The Castle of Masnago, home to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Varese, hosts the exhibition Japan: Drawing and Design. Born from the work of Eleonora Lanza and Rossella Menegazzo, the exhibition aims to enhance the heritage of the Civic Library of the Municipality of Varese, presenting to visitors, for the first time, the precious albums and illustrated volumes from the Meiji era. The books, which arrived from Japan thanks to the commercial exchanges that developed in the nineteenth century between Europe and the East, were donated to the Municipality by private citizens.

The refined pages, designed by great artists and printed in color using wooden matrices, lead you to immerse yourself in the culture of this country, which has always fascinated the West for the accuracy of its shapes and designs. The narrative unfolds through books of models and decorative motifs for kimonos and fabrics designed by the best artists in Kyoto and belonging to the Unsodo publishing house, which testify to the rapid modernization and westernization of the country, however always linked to its own traditions.

The subjects represented are mostly natural elements linked to Japanese symbolism. Among these we can mention: bamboo, emblem of resilience, plum tree, tree of rebirth and pine, symbol of longevity. The variety of illustrated plates in the volumes, true works of art, refer to poetry, legends and popular customs, everyday objects such as fans and vases, classical pictorial traditions, but also anticipate contemporary design and graphics. A selection of posters from the 1960s to today, by the most well-known names in graphic design, closes the exhibition by investigating the developments of decorativeness and themes of classical Japanese art in the transition from drawing (zuan) to design. Sixty posters that reveal both the past and future of a culture as distant as it is close to our sensitivity.