Culture swap

PICTURES OF A FLOATING WORLD
Visual highlights from 150 years

While the Austria Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka will provide a platform for creative dialogue between the two countries, it is simply the latest step in a surprisingly long and rich history of bilateral relations. This friendly long-distance partnership began when decorated naval officer Anton Freiherr von Petz led an Austrian mission to the newly opened Japan. On 18 October 1869, a treaty of trade and friendship was signed, establishing diplomatic relations between the two nations.

Just four years later, the modernising Meiji government, keen to show what the new Japan had to offer, made its first official appearance at an international exposition with the Vienna World’s Fair. It was a high-level production complete with Shinto shrine, Japanese garden, scale model of the great Buddha in Kamakura and a four-metre-wide lantern. The pavilion was greeted with acclaim by thousands of visitors; many Japanese products, such as ukiyo-e (woodblock prints), sold out within a week.

Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) holds more than 200 Japanese objects from the 1873 exposition. “Our collection testifies to Japan’s endeavour for the Vienna World’s Fair,” says Mio Wakita-Elis, curator of MAK’s Asia collection. “A porcelain plate made in Seto, showing a beautiful underglaze Mount Fuji, for instance, has a peculiar format unprecedented in the long history of Japanese ceramics.”

Suitably inspired by such objects, a wave of Japonisme splashed across Europe in the subsequent decades. The ready availability of ukiyo-e helped quickly disseminate Japanese aesthetics among influential tastemakers, the depictions of everyday scenes a modern counterpoint to the high-society portraits that dominated fine art at the time. World-renowned Austrian artists, such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, were profoundly influenced by the Japanese approach to flat perspectives, decorative patterns and vertical compositions. Shodo calligraphy influenced the thick lines used by designers from the Wiener Werkstätte, while architects such as Otto Wagner introduced Japanese-influenced ornamental designs to the façades of buildings across Vienna. Such similarities were also heightened, says Wakita-Elis, by a shared “love and dedication to the quality of handcraft” between the two nations.

More than 150 years after the Vienna World’s Fair triggered a craze for Japanese culture, the Austria Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka is hoping to have a similarly influential impact on bilateral relations. While visitors can immerse themselves in the very best of Austrian music, technology and innovation, the pavilion will also spotlight the work of Felice Rix-Ueno, one of the most varied and poetic artists of the Wiener Werkstätte.

Her enduring design motifs will be seen across everything from the wallpapers and curtains in the lounges to the merchandise on sale in the gift shop. “Rix-Ueno had a unique way of embodying the transculturality of the Austrian-Japanese creative relationships,” says Wakita-Elis. “Since her immigration to Japan in 1925, she was active both in Vienna and Kyoto, teaching Japanese design students at both Kyoto City Art Museum and the private design institute that she and her husband founded in Kyoto for more than 20 years.”