Collection Exhibition: "She Who Crosses the Sea" / Highlights

In the Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton defined surrealism as “pure psychic automatism,” the dictation of thought in the absence of any control exercised by reason. It began as a literary movement led by poets, and painters such as Max Ernst, René Magritte, and Salvador Dalí and photographers such as Man Ray joined it. Collage, frottage, and decalcomania, which court chance, were also attempts to keep the conscious mind out and let the unconscious appear. A line from Lautréamont, “the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table,” is often given as an example of dépaysement, the strangeness and wonder born when things meet out of place. Some painters, like Joan Miró and André Masson, improvised forms from automatism; others, like Magritte and Dalí, painted images that came from dreams in relatively realistic space. In Japan surrealism flowered first in poetry in the late 1920s and spread to art in the 1930s, with painters such as Koga Harue and Fukuzawa Ichirō. It was suppressed under the wartime regime, and in 1941 Fukuzawa and the poet Takiguchi Shūzō were arrested on suspicion of violating the Peace Preservation Law. In Taiwan under Japanese rule, the poets' group Le Moulin (Fengche Poetry Society) tried to introduce surrealism in the 1930s, but realism dominated the literary world of the time and the attempt was not widely accepted.

Look at the things in the picture one by one and find something that would not normally be there. Is it painted like a scene from a dream, or does it grow out of improvised lines and shapes?

Museums collect and exhibit heritage (the ICOM definition); showing what the museum itself holds is the job of the permanent display, or collection exhibition. At the Kyoto National Museum, for example, the collection exhibitions present works the museum owns and works on long-term loan. Special exhibitions run for set dates. The Kyoto National Museum describes its special exhibitions as large-scale loan shows that typically use almost all of the galleries in one wing, and its collection galleries may be partly or fully cleared during them. Tickets differ by museum. For the Tokyo National Museum's special exhibition on Daitoku-ji (14 October to 6 December 2026), the ticket also admits you to the museum's collection exhibition (heijō-ten) on the day of your visit (except 30 November, when the collection galleries are closed); the Kyoto National Museum does not sell a separate collection ticket while a special exhibition is on.

See the collection and the special exhibition on the same day and compare how the works are set out.

• Permanent and special exhibitions 상설전과 특별전→Same topic in Seoul
• Permanent and special exhibitions 常設展與特展→Same topic in Taipei