ART REVIEW : For the Japanese, It’s Certainly Not All Work and No Play : LACMA’s ‘Asobi’ exhibition shows how important play is in Japan. Most of the works date back to the Edo Period.

Until Japan entered the nagging economic slump that’s currently plaguing the planet, the tiny powerhouse might have given the impression that people do nothing but work there. Now comes a stereotype-busting exhibition called “Asobi: Play in the Arts of Japan.”

On display in the County Museum of Art’s Joe D. Price pavilion for Japanese art, it’s a beautifully selected and often delightfully funny 75-work theme show organized by Kristine Guth for the Katonah Museum in Katonah, N.Y., and supervised by LACMA curator Robert T. Singer.

It lets us know that, like everyone else, the Japanese have always loved to let their hair down. Most works come from the long-running Edo Period, a time when the island nation opened up to the West and created the urban “floating world” of actors, mountebanks and prostitutes that inhabited the pleasure district of Tokyo, then known as Edo.

But play in Japan goes back to the rising sun of history as part of both Shinto and Buddhist religions. Horse racing and Sumo wrestling--today regarded as utterly secular if not slightly tawdry--had their taproots in Shinto ritual.

According to Guth’s essay in the slender, sharp catalogue, play was regarded as virtually basic to existence. In Shinto lore the sun goddess Amateratsu retreated to a cave leaving the world in darkness. The other gods lured her out with songs and bawdy dances restoring light to the world. The image is that in Japan life without play is life without sunshine.

Fun here includes competition; much of this art grew out of contests in the mastery of poetry, calligraphy and painting. It’s work that indulges in visual puns, parody and sexual double entendre. The latter seeps out of images of pillows and damp sleeves, traditional symbols of erotic longing. A big, anonymous gold-ground screen called “Whose Sleeves?” looks abstract and elegant. Recast in Western terms, it would be an interior scene with clothes of both genders scattered merrily about--and we’d get the point.

Making fun of authority figures is also an issue here. Hanabusa Itcho’s “Four Sleeping Figures” depicts a courtesan and her attendants. The subject is a play on a traditional image of four revered Zen monks, thus equating the pleasures of the flesh with the rapture of spiritual enlightenment.

Nagasawa Rosetsu’s “Chinese Children at Play” is rendered on two six-fold gold-ground screens. Visually witty and immensely endearing, the work shows scores of toddlers waiting in line while working up the courage to cavort on the back of an elephant so large it takes 24 feet of real space to depict the scene. That’s big.

It’s just the largest of several works that make you wonder if Walt Disney got the idea for animated cartoons from Asobi art. Zodiac animals dress up in kimonos. Winged insects march in ritual procession.

There is also a play on scale. Long before Japanese innovators became adept at making microchips, many of the nation’s artists took great glee in miniaturizing the world. Aesthetically, they believed that small scale concentrates and dramatizes the spirit of the objects, lending them that magic that charms us to this day.

Japan’s most famous form of shrinking the kids--or anything else--are the tiny netsuke. Makers of these objects were often as clever as they were skilled. They make keen visual puns such as “Netsuke in the Form of a Child’s Kite.” It’s also a kite in the form of a child who looks as if he’s been flattened in a mangle. Odd how much humor has an edge of cruelty.

Asobi art also relished illusionism. A lacquer writing box seems to have a fan on top of it, which is being chewed by rats. A leather arrow quiver is rendered in lovely celadon porcelain.

If anything, Japanese artists were even more inventive in the pictorial arts. One set of three books can be set side by side and opened so each page combines into a triptych showing people at their pleasures. The one on view depicts Kabuki actors having a hilarious time swimming off a sampan.

Among the most risible works here are a half-dozen images by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. The shadow of a lobster turns into a fisherman. A man’s face is a composite of nude figures in the manner of the Italian illusionist Archimboldo.

Perhaps the most sophisticated charmers are those where written calligraphic letters are turned back into the thing they stand for. The character for mountain becomes a mountain. In a variation Hanabusa Itcho made a triptych in which workers erect cultural edifices using calligraphic characters as building blocks. Japanese workers build Japanese poetry while Chinese workers do the same for their verse. A judge naturally gives the nod to Japanese poetry.

See this show. It’s a breath of fresh laughter.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through May 30, closed Mondays, (213) 857-6000.