Plus léger que l’air – Lighter than air – Baur Foundation, Museum of Far Eastern, Switzerland

Lighter than air

The flight of the dragonfly

October 30, 2024 – February 2, 2025

100 years ago, in April 1924, during his trip to the Land of the Rising Sun, Alfred Baur, an extraordinary entrepreneur and founder of the Museum of Far Eastern Art, discovered, during the cherry blossom season, the light-hearted poetry of the “images of the floating world” ( ukiyo-e) associated with the landscapes of the masters of prints and the delicate patterns dotting the objects in his collection.

Echoing her taste and pioneering spirit, and as part of the 160th ^anniversary of diplomatic relations between Switzerland and Japan, this exhibition evokes the aspirations for lightness that run through Japanese culture and that we find in Uehara Michiko, a major representative of textile arts. In the subtropical light of her native region, in Okinawa, an archipelago in the far south of Japan, this virtuoso of weaving and dyeing creates sublime fabrics as fine as “the wing of the dragonfly”. From the symbiotic relationship that binds her to natural fibers is born, in her words, “woven air”, a journey without borders, listening to the living. A quest and a challenge that are reminiscent of those of the explorer Bertrand Piccard whose solar plane, a giant dragonfly, combining through its carbon fiber structure, extreme resistance and lightness, weaves a harmonious trajectory between humanity, earth and sky…

Through the “woven air” of the Pacific and in a world ravaged by wars, we can bet that Alfred Baur would have celebrated, just like us, the virtuosity of the hand, the flowering of cherry trees, the free and agile flight of dragonflies…