When you enter UMMA's current off-site exhibit "Out of the Ordinary/Extraordinary," which runs through Sunday, you might be perplexed by the divergent images that return your gaze. The photographs featured in the exhibit range from half-nude androgynous youths and pregnant men to young women playfully mocking Japanese popular culture and silhouetted portraits of artists. But as different as the pictures of the 11 contemporary Japanese photographers appear in style and content at first glance, their works have more in common than what meets the eye.

Prominent Japanese art curator and cultural critic Mishiko Kasahara originally curated the exhibit for the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. It explores the commonalities of art's role in Japan's society, where the cultural fabric is worn thin by recent moral and social crises.

A response to current strains on cultural cohesion that resulted from 1997's stock market crash, increased violence rates and nationalism that some viewed as excessive, Kasahara's assemblage of contemporary Japanese work questions the roles of diversity, identity and relationships in modern Japanese society.

One of the exhibit's highlights is the work of Sugiura Kunie. In "The Artist Papers," Kunie creates life-sized silhouettes of visual and performing artists like Yayoi Kusama and Jasper Johns. While the silhouetted subjects lack defining characteristics like facial expression, the success of the black-and-white portraits rests on their ability to capture identity. Though the images are two dimensional, they're solid enough to suggest their place in a concrete reality. Kunie heightens the viewer's interest by combining four frames in two of her portraits. This diversifies the arrangement of images and allows for variations in scale.

The story behind Yokomizo Shizuka's photographs is undoubtedly enticing. For her series "Stranger," Shizuka sent letters to random people titled "Dear Stranger," providing a date and allotting a 10-minute time frame for photographs. If the subject agreed to her terms, he opened the curtains at his home and faced the street on the assigned date. The results of Shizuka's experiment allow the voyeur to break the boundary between public and private. Her subjects stare out of their windows directly at the viewer, offering up their domestic space to the viewer. The minimalism and openness of the work appeals to a broader audience, aided by its portrayal of people not exclusively Japanese. Despite the casual appearance of her subjects (one holds a phone in boxers and a hoodie), the photographs retain a performance quality because, in fact, the scene was staged for the camera.

Okada Hiroko's works respond to a prominent Japanese politician's suggestion that women become martyrs to reproduction instead of studying and working. Hiroko's proposed solution to raise Japan's reduced birthrate is somewhat unconventional. The hilarity of her photos rests on efficiency: males have babies. Combining video and photographs, Hiroko shows pregnant men shopping for baby clothes and posing in fertility clinics. The men appear to embrace childbearing, despite the clinic's dirty floor and dilapidated curtains. If pregnancy were as easy and joyful as it looks, as Hiroko seems to say with her ironic productions, then wouldn't the world be a better place if men were responsible for it?

The artists' diverse works, while motivated by current Japanese culture, are relatable to American audiences because they explore issues that are essentially human rather than definitively Japanese. These studies in selfhood, stereotypes and sexuality tease the extraordinary out of the ordinary.

Out of the Ordinary/Extraordinary
Running through Sunday
At the UMMA Off-Site