Why Japanese Art Fell in Love with Power Lines
Accidental Aesthetics and Romance of Power Wires
From 1880s woodblock prints to Evangelion and Makoto Shinkai, Japanese art has never stopped drawing power lines. A new exhibition in Tokyo traces this obsession, showing how telegraph poles went from symbols of progress to objects of accidental beauty. The piece also explores the romance of infrastructure in Soviet posters, American photography, and anime, asking why we find wires so compelling—even as Japan plans to bury them all.
Nobody drew them because they were pretty, they drew them because they were present, and they were found to be pretty, even to the point of romance, in the process.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0
Power lines are a reminder of man's ability to generate electricity.
- FatherOfCurses
The Barenaked Ladies have a song that mentions power lines in a somewhat romantic way: https://genius.com/6365258
In the neighborhood where I grew up, there were transmission towers that went through about 200 meters away from my house. During the winter when we got freezing rain I could hear them crackle slightly. All the other infrastructure was buried, the transmission towers were the only overhead lines.
- KK7NIL
Nice read but hard to resist the "X but in Japan!" jokes.