The Developing Thought of a Human... Mist and Bedroom and (Japanese: Aru ningen no shiso no hatten... moya to shinshitsu to; also translated as Development of a Man's Thought... Mist and Bed Room) is a 1932 photocollage by the Japanese photographer-poet Kansuke Yamamoto. The work is held by the Nagoya City Art Museum (accession no. 2009.08.056.001). In a review essay on the Getty exhibition ', Eiko Aoki describes the work as combining contemporary newspaper clippings with cut-out photographic fragments, including close-ups of lips and parts of a woman's body.
In Dokuritsu B-2 (5 April 1932), the bulletin issued by the Dokuritsu Shashin Kenkyà «kai, Yamamoto reproduced the work under the Japanese title æÂÂãÂÂ人éÂÂã®æÂÂæ³ã®çºå±Â...éÂÂã¨å¯Â室. The same issue also carried Yamamoto's accompanying text é¡Âã¨主é¡Âï¼ÂäºÂï¼Â. Writing in the Getty catalogue ', Ryà «ichi Kaneko notes that the work's year of creation long remained uncertain until research for the 2001 Tokyo Station Gallery retrospective Shashin-ten Shururearisuto Yamamoto Kansuke: Fukanà  no dentatsusha established it as a work from 1932.
The Developing Thought of a Human... Mist and Bedroom and is a black-printed gelatin silver print on photographic paper whose center has been torn away to form an irregular opening, exposing newspaper clippings inserted beneath the surface. Across the newspaper fragments, Yamamoto pasted three photographic cutouts of lips, including one pair in the upper left and two overlapping near the lower right. He added a cutout of a woman's high-heeled leg beside the lips at lower right, and a small portrait-like head in the upper right. Kaneko notes that some headlines remain legible on the underlying newsprint, including items on arms-reduction diplomacy and the yen exchange rate. The resulting surface juxtaposes photographic fragments and newsprint in a collage format associated with Dada and Surrealist practice of the 1920s and 1930s.
Writing in the Getty catalogue ', photography historian Ryà «ichi Kaneko characterizes the work as a Dada- and Surrealist-era collage and argues that its level of artistic expression is "on a par with that of any contemporaneous European artists". Kaneko notes that the work's year of creation long remained unknown until research for the 2001 retrospective Surrealist Yamamoto Kansuke established it as a work from 1932, when Yamamoto was eighteen years old. Kaneko argues that confirming the 1932 date shows Yamamoto as a precocious artist and treats the work as a landmark for rethinking the founding and development of modern Japanese photography in the 1930s. He further argues that Yamamoto did not adopt collage merely as a borrowed European avant-garde style but used it as a vehicle for sharp social criticism in the specific context of Japan, reading the inserted newsprint as reporting on the 1932 Geneva arms-reduction conference and the global economic crisis that followed the 1929 stock-market crash. In Kaneko's account, these clippings anticipate Japan's path from peace to war, including expansion after the Manchurian Incident and Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations. Kaneko adds that, against this historical backdrop, Yamamoto arranged the repeated lips together with the cut-out face and leg as eerie elements "floating across the surface" of the collage, suggesting that the lips may be read as symbols of aggression or lust.
The Japanese title recorded in the Nagoya City Art Museum collection database is æÂÂãÂÂ人éÂÂã®æÂÂæ³ã®çºå±Ââ¦éÂÂã¨å¯Â室ã¨. Art Platform Japan lists the same work with the English rendering Development of a Man's Thought... Mist and Bed Room. In the Getty catalogue ', Ryà «ichi Kaneko refers to the work in English as The Developing Thought of a Human... Mist and Bedroom and. In the Dokuritsu Shashin Kenkyà «kai bulletin Dokuritsu B-2 (5 April 1932), the reproduction appears under the shortened Japanese title æÂÂãÂÂ人éÂÂã®æÂÂæ³ã®çºå±Â...éÂÂã¨å¯Â室 (without the final to). These forms are treated by the cited sources as alternative renderings of the same 1932 photocollage by Kansuke Yamamoto.
The work is held by the Nagoya City Art Museum, where it is catalogued under the Japanese title æÂÂãÂÂ人éÂÂã®æÂÂæ³ã®çºå±Ââ¦éÂÂã¨å¯Â室㨠and dated to 1932. The museum database records the medium as a gelatin silver print with collage on paper and gives the dimensions as 28.1 à20.7 cm. The museum lists the accession number as 2009.08.056.001. Art Platform Japan, which aggregates collection information for works held by Japanese museums, also identifies the Nagoya City Art Museum as the holding institution and records the same accession number for Yamamoto's work, while providing the English rendering Development of a Man's Thought... Mist and Bed Room.
The photocollage was first reproduced in Dokuritsu B-2 (5 April 1932), the bulletin issued by the Dokuritsu Shashin Kenkyà «kai, under the Japanese title æÂÂãÂÂ人éÂÂã®æÂÂæ³ã®çºå±Â...éÂÂã¨å¯Â室. Kansuke Yamamoto also contributed the text é¡Âã¨主é¡Âï¼ÂäºÂï¼ to the same issue of Dokuritsu. In the Getty Publications catalogue ', Ryà «ichi Kaneko reports that the work's year of creation long remained uncertain until research for the Tokyo Station Gallery retrospective Shashin-ten Shururearisuto Yamamoto Kansuke: Fukanà  no dentatsusha (22 AugustâÂÂ24 September 2001) established it as a work from 1932. The photocollage is reproduced as plate 54 in the Getty catalogue Japan's Modern Divide, which presents Yamamoto's Surrealist-leaning experiments in dialogue with the documentary photography of Hiroshi Hamaya. It was reproduced again as fig. 9 in Eiko Aoki's review essay on the Getty exhibition in Trans-Asia Photography Review. The work has subsequently appeared in museum survey exhibitions of Japanese avant-garde photography and Surrealism.
The Kyoto presentation and the later Itabashi and Mie venues represent the same exhibition project, documented in official lists of works and tour materials under closely related English titles.