Nerima Art Museum exhibit traces Japan's century-long love affair with power line imagery

An essay examines how Japanese woodblock printmakers since the 1880s have depicted telegraph and power lines as symbols of modernity rather than eyesores, contrasting this with Western social media users who frequently mock utility wires as ugly. It highlights a 2021 Nerima Art Museum exhibition, curated by Yosuke Kato, that gathered roughly 130 works from the 1850s to today under the title 'Densen Kaiga' (Electric Wire Paintings), showing wires as a recurring visual motif in Japanese art and anime.