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"I can’t understand why some people believe completely in medicine and not in art, without questioning either," Damien Hirst once quipped. Now comes an exhibition that questions both, and includes his work in doing so.

"Medicine and Art: Imagining a Future for Life and Love," which opens this month at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, is, if you can get past its slightly schmaltzy title, a show about the human body as it’s been understood by physicians and artists through the ages. It brings together some 150 medical artifacts with 60 historical artworks and, in keeping with the Mori’s mission as a museum for the art of today, 30 contemporary pieces.

Mori director Nanjo Fumio, who organized the show in collaboration with senior consultant Hirose Mami and assistant curator Tsubaki Reiko, says he was inspired by an artwork that doesn’t figure in the exhibition: Gauguins late masterpiece Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, a friezelike painting that reimagines the three ages of man, that stock Renaissance subject, as a lush Tahitian idyll.

Nanjo was particularly intrigued by the final question in Gauguin’s title, which brought to mind advances in medical technology like cybernetics. "Medicine and Art" goes further than previous shows with medical themes, he believes, since it is "about the future and based on philosophical questions such as the definitions of life, love, and death." Considering the possibility that artists, like present-day Frankensteins, might take advantage of developments in science and technology to create "a new creature as an artwork," Nanjo wondered, "Does this mean the artist becomes God?"

Nanjo was also inspired by a visit to London’s Wellcome Trust. Viewing the foundation’s collection of objects related to art and medicine, which belong to cultures ranging from the ancient to the modern and from the Western to the Eastern, he asked himself what kinds of discussions he could prompt at the Mori by juxtaposing these items with contemporary art.

The resulting exhibition contains a rich array of artifacts from the Wellcome, including anatomical models and surgical tools, glass eyes, prosthetic limbs, and custom-made X-ray apparatuses. Also on view are items with a more aesthetic thrust, such as a delicate red-chalk drawing of a human leg by Michelangelo in which each striation of the musculature is meticulously rendered, and 19th-century anatomical drawings from Tibet of male and female figures sporting transparent skin. One can even find Charles Darwins walking stick, its ivory handle carved in the shape of a human skull.

In the exhibition’s first segment, "Discovering the Inner World of the Body," are three anatomical drawings by Leonardo da Vinci (on loan from the Royal Collection and on public display for the first time) and an 18th-century scroll painted by Maruyama Okyo, from the Daijoji temple in Hyogo, Japan. The scroll is a sort of Zen memento mori portraying a skeleton meditating in the lotus position against the backdrop of a roiling sea.

But the contemporary art might well steal the show. What better context than this exhibition’s second part, "Fighting Against Death and Disease," for Gilles Barbiers creepy 2002 installation Nursing Home? On loan from the Margulies Collection, in Miami, it depicts life-size superheroes in their senescence: a graying Superman perambulating with his walker, a considerably less than incredible Hulk slumped in his wheelchair, Wonder Woman, her once-taut physique gone saggy, attending as nurse to Captain America, who’s supine on a stretcher and hitched to an IV. And what better place than the exhibition’s final part, "Toward Eternal Life and Love," for Jan Fabres 2008 sculpture I Drive My Own Brain II, in which the artist, windblown and debonair, clutches reins fastened to a giant cerebrum, riding it as one would a trusty steed?

Hirst, with his long-standing interest in medicine and death — consider the photos he had taken of himself grinning in a morgue or his anatomical models as monumental sculptures — is a natural fit for this show. The exhibition features one of his earliest glass-and-steel medicine cabinets, Anarchy (1989), and an eerily hyperrealist 2007 painting of three surgeons huddled around his wife after her C-section.

While the show’s title and final segment suggest a wish for some sort of immortality, Nanjo hopes the issues raised are as much existential as medical. "If there is no limit to life," he says, "the value of life’s precious moments might be lost.

"Body Image" originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2009 Table of Contents.