The crowd and Yuko Suzuki’s woodcut drawings at Lumenhouse. — Photo by Kevin Armento

The J-POP exhibition at Lumenhouse is billed as “a new Japanese aesthetic of playful invention from the material realities of everyday life,” but this might be an under-sell. Material reality may have been the basis for some of the drawings and wood carvings on display Saturday night, but many more seem the product of journeys through dreamscape.

Take Yuko Oda’s fanciful series of pen and charcoal drawings — some accented with strips of glimmering paper — which explores variations of radial imagery. There are forms of flowers, birds, and planets in these pieces, but only loosely. The forms exist on backgrounds of blank, muted color, all of them suspended in orbit around a central figure (resulting in titles like “Cosmic Burst” and “Radiance”). Ms. Oda’s collection appears in sharp contrast to the work of the other three artists (Hiroki Otsuka, Mariko Suzuki, and Yuko Suzuki), whose works more closely fit within the style implied by “J-POP.”

Then there are Yuko Suzuki’s woodcut drawings: intricately (and very expertly) carved figures of luminous, provocative subjects. Children’s bodies in lovely bright dresses with oversized animal heads, a young girl squatting in defecation. You get the idea. The woodwork was exquisite, and these pieces stood out from across the room in a fashion that caused mirages of the words “Pow!” “Whamm!” and “Sploosh!” to appear in bright letters above the drawings.

A more-or-less constant crowd of about fifty kept Lumenhouse full most of the evening, and one could easily keep cool with available bottles of Asahi. The gallery itself, it’s worth mentioning, was impeccably displayed for the exhibit. Half of the warehouse featured the canvases and woodwork on pure white partitions, while on the other side of the large room a computer animation video piece was projected onto a large white studio background, next to which were a couple couches for lounging. It was a very clean presentation. This may seem odd to mention, but for these kinds of modern pop pieces with very clean lines, and — with the exception of Ms. Oda’s work — bright comicbook-like colors, the sparse and clean-cut display style really gave it a lot of punch. (Pow!)