Uchujin Gokon Exhibition

Before you go

The future Kyoto imagined by director Hiroshi Aramata is one where aliens live alongside humans and gods watch over people's hearts, and this exhibition puts that imagination in the museum.

A special exhibition for the museum's 20th anniversary, planned by Aramata, who has served as director for about ten years, on the theme of "the Kyoto of the future". Its centrepiece is the "Alien Bones" series, portraits of aliens drawn by manga artist Baron Yoshimoto after a divine revelation, with 100 original drawings shown in public for the first time, according to the museum.

In the near future Aramata imagines, aliens coexist with humans and gods born from people's hearts watch over the world, a world entirely unlike the present. The exhibition also shows some 200 lucky charms and talismans Aramata collected at home and abroad over about ten years, alongside works from the "Hiroshi Aramata Art Project" made with Kyoto Seika University students, about 360 items in all.

The art project was a contest Aramata organised for Kyoto Seika University students, in four categories: a welcome video of strange creatures dancing, a key visual for the 20th anniversary ceremony, photographs and rubbings from street observation, and a guardian deity for Kyoto. Winning students' deity designs were made into a statue together with Aramata in the style of the traditional craft "isshiki-kazari", and shown in the exhibition.

Aramata is a writer who became director of the museum in 2017; Yoshimoto is a manga artist who received the Japan Cartoonists Association Award's Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Prize in 2019.