"Realism" can be a frustratingly indeterminate term. It can be used to refer to individual paintings, and it can be a conceptual placeholder that seemingly encapsulates the entire history of the Western Renaissance, and other, fine arts through to modernism.
The critical afterlives of realism, the "real" and "reality" in Japanese modernism, however, were considerable. What realism could mean from the late 1920s became increasingly varied and by the decade following World War II, realism had come to include most anything at all.
"Out of Real," drawn from the collections of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, attempts to seize upon some of the incredible diversity of artistic expression of those terms through 71 artists, both local and international. Split into two parts (and currently showing part two), the exhibition brings together a total of 121 works from the 18th century to the present. The perhaps unavoidable conclusions are that the realisms across those centuries as they were received or created in Japan were either myopic or without focus — or both.