The Art Institute of Chicago is pleased to announce Foreign Exchange: Photography between Chicago, Japan, and Germany, 1920–1960, on view May 4–September 9, 2024. This exhibition features more than 100 works by more than 30 artists in the museum’s permanent collection, and provides an opportunity for visitors to learn about the new visual language that came to prominence in photography after World War I.

Emerging in the 1920s, this style featured bold geometry and abstract forms often associated with Bauhaus, the influential German art school that operated between the world wars. This exhibition explores how this aesthetic developed through exchanges among a broader set of artists from Germany, Japan, and the United States. Japanese traditional architecture and ink paintings were incredibly influential to Bauhaus professors Walter Gropius and Johannes Itten, while their Japanese students Iwao and Michiko Yamawaki brought Bauhaus art and design back with them to Tokyo. The opening of the New Bauhaus (later the Institute of Design) in Chicago expanded this cross-continental dialogue between the three countries, as founder László Moholy-Nagy introduced students to cutting-edge work by Japanese artists like Ei Q. After World War II, Institute of Design graduate Yasuhiro Ishimoto traveled to Japan with Gropius, exchanging knowledge with members of the experimental art group Jikken Kōbō. 

“Many artists explored the ‘Bauhaus aesthetic’ without tying it to the idea of a region or country,” said Yechen Zhao, assistant curator, Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago. “This show encourages visitors to draw connections across geographies and time rather than reducing these artists and their works to their race or nationality.”

This exhibition brings together exemplary objects from our collections of Photography and Media, Arts of Asia, Modern and Contemporary, and Prints and Drawings to trace this conversation that transcended national boundaries and identities and that, for many artists, offered refuge from racist and nationalist hostilities fomented in wartime. Their shared visual language was, and is, stateless.

Foreign Exchange: Photography between Chicago, Japan, and Germany, 1920–1960 is curated by Yechen Zhao, assistant curator, Photography and Media, with assistance from Stephanie Lee, Dangler Intern, Photography and Media.