It’s one thing to look at a book (or JPG, for that matter) but often the clarity of a print can offer a different sensation. On the back of her impressive book “half awake and half asleep in the water,” I went to Narahashi Asako’s career-spanning exhibit at the Tokyo Art Museum in the hope of seeing something different from her prints. The show did make good on that expectation, but unfortunately not for the better.

“Coming Closer and Getting Farther Away 2009/1989“ (up until December 27) was a real disappointment, largely because the prints were so poor in quality. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the catalog for the show, even the flyer for the show, looked better than these prints, which were large-sized inkjets with gigantic white borders. The colors were completely flat, as if there was a pale blue color cast—so frustrating when it’s obvious that Narahashi can make good prints!

Beyond their quality, all of the photos in this show were hung unframed, pasted to the wall by the top two corners. The bottom two corners hung free, and the paper was bent or creased in many places, as if each photo had been, as they say, blowing in the wind. Most of the prints were pasted up right next to each other, which made for an ugly sight: a solid line of loose paper flying off the wall, large borders cluttering the field of vision, and glare bouncing off the creases.

This style of hanging prints could have worked in a different building, but the Tokyo Art Museum is designed by Tadao Ando, which means that (for better or worse) it resembles an industrial refrigerator made out of concrete. In such an austere setting it didn’t seem fitting to hang the work as if haphazardly. I could have missed Narahashi’s concept entirely, but it was another off-kilter element which prevented the show from ever really getting off the ground.