Art can sometimes be surprisingly serious and po-faced, almost as if it were seen as a kind of substitute religion. Luckily, none of this pomposity attaches itself to the work of Sasae Ono, one of Japan's most talented artists in the 20th-century, and the subject of the exhibition "Ono Sasae: Modern Girls on Parade" at the Taro Okamoto Museum of Art in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture.
The show's title comes from Ono's most persistent subject: the flighty and fashionable young Japanese urban woman; an object of fascination and censure in the past as she still is today. Ono's art reflects both of these passions in ample measure, with images that celebrate as much as they criticize, and vice versa.
It is surprising that Ono is not more widely known, as his work is a pure delight and shows tremendous skill. But part of the appeal of art is a certain inaccessibility that plays to a snobbish desire to appear more sophisticated. In these terms, Ono's art is a complete failure because it is immediately accessible to everyone, in the same way that the "saucy" seaside postcards of Donald McGill are.