transcends it. If you can, stand in its light. And if you cannot, listen closely: the echoes will reach you.