The Minneapolis Institute of Art has opened two Japanese art exhibitions on the same day, pairing a playful look at skeletons with a survey of post-war ceramic rebellion. Bare Bones: Skeletons in Japanese Art and Breaking Tradition: The Avant-Garde in Japanese Ceramics, 1948 to 1990 both opened on October 24, and both draw on the museum's renowned collection of Japanese art.

Bare Bones, on view in the Cargill Gallery through January 3, 2027, shows how skulls and skeletons appear across Japanese painting, prints and book illustrations, sometimes as secondary details and sometimes as the main subject, especially after anatomical knowledge spread in the nineteenth century. The exhibition presents skeletons in a lifelike and humorous manner, finding playfulness in imagery usually meant to terrify. Its highlight is a recently acquired pair of six-panel folding screens by Takeuchi Ryūa, showing skeletons at play in a courtesan procession, a work that turns a subject usually meant to frighten into something comic and theatrical.

Breaking Tradition, in the Mary Griggs Burke Gallery through February 7, 2027, follows the artists who broke Japanese ceramics away from functional craft in the decades after the Second World War. Working between 1948 and 1990, they pushed clay toward sculpture and abstraction, remaking a tradition-bound medium into a vehicle for avant-garde experiment.

Together the two shows offer a compact portrait of Japanese art's range, from popular imagery with a macabre sense of humour to the serious reinvention of a craft tradition. Both are free, and their Halloween-season opening gives the museum's autumn programme a seasonal edge.