adrianのブログ

Why is it the brightest and best young artists are leaving Japan? For sure, there are "push" reasons: Japan under the shadow of Fukushima, with all its ongoing economic, political and social crises, is a difficult place to be. But there are also "pull" reasons: places calling out to artists as great places to live, work and develop. New York, London, L.A., Hong Kong: they all have their attractions. But top of the list right now is Berlin, the last free city in Europe, and for many the true global capital of contemporary art.


Ayaka Okutsu, photos of performance by Iohanna Nicenboim

Any excuse and I am happy to board an ICE cool German train, Trans-Europe Express, and head for Berlin. I arrived last week to give a talk, and by accident it was gallery weekend and the opening of the Berlin Biennale. The atmosphere in Berlin is one of space, freedom and the attitude: "let's make this happen together". Other cities feel like a struggle to survive, and a constant competition for attention; the scramble to establish your "career", the focus on ego. In Berlin you feel like you could live on next to nothing, and devote yourself to collaborative art and creativity without ever bothering again about art markets or museum shows.

This must be why there are numerous young Japanese artists surviving and thriving here. Many arrive with German scholarships to study or fellowships from Bunka-cho and Japan Foundation. Most are now staying on. Hardly any learn much German, and the thought of being back in Japan is constantly on their mind, but Berlin has become a home.


Japanese Berlin at drinks before my book talk

Even without foreplanning my weekend was full. I started out with a rendezvous for ramen -- the best in town, at Cocoro on Gipstr. -- with mid career artists Ayumi Minemura (Are You Meaning Company) and Aiko Tezuka. Minemura's gentle relational art, influenced by art school in the late 90s at Zokei with figures like Koki Tanaka, has long found its home in Berlin. She is currently working on collaborative projects that question identity and romance, such as work with American artist James Gregory Atkinson earlier this year. Tezuka, who I was meeting for the first time, I had seen a couple of years ago at the brilliant Stitch By Stitch show at Teien Museum, in Tokyo, 2009. Tezuka is well known for her deconstructive installations using carpets, large scale fabrics and embroidery. She has just arrived in Berlin from London, and can't believe the cheap prices for rent.

Our destination was the performance that evening by Ayaka Okutsu at the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin. Amidst a series of installation works by German and Hungarian artists on the theme of "The Planet as the Festival", Okutsu's performance was by turns cute, funny, alarming and, in the end, quite harrowing -- a minature narrative commentary on the human condition, a live version (I thought) of Kafka's Metamorphosis. With electronic music as a soundtrack, Okutsu climbs into a strange colourful costume she has sewn with multiple arms and legs that are attached to the cieling by cords. This is my body, she says, exploring her limbs and physical feelings in this strange claustrophobic environ. She wonders how she looks to the appreciative, excited crowd. But her psychology then starts to shift: from comfort to alarm, as she begins to feel constrained, even trapped in this outfit and scenario. She wants to be free. A dark figure in black then approaches and starts cutting the cords. The limbs fall limp, one by one, but it is not freedom she finds, but panic as she realises that she is losing her physical self. Imploring the crowd to help, eventually kindly Berliners come up to carry the arms and legs, and help her move around again.



Now a mass cluster of people, Okutsu moves and is moved out of the room and down the stairs. She is being transported somewhere. The crowd follows. In the bar downstairs, a stage awaits. A wall behind which she falls. The dark anti-bodies attack her again. She disappears into a cloud of smoke. Don't look now.

The body, claustrophobia, and violence were also the theme of an installation in a brutal former GDR industrial space, PSM, by Ujino, who has developed a very productive relationship here with the German gallerist Sabine Schmidt.




Ujino, Duet

In a dark, oppressive workshop room, into which you climb as a heavy metal door clanks shut behind, Ujino has built a mechanical track on which two sets of hanging clothes -- apparently made by draping two shirts and a skirt over car windscreen wipers -- jerk and swing abruptly to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The dance imitates in an early Fordist mechanical style the movement and grace of Noh performance. Eventually the two empty shirts attack each other: a violent interaction accompanied by an explosion of noise. A bloody red light illuminates the ballet in the dark.

Watch the video here:
http://youtu.be/SnCsD40fiis

I was delighted to get the chance to chat a bit with a cheerful Ujino afterwards, sharing a shochu sour as he showed me another performance piece on video with radios, light and sound. Our talk turned to the still little known legacy of 1990s Tokyo pop art, and how he got involved with first Gimburart in 1993, then later collaborations with artists such as Matsukage. In the 2000s he has gone from strength to strength with the strong support of the gallery Yamamoto Gendai and writer Noi Sawaragi.

Elswhere in the city, there were highly rated openings by Takehiko Koganezawa and Izumi Kato, which I couldn't make.




Ryoji Ikeda

My third highlight of the weekend then turned out not to be the enormous industrial video installation by Ryoji Ikeda in the immense abandoned German Kraftwerk on the river -- a rather crass commercial collaboration with Honda car designers, that looked cool in the incredible destroyed factory space, but was ultimately empty -- but the nearby show at DAZ (Deutsches Architektur Zentrum) by the young artist Toshihiko Mitsuya in collaboration with the architects Grohbrügge and Chermayeff, called "Structural Studies".






Structural Studies 1-4


Structural Studies 2-7


Structural Studies 7

Mitsuya is known for his rather otaku style obsession with creating minature characters and objects out of tin foil. I'd once seen an astonishing wall of his creations before, which looked like a cupboard full of freakish invented animals by a Hollywood CG designer as prototypes for some Star Wars or Lord of the Rings film. Berlin, though, is sharpening his conceptual ideas, and with the architects, he explores the sculptural possibilities of 0.02mm aluminium film. Foil is composed only of surface, has no thickness, yet gets hard if pressed and can create light based effects that cannot be achieved with clay or stone. The sculptures, lined up diagonally in a room, with the titles 1-7 on a wall, seemed to tell a story, maybe stages in a romance or a passage through emotions, in relation to abstract 3D solids in space. A truly sublime installation work.

I had met Mitsuya last year, at his partner's place, the Yamamoto Gendai artist Sako Kojima. Kojima's extraordinary live performances as a hamster articulate anxiety with the strain of humanity in modern life. She has been following painting courses in Germany, and the work she showed me at the apartment was a series of graphic, often harrowing, paintings of her suffering furry alter egos. It's almost pure expressionism, almost too painful to look at, her violent and dark paintwork mirroring the harsh theme.

Kojima and other Berlin based Japanese artists will form part of Kengo Kito's plans for a second version of THE ECHO in August this year in Berlin. THE ECHO was the show of young Japanese art that was a landmark for the 70s born generation in Yokohama during (and against) the Yokohama Triennale. I paid a social call to Kito and his partner Kei Takemura, who are now settled in Berlin with their three year old son. We talk again about the negative reactions to the orginal ECHO show in 2008 by Tokyo curators and critics, such as Minoru Shimizu, who dismissed their artist-organised initiative (I wrote for the catalogue).

My catalogue essay, "After the Gold Rush"
http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/hM5OPpsLUrWje0vGDwo4/?lang=en (English)
http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/hM5OPpsLUrWje0vGDwo4/?lang=ja (Japanese)

A large number of those artists are now making quite significant careers: among them Kohei Nawa, Taro Izumi (currenty on show in Paris), Koichi Enomoto, Go Watanabe, Satoru Aoyama, Kouichi Tabata, Hiraki Sawa... The negativity and smallness of the Tokyo scene is one reason why a lot of artists choose to leave.

Saturday evening, there was the opeing of Takashi Murakami's new Hidari Zingaro (Kaikai Kiki) gallery on the gentrifying borders of Kreuzberg and Neukolln. One locally based Japanese writer, Kiyohide Hayashi, commented that Murakami must be a masochist, given that so many people in Berlin are critical of his work and what Kaikai Kiki stands for. There is also little money to be made in the city from sales. I thought the opening had to be symbolic: a signal to be part of the most imporatnt conceptual global contemporary scene, to counteract the negative blatant commercialism of all his work with Perrotin and Gagosian. The gallery was launched with a live painting by Mahomi Kunikata , along with a new video work (very similar in style to Akino Kondoh) and her now vintage -- if not well-past-sell-by-date -- minature pornographic sushi, with little girl characters posing on blocks of fake rice-- her footnote I suppose to Makoto Aida's Edible Mimi Chan concept of 2001. I was surprised that were showing pretty much the same thing as when Murakami and Midori Matsui discovered this troubled young woman from Yokohama in the early 2000s: a riot of teenage psychiatric confession in the form of outsider manga art in garish poster paint lines and colours. Oh So Typically Japanese, I suppose. Plenty of the Germans at the opening seemed to be enjoying it as such.

Sunday evening, I was overjoyed to be able to present my new book, Before and After Superflat: A Short History of Japanese Contemporary Art 1990 - 2011 at the alternative bar space in the old East, Bar Babette.

Info on book:
http://www.adrianfavell.com/BASF%20blurb%20page.htm

The evening was organised and hosted by the young Japanese-French curator Nine Yamamoto-Masson, who had been talking me through the dynamics of the Berlin scene the evening before. The book is partly about the rise and fall of "Cool Japan", and the simplistic neo-japonisme that Takashi Murakami has made so successful. The rest of the book is about all the other great things the world has missed in its fixation on Superflat: and it was a great honour to have a room full of Japanese artists to discuss their alternative vision.

Ujino commented on the explosion of art in Tokyo in the early 1990s, and the key moment of Gimburart.


Kei Takemura

Kei Takemura talked about conceptual choices that took her back to various craft techniques and materials, while experiencing the memories and longing of a transnational life. Kengo Kito explained how and why their generation's art had little to do with Murakami's vision. And the discussion was rounded off with comments from the visiting Japanese writer/curator Kentaro Ichihara, talking about the experiment of Magical Art Room with Satoshi Okada, Hiromi Yoshii and others, how they all had tried to create new opportunities for young artists to emerge. Other participants in the evening included video artists Mai and Naoto, graphic artist Ryu Itadani, sculptor Yuji Mori, painter Yuki Itoda, and performance artist Ayumi Matsuzaka.

The Japanese artists in Berlin remain a close knit group. And the habits of the old Tokyo social life don't change so much. After all the talk and drinks, it was time to move on to a nijikai -- which after some confusion took a group of about 15 to a classic German bar for schnitzels and flamkuchen and lots more beer. The talk for once was about Japanese politics. Once they had thrown us out of that place at about midnight, there was more talk of sanjikai, but I for one was ready for some sleep.


adrian goes for future with Ichiro Endo: "Mirai e!!!"

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Thank you to everyone who attended my book launch at NADiff, Ebisu on April 4th. It was a very special evening for me, presenting and discussing the book with so many Tokyo art world figures who have helped my research over the years. And now here are some pictures!


Not quite all Showa 40 nen kai: from right, Mario A, Matsukage, Aida Makoto (whose famous Azemichi painting of 1991 is on the book cover) + adrian


Artist and art chronicler, Hideki Nakazawa shows off his baka cg work of 1992, featuring Ozawa Tsuyoshi jizoing in Seoul with "Nakamura to Murakami". Now available in very limited t-shirt series (at least two)!


File my book somewhere between Yoshitomo Nara and Yukio Mishima


What a great panel: from left, Satoru Aoyama, Midori Mitamura, Hideki Nakazawa


adrian takes on Aida's Air Raid over New York (1995)


adrian and artist Peter Bellars, who provided many of the fantastic black and white photos in the book


Please buy this book! Thanks to writer Chie Sumiyoshi for organising and chairing the event, and hosting the party afterwards

You can watch the whole event online:
>ustream
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/21585491

Plus online chatter with Hideki Nakazawa:
>togetter:
http://togetter.com/li/283654



BEFORE AND AFTER SUPERFLAT: A SHORT HISTORY OF JAPANESE CONTEMPORARY ART 1990-1991
http://www.adrianfavell.com/BASF%20blurb%20page.htm
Available from Amazon.com and art book stores worldwide

WATCH THIS SPACE! Selected extracts from the book with Japanese translation will be appearing on my ART-iT blog in future weeks. You can read the first installment here (BASF 1):
http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/seBSJbcG5OxFazTvil0N/

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

I wonder how many people actually made it down to Kurashiki -- fifty kilometres south west of Okayama -- to see Erina Matsui's Sunrise before it closed this weekend (that's Erina's unofficial title, it was called "Artist Meets Kurashiki Vol.9")? Only hard core fans? I had to fly all the way from Paris.



At her graduation show in Spring 2010 at Yamamoto Gendai, Erina seemed tired out from keeping up with the growing list of collector's pre-orders. That big Takahashi sale, for example (the Erina universe painting on four screens) seemed to cost her a lot; and the straight commercial gallery format seemed a restricting format, even with the karaoke and cosplay performances to liven it up.

Being given a museum to play around in seems to have liberated a new burst of creative energy. Besides the neo-classical facade, Ohara museum is a classic edo style construction around a garden. It has a rather sleek annexe where they put the Japanese modern classics (the originals by Kishida and local hero Torajiro Kojima, for example), as well as a downstairs, that has a nice spread of gutai, minimalism, 80s pop art, and even some contemporary works. Thumbs up for for the Kumi Machida, the Yusuke Asai, and Rompers, that sweet and sickly Bjork-type video by Motohiko Odani, which I watch again with a couple of fifty something salary men.

But they put Erina in the main museum, that is still waiting for a re-fit, and perhaps has been since the 60s: its rather shabby 30s mock classic architecture, its worn felt carpets, its saggy wallpaper, its holes and rips in the infrastructure everywhere, its pension age staff. There's ugly lighting in claustrophobic windowless rooms, and lots of heavy ponderous European classical and modernist art hung on strings from faded wooden beams. Mr Ohara must have devised all this as an art history lesson for the common people. It's dusty and smelly and no fun at all. Except for Erina, that is.



Her works at this first proper solo show soon have the busy Sunday morning tourist crowd chuckling. "Sugoi des yo!" says one young couple (about the only couple I see under 45, and the only ones who looked like they might live in a major city). I hadn't worked this out before, but an Erina show is perfect for a populist audience. It's not for me, the ex-pat European professor, with a distinguished publications list on Russian literature or something; it's a big fat box of pink, soft and squelchy mochi, wrapped in glittery paper, ideal for a big and boring Japanese town museum where the crowds are only here for the package tour hotel rooms, omiage shops and the local lacquerware (or whatever it is they make around here) -- and don't have a clue what they are looking at. Most of them today were here to see the Ferrari sports car rally that was bizarrely polluting the streets of the normally-pedestrian only historical town centre. Later, I find out the museum has 300,000 visitors a year.

Erina welcomes them all in with a big grin and girlish charm: to start with an Uparupa galaxy painting on screens and a table full of good luck charms. There is a bamboo kadomatsu, also a pink, plastic toy version version of what looks like Johnnie Walker's legendary dog Bacon, with a nodding head (actually it's a dragon, to celebrate the New Year). I'm wondering where the next works are: instead of slowly plodding around and appreciating the classics, I'm doing this all wrong; I'm really only interested in seeing Erina's works, and rush to find them. I have to follow the rigidly planned out museum route up and down stairs via the middle ages, French impressionism, minor Picassos and Giacomettis, and modernist abstractions. This too is the point: Erina's works become surprise interventions in the otherwise deadly museum space. A treasure hunt amidst the fossils. The kindly septugenarian art guide waves me in the right direction, the old ladies smile as I take fervid notes. The next three works by Erina -- Erina as an octopus (a local delicacy), Uparupa as a still life, and a Renaissance style religious icon -- sit opposite an absurd Madonna and Gabriel painting by El Greco (quite likely to be a fake given the dubious origins of a lof of 80s acqusitions in Japanese): the icon piece has Erina-donna peeking through the golden saintly key hole, an antique she acquired in Russia, she tells me later.



This is one of her pretty, idoru type self-portraits, where she is sweet and blank like a shojo manga; downstairs it's back to the scary, ribald self-portraits.

All the signature stylings are there and more vivid than ever: the flesh wrinkles, the nose warts shine, the little facial hairs bristle; everything is all close up and personal in the bathroom mirror. Don't squeeze that spot. She even seems to be growing a beard in one of the two round bauble paintings. In fact, this one is her first ever "collaboration" (i.e., a painting of someone else) -- "me and you" -- in which her face blends into that of one of her most avid collectors. It's an intriguing first break from solipsism.

Erina told me off when I used the word "grotesque" before. No, it's all very beautiful. There are tables of stuff from her bedroom/studio: more toys, trinkets, a punching doll, jewelry, lots of Uparupas calmly holding court. A shrine of sorts. Erina tells me its a kind of Hina-matsuri table, and that she is -- of course -- Uparupa. In another painting she becomes an apple with a 105 degree fever. There is a also a collaboration (a pastiche + Erina) with Manet's Water Lillies and a Russian-style surrealist matrioska (Russian doll).

In the final room there are some cosplay type photos, another new departure; with sort of 1950s A list Hollywood stylings (a commercial collaboration with a fashion designer). Erina is inheriting Yayoi Kusama: becoming a character, with obsessions, hangers on (a queue of young earnest male Japanese artists ready to carry her bags), any number of outfits and persona, and a long line of branding products. More poignantly, there are a lot of empty frames hanging everywhere; sometimes ornate, sometimes handmade in paper mâché, another theme running through the show. Erina later explains that in the old days the painting was the man, and the frame -- the decoration -- was the woman. Nowadays, the frame can stand apart.

The big show piece work in the final room, "Erina Sunrise", is heralded by a golden frame hanging independently at some remove, with lots of purple silk lavished on the walls; a grandiose installation. The museum bought this one, along with two others. The universe expands, the stars shine, the gods fly; and Erina appears as Mount Fuji, with the sunrise exploding over its crest.



For me, though, the biggest highlights, in a calorie and cholestrol packed show, are the two unannounced works smuggled in like a Banksy raid into the main gallery. Erina went back to Kurashiki, to the museum she used to visit as as a child, and had a good look around. She then faked two of Ohara's most famous works, two paintings representing high modernism in the museum, West and East: one by Gauguin, a heavy set dark haired naked native island woman; the other by Japanese 20s master, Ryusei Kishida, the little brown dancing girl in a red kimono and white socks. The copies are close appoximations, with small Erina references smuggled in -- an Uparupa here, a cute horsey face there -- executed lavishly on a cheap cardboard "canvas" with a frame made out of cheap haberdashers tape. She then cut out the faces in the cardboard so that she can put her face in the painting and become the girls. It's just right: she looks like them; a perfect selection from the collection. Brilliant knees up vaudeville, like on Brighton Pier or Coney Island. At the opening of the show, Erina made her big appearance in front of an adoring local crowd, with Kishida's Little Dancing Girl literally hung on her face: as if she was the model all along. The little sly smile is eery.

It's too much. No; there's more. The museum shop even becomes an Erina show! There's some products, postcards, a folder, a cuddly Uparupa for 5000Y. And by the door, as at Yamamoto Gendai, waving farewell, a little blonde Blythe doll wearing an Erina designed outfit.

I was meant to meet Erina that evening, but she phoned to say she was busy in Tokyo. Instead, I took the train over the Seto bridge to Shikoku to check off one more contemporary art museum on my Yokoso ! Japan list: MIMOCA, the Genichiro Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art. The contrast is amazing. Kurashiki is a wealthy tourist town, Marugame a post-industrial slum, where they don't even have a MacDonalds. I asked at the museum if there was any wi-fi anywhere; they couldn't think of anywhere. Even the pachinko parlours are closed around here. The museum, though, is an over-the-top concrete 90s art museum as airport terminal; a sort of windswept remake of the postmodern Arc de Triomphe in la Défense, by Yoshio Taniguchi, all built to house the self findulgent collection of the mediocre modernist Inokuma. There is astonishingly low rate of art works to square feet; and absolutely nothing worth a dime in the main collection.

Despite this, MIMOCA has quite a respectable track record; much of it dating back to when young Yuka Uematsu (now at Osaka National museum, and working with Tabaimo) was curator here: I pick up catalogues by Suda, Yanagi and Koganezawa; Sugimoto did his entire origins of art history sequence here; they once had Marlene Dumas and Steve McQueen shows. When I try to pay with a foreign credit card, the check out girl doesn't know how to make the machine work. It all gets very embarrassing. Soon several of her colleagues are running around all flustered, apologising for everything.

The show today is one of my top favourites, Chiharu Shiota -- the only Japanese contemporary artist I've ever collected -- but it is a sore disappointment. A couple of old wooden boats get rained on; there are some old suitcases piled up in a corner (a copy of some of Chiota's windows installations works); some videos of cute kids. It's all a lazy re-tread of other shows that were much better; Shiota is stretching the talent a bit thinly. I begin to wonder about my investments.

No such disappointment with Erina, and we reschedule our meeting for Tokyo when I get back. I just hope the macarons I brought for her from Paris will still be fresh. I load up on sovernirs, catalogues and postcards and wander out through the gardens, contented, even though I couldn't sneak a photo of Blythe on the way out. I look around this anonymous provincial city on the way back to the station: Erina Matsui's hometown. I blink and look again. For a while all the billboards in Kurashiki have Erina's face.



ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Before and After Superflat
A Short History of
Japanese Contemporary Art 1990-2011

Adrian Favell


スーパーフラット前とその後
1990-2011の日本現代美術の歴史

エイドリアン・ファべル　




Contents

目次


PROLOGUE
• Tourists in the Japanese Pavilion

プロローグ
• 日本館のツーリスト


PART ONE
Little Boys and Tokyo Girls: The Rise of Superflat
• Artist in Wonderland: Takashi Murakami
• The Little Prince: Yoshitomo Nara
• Tokyo Girls Bravo! Kaikai Kiki and Mariko Mori
• Utsukushii Kuni: Yokoso Japan!

第一章
リトルボーイと東京ガールズ：スーパーフラットの誕生
• 不思議の国のアーティスト：村上隆
• 星の王子さま：奈良美智
• 東京ガールズブラボー！　カイカイキキと森万里子
• 美しい国：ようこそ！ジャパン


PART TWO
How to be A-Zillionaire: Commerce, Design and Art in the Superflat World
• The Art Entrepreneurship Theory
• Nara as Businessman
• The World is Flat
• The Creative Surplus

第二章
億万長者になるには：スーパーフラットな世界のビジネス、デザイン、アート

• 芸術起業論
• ビジネスマンとしての奈良
• フラットな世界
• クリエイティブの余剰


PART THREE
Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? The Tokyo Art World in the 1990s
• Tokyo 1991-1995: The Birth of the Cool
• Ginza Days, Omori Nights: The Birth of a Contemporary Art Scene
• Art and Money: The Birth of a Contemporary Art Market
• When Will Aida Be Famous? Before and After Zero Japan

第三章
あの人は今？：90年代東京美術界の若手ホープたち
• 東京 1991-1995年：クールの誕生
• 銀座の日々、大森の夜：現代美術シーンの誕生
• アートとお金：現代美術市場の誕生
• 会田誠はいつ有名になるのか？：日本ゼロ年の前と後


PART FOUR
Art & The City: How Art Replaced God at the Heart of Neo-Tokyo
• The Tower of Power: The Mori Story
• Yokohama: From Triennial to Debacle
• What are Contemporary Art Museums in Japan Really For?
• Echigo Tsumari and Rural Art Festivals: Rise of the Northern River

第四章
アート・アンド・ザ・シティ：ネオ東京のど真ん中でアートが神に置き換わる時
• 力のタワー：「森」のお話
• 横浜：トリエンナーレからその失敗へ
• 日本の現代美術館の真の目的
• 越後妻有と地方のアートフェスティバル：北の川の繁栄


PART FIVE
After the Gold Rush: The New Japanese Art Scene in the 2000s
• China Mania
• The Zero Zero Generation
• Aida’s Children
• Space for Our Future

第五章
ゴールドラッシュ後：日本の新たなバブル後アートとその重要性
• チャイナマニア
• ゼロ年世代
• 会田の子供たち
• スペース・フォー・アワー・フューチャー


EPILOGUE
• After the Tsunami

エピローグ
• 津波の後


Sources and Acknowledgements

謝辞


Cast of Characters

キャラクター のキャスト




PROLOGUE
プロローグ

Tourists in the Japanese Pavilion
日本館のツーリスト

What image should Japan present to the world? The Japanese worry a lot about this question. Every year, in fact, the Japanese Foreign Ministry, Japan Foundation and Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunka-cho) spend millions of yen trying to answer it. Among the many fields of culture they cover, contemporary art is one of the central elements of their mission. Although it is a small and specialised field, contemporary art is the cultural lingua franca of some of the world’s most cosmopolitan and influential elites. In major cities around the globe, it is what can be seen at top museums, in the fanciest auction houses, and on the walls of the richest millionaires. With the symbolic importance of art in mind, the Japan Foundation organises the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale once every two years. This is the world’s biggest festival of global contemporary art. At any World Expo like this, with so many wonderful countries on show, strong images are needed to pull in the viewers. Many will often overlook or forget the Japanese Pavilion. But, although it was not the official selection in the Pavilion that year, at Venice in 2009 a contemporary Japanese artist certainly gave the world something "Japanese" it could remember.

世界に向けた日本を代表するイメージとは何か。これは、外務省と国際交流基金そして文化庁が毎年何百万円もかけて頭を悩ます問題である。彼らが取り扱う数ある分野の中でも現代美術は彼らのミッションの中心となっている。それは小さく特殊な分野ではあるが、現代美術は世界で最も国際的で影響力のあるエリート達の文化的な共通語となっている。世界の主要都市ではこれが有名美術館や一流のオークションハウス、大富豪の家の壁で見られる物なのだ。このことを念頭に入れ、国際交流基金は2年毎に開催される世界の現代美術の最大かつ最上の祭りであるべネツィア・ビエンナーレで日本パビリオンを運営している。多くの素晴らしい国々が参加するこのような世界万国博覧会ならどこでも、観客を呼び込む強いイメージが必要なのだ。多くの人は大抵、日本パビリオンを見過ごしたり忘れていたりする。だが2009年のベネツィアで、その年のオフィシャルセレクションではなかったにもかかわらず、ある日本の現代美術家がこのような人たちの記憶に残る日本的な何かをもたらした。

The sun was shining, and the famous old city was full of rich and beautiful tourists. High on their list of things to see was the newly reopened customs house on the Grand Canal. On display here were the works of a global art collector, François Pinault, the multi-millionaire owner of Gucci and Christie’s auction house. He had engaged the Japanese architect Tadao Ando to renovate this spectacular waterside building at the entrance to the city. There are many famous American, German and British names in Pinault´s collection. But at Venice there was also something Japanese. Near the centre of the show, in a big white room, stood a monstrous eight foot high plastic sculpture. It seemed like something straight off the pages of a disturbing adult comic book. A naked cartoon boy with a big grin, enormous eyes and crazy hair stood there masturbating, a wild lasso of plastic semen filling the air around him.

太陽が輝やき、この有名な古都は裕福で身なりの良い観光客であふれていた。最も注目されていたのは、グランド・カナル沿いに新しく美術館としてオープンした旧税関の建物だった。ここでは国際的なコレクターであり、グッチやオークションハウスのクリスティーズを所有する大富豪フランソワ・ピノーの所蔵作品が公開されていた。彼は、建築家の安藤忠雄に町の玄関口にあるこの壮大な水辺の建物の改築を託していた。ピノーの素晴らしいコレクションの中には、多くの有名なアメリカ人、ドイツ人、イギリス人アーティストたちの名前があった。しかしベネツィアには、日本の物もあったのだ。大きな白い部屋の中の展示物の中心に、約2.5メートルのプラスチック製巨大フィギュアが立っていた。それは、いかがわしい成人マンガの１ページから抜け出てきた物のようであった。にやにやとした笑みを浮かべた大きな目とスパイキーな髪型の漫画のキャラクターのような裸の男の子は、オナニーをしながらそこに立ち、投げ縄のように白いプラスチック製の精液を空中に振りまいていた。

The sculpture was Takashi Murakami’s My Lonesome Cowboy. Sold to Pinault by the auction house Sotheby’s of New York in May 2008 for a reported $15 million, Murakami’s provocative “little boy” stands as the most successful piece of Japanese art ever. It was one of the last big trophy acquisitions of the global art elite, before the collapse later that same year of the world economy and the global bubble in art prices of the mid 2000s. As a result of his success, Murakami represented during those years most of what anybody in the West knew about Japanese contemporary art. He called this distinctively Japanese style art "Superflat". It was inspired by the country’s animation and comic cultures, and it seemed to be everywhere. ©MURAKAMI, a major world tour and retrospective of the artist’s works, during 2008 and 2009, took his vision from Los Angeles, via New York, to Europe and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. In 2008 he was listed by Time magazine among the 100 most influential persons of the year – the only fine artist in the list – and in 2009 was ranked by the magazine Art Review as no.17 of the 100 most important persons in the global art world today – the only Japanese in the list, one of only three Asian names, and one of only about 20 artists. In the autumn of 2009, London tourists packed into to the Tate Modern to see Murakami bookend a retrospective history of contemporary art after Andy Warhol with a huge mural of Akihabara, the electronics and video game epicentre of Tokyo, and a video featuring Hollywood actress Kirsten Dunst singing “I’m turning Japanese”, an old punk rock song also about masturbation. In the autumn of 2010, Murakami’s giant and colourful installations found a home in the Palace de Versailles in Paris, en route for an even bigger show for the Qatar royal family in 2012. It all confirmed “Takaaashi” – as he is known to his American friends – as Japan’s most visible international art superstar. He alone was able to rub shoulders with global art superstars, such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.

この作品は村上隆の『マイ・ロンサム・カウボーイ』であった。2008年5月にニューヨークのオークションハウス、サザビーズで推定1500万ドルで落札された。この挑発的な「リトルボーイ」は事実、日本美術の最も成功した作品である。そして、同じ年の終わりに起こった世界経済の崩壊と2000年代半ばの美術価格の国際バブル破綻の直前に国際的な美術エリートが獲得した最後の大きなトロフィーの1つでもあった。この成功の結果、数年の間村上は西洋の誰もが知っているであろう日本現代美術のほぼ全てを代表していた。彼はこの独特な日本スタイルのアートを「スーパーフラット」と呼んだ。それは、日本のアニメ・漫画文化に影響を受け、どこでも見られるようだった。2008年と2009年の間に開催された「©MURAKAMI（コピーライトムラカミ）」展は大規模な世界ツアーとなる回顧展で、彼のビジョンをロサンゼルスからニューヨーク、そしてヨーロッパはビルバオ市にあるグッゲンハイム美術館へと巡回させた。2008年には、村上は『タイム』誌のその年最も影響力のあった100人の中に唯一の美術家として掲載され、また、2009年には『Art Review』誌に今日の国際美術界で最も重要な人物100人の内17番目に位置づけられた。彼は3人しかいないアジア人の中唯一の日本人、そして約20人しかいないアーティストの中の１人だった。2009年の秋には、ロンドンの観光客がテート・モダンに押し寄せ、巨大な秋葉原の壁画やハリウッド女優のキルスティン・ダンストが古いマスターベーションについてのパンクロックの歌『I’m turning Japanese』を歌っているビデオなどで、村上がウォーホル後の現代美術の回顧的な歴史にどう区切りをつけたのかを見た。2010年の秋には、村上の大規模でカラフルなインスタレーションがパリ近郊のベルサイユ宮殿で見られた。それは、2012年のカタール王室のための更に大きな展覧会への道筋であった。これら全てが「たかぁぁぁし」（彼はアメリカ人の友人の間ではこう呼ばれている）が、日本の最も有名な国際的アートのスーパースターであることを裏付けている。彼は１人で、ジェフ・クーンズやダミアン・ハーストのような世界のアートのスーパースター達と肩を並べることができるだろう。

There are many other Japanese artists, but few in the 1990s and 2000s had anything like the kind of recognition Murakami enjoyed in terms of international sales and consistent museum visibility. The cult illustrator, Yoshitomo Nara, was one. Nara was a worthy partner to Murakami, with his childlike paintings, toys, playroom installations–and big sales. He too fitted the idea of superflat art. Nara spent much of the 2000s on a world tour of his own, rounding up an impressive decade with a large new catalogue and retrospective show in New York in the autumn of 2010 which celebrated his alternative status. Behind his international success, Murakami was also able to cultivate the careers of a number of young girl artists, employees at his Kaikai Kiki corporation which produces all his art works and spin off products in a related style. This obviously adolescent art appealed to a Western sense of what they thought Japanese youth culture must be like. Then there was, for a while at least, Mariko Mori, with her fantasy girl photos and space age machines.

日本人アーティストは他にもたくさんいるが、90年代と2000年代に村上が享受したような海外での売上高や美術館での出品頻度を同様に得た人は少ない。カルト的なイラストレーターの奈良美智がその1人だ。彼は、子供のような絵画、おもちゃ、子供部屋風のインスタレーション、そして莫大な売り上げをもって村上の貴重なパートナーであった。彼もまた「スーパーフラット」の考えにふさわしかった。奈良は2000年代の多くを費やし、独自の世界ツアーを開催したり、目覚しい10年間を大きな新しいカタログで総括したり、彼の新しい地位を祝った2010年秋のニューヨークでの回顧展を開催したりした。一方、その国際的な成功の裏で村上隆は、何人もの若い女性アーティストを育てている。彼女達は村上の全ての芸術作品とそこから生まれる関連作品を生産している有限会社「カイカイキキ」の社員でもある。この明らかに子供じみたアートは、日本の若者文化はこうであろうといった西欧が持つ固定観念に訴えかけている。そして他にはおそらく、幻想的な女の子の写真や宇宙時代の装置のようなインスタレーションを作る森万里子が挙げられるだろう。

Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara and Mariko Mori were successful internationally for a simple reason. Each made an art that confirmed, reproduced and sold to the West a certain vision of Japan that reigned until March 2011. This was “Cool Japan”: a kind of neo-Japonisme, which worked as an updated version of the historical Western fascination for classical Japanese culture known as Japonisme. It was the hip high-end tourist’s Japan that everybody wanted. Countless books, magazines, travel guides and websites for international tourists celebrated this image. Japan, for this kind of consumer, was a land which during the 1990s and 2000s became a cartoon: full of cute-yet-seductive schoolgirls, super-nerds with weird fetishes, and a warped, decadent pop culture. Young people in North America and Europe rushed to learn the words to describe this Asian wonderland. It was the land of otaku (obsessive nerds), of manga (comics) and anime (cartoons), of all things kawaii (cute) and moé (a word expressing an otaku nerd’s adoration of a cute young girl). It was also a Japan whose capital was a futuristic techno-scape called “Neo-Tokyo”, overlooked by the gleaming towers of Tokyo's high rise city centres, Roppongi Hills and Shinjuku, and full of the sensory overload and neon-possibilities of its commercial hubs, Akihabara and Shibuya. Where once Japan had an exotic culture of geisha (entertainment women), tea ceremonies and zen gardens, and an art of subtle wood block prints and ukiyo-e (Edo period pictures of the floating world), it now became a Cool Japan of maid cafes, outrageous teen street fashion, and infinite lines of plastic collectible products. The art of Murakami, Nara and Mori somehow succeeded in packaging this mostly youth and teen oriented pop culture for the elite, adult, and very rich global art world. Like the Young British Artists – a parallel generation who managed to re-invent London and “Cool Britannia” with a dramatic and often shocking pop art in the 1990s – this group of Japanese otaku style artists found international acclaim by presenting Japan and its capital city, as the artists in London had, as uninhibited “Sensation”.

村上隆、奈良美智、森万里子が国際的に成功した理由はとてもシンプルだ。それぞれが2011年の3月まで占めていた日本のあるイメージを認め、商品化し、西欧に売っていたアートを作ったのだ。これが「クール・ジャパン」だった。西洋を魅惑した歴史的な日本の伝統文化の最新版とも言えるネオ・ジャポニズムのようなものである。教養ある洗練された観光客の誰もが求めた日本像だった。外国人観光客向けの数限りない書籍、雑誌、旅行ガイドブック、ウェブサイトがこのイメージを支持していた。この手の消費者にとって日本は、90年代2000年代に漫画になった国だった。たくさんの可愛く魅惑的な女子生徒、奇妙な執着を持つマニア達、そして歪み退廃的なポップカルチャーで満ち溢れている。北米や欧州の若者達はこのアジアのワンダーランドを表現する言葉を競って覚えた。日本はオタク、漫画とアニメ、カワイイ物、そして萌えの国なのだ。また日本には未来的でハイテクな景観の「ネオ東京」と呼ばれる首都があった。そこにはきらびやかに建ち並ぶ六本木ヒルズや新宿の高層ビル、たくさんの宣伝やネオンに埋もれた秋葉原や渋谷などがある。かつての日本は芸者、茶道、禅庭園、緻密な浮世絵や木版画といった芸術などエキゾチックな文化があったが、今ではメイドカフェ、奇抜な10代のストリートファッションそして無数の収集対象となるプラスチック製品などを生み出す「クールジャパン」なのだ。村上、森、奈良の美術は、この主に若者や10代向けだったポップカルチャーをエリート、大人、そしてとても裕福な国際美術の世界で何とか商品化することに成功したのだ。1990年代に劇的かつ衝撃的なポップアートでロンドンと「クール・ブリタニア」を再発見することに成功した「ヤング・ブリティッシュ・アーティスト」 (YBA)のように、この日本の「オタク」スタイルのアーティスト達もまた、日本を抑制されていない「センセーション」として紹介することによって国際的な称賛を勝ち得たのだ。
　
To say the least, this superflat vision of Japan seems history now. The international image of Japan may have changed forever. Cool Japan is over. Japan is no longer seen as the leader of high tech modernity or the world’s Asian future. And for weeks in 2011 all the world saw on 24 hour news channels and YouTube were images of buildings shaking and the sea smashing into a vulnerable coastline. It watched in horror as nuclear reactors exploded, and numerous cities and towns were laid waste. For years the world had known that Japan had a stagnant economy, and even more stagnant politics. It had an ageing population and a desperately low birth rate. It had too many suicides, and a massive gap between urban growth and rural decline. It was being supplanted industrially and financially by China. But at least it had culture. For a decade, Cool Japan provided an alternative vision. It was government policy, and the first line in all the tourist guidebooks. Then, all of a sudden, the long distance air flights were nearly empty. Cool Japan became history, the bad memory of another “lost decade”. Internationally, Japan nearly dropped off the world map.

少なくとも、この日本の「スーパーフラット」なビジョンは今や過去のものとなったようだ。日本の国際的なイメージは変わってしまった。「クール・ジャパン」は終わったのだ。日本はもはや現代のハイテク国や世界におけるアジアの将来ではなくなった。そして2011年の数週間に渡り世界は24時間放送のニュースやユーチューブで揺れる建物や、海が脆い海岸線を飲み込む映像を見た。また、原子炉が爆発するのをぞっとする思いで見つめ、そして数多くの町や市が瓦礫と化した。長年、日本が景気低迷し、更に政治も停滞していた事は世界に知られていた。人口の高齢化と絶望的な少子化にも悩まされていた。また、あまりにも多くの自殺者がおり、高成長の都市部と過疎化が進む農村部の差が大きすぎた。工業的にも経済的にも中国に取って代わられたのだ。しかし少なくとも文化があった。10年間に渡り、「クール・ジャパン」は新しいビジョンをもたらした。それは政府の政策であり、全てのガイドブックの始まり文句だった。それが突然、長距離飛行機に空席が目立ち始めたのだ。「クール・ジャパン」は歴史となり、また別の「失われた10年」の悪い記憶となった。国際的に日本は、世界地図から姿を消した。

In the Japanese contemporary art world, the problem with Murakami and associates was already visible a long time before 2011. The easy eye candy of superflat art was, to anyone that knew anything about the place, a blatant caricature and distortion of modern Japan. For a decade, it became practically the only Japanese contemporary art ever seen internationally. In fact, the success of their otaku style art stood as the stunning exception to the dismal failure of much Japanese contemporary art to match the international impact of Japan’s other creative industries. As a result, aside from Murakami and co., contemporary art from Japan was much less globally appreciated than its anime and manga artists, its character and toy producers, its architects and fashion designers, or even its cooks and novelists. The Japanese art scene in reality languished for over a decade in the shadow of a far bigger Chinese art boom. Its turnover was a miniscule part of the global art market, and its many expensive museums and ambitious art festivals were largely overlooked by foreigners. Tokyo’s lively but small art world has never been anything but a minor outpost on the global map. Successive waves of home grown artists and creators articulated a variety of original and alternative visions to Murakami, Nara or Mori. But in the shadow of Cool Japan, they struggled to attract much attention or sales.

日本の現代美術界では、村上と彼の仲間達の問題は2011年以前から既に明らかであった。彼らの「スーパーフラット」の「アイ・キャンディ」（視覚的には面白いが内容はあまり無いもの）は、少しでも日本を知る人にとっては露骨な似顔絵風であり、現代日本の歪曲でもあった。そして、10年間これが実際に西欧で見られる唯一の日本の現代美術になった。実際、彼らのオタクアートの成功は、日本のほとんどの現代美術が惨敗している中、ずば抜けて際立っており、日本の他のクリエイティブ産業の国際的な評価に相当していたと言える。その結果、村上と彼の会社以外の日本の現代美術は、アニメや漫画家、そのキャラクターやおもちゃメーカー、建築家、ファッションデザイナー、更にはシェフや小説家などと比べると国際的に評価が低かった。現実の日本のアートシーンは10年以上にわたり遥かに大きな中国美術ブームの影に追いやられていた。日本の現代美術品の売上高は国際的な美術市場においては、微々たる額であり、その数々の高額な費用をかけた美術館や奇抜な芸術祭はほとんど外国人に見過ごされていた。東京の活気はあるが小さな美術界は、世界地図上ではマイナーな辺境の一点にしかならなかった。成功の波に乗った日本のアーティストやクリエイター達は村上、奈良、森に次ぐ様々なオリジナルかつ新たな展望を明確にしていたが、「クール・ジャパン」の影で人々の関心を集めたり、販売につなげるのに苦労していた。
　
Meanwhile, Takashi Murakami’s heady cocktail – written down in his 2001 manifesto for the Western art market, Superflat, that blended oriental stereotypes, deviant sexuality, corporate branding, and promiscuous pop culture iconography – was channelled into a bigger entrepreneurial mission back home. He successfully promoted himself as the guru of the kuri-eita (creator) generation, the young adults of Japan’s two “lost decades” of the 1990s and 2000s who grew up in a society in decline, but who dreamt of the freedom to travel and to express themselves creatively. To these followers in Japan, he declared he was on a mission to fool the West and smash the Japanese art system. Yoshitomo Nara meanwhile pursued a no less successful path to independence. He built on smart collaborative ventures across Asia, drawing on the help of thousands of internet fans. He also tapped into an outpouring of regional development aid from his native region, putting on touring shows that fronted his own multi-million yen book, toy and merchandise franchise.

その一方で、西洋の東洋に対する固定観念、逸脱した性、企業のブランド化、乱雑なポップカルチャーアイコンをうまく混ぜ合わせた村上の、かの有名な「スーパーフラット」美術論が、日本で更に大きな起業家としての特別な使命に注ぎ込まれていた。彼は、不況の社会で育ち90年代の日本の「失われた10年」に大人となったクリエイター世代の教祖として彼自身をうまく仕立て上げた。彼は日本の信者達に、欧米を欺き日本の美術システムを崩壊させることを使命としている、と宣言した。奈良美智も村上同様、独立を成功させる道を開拓した。彼はアジア全域に賢明な共同事業を構築し、インターネットで呼びかけ数千人ものファンの助けを借りたりもした。また、彼の生まれ故郷の自治体からの助成を享受したり、数百万円もの利益に及ぶ著作本やおもちゃ、グッズなどの商品化された物を宣伝するかのような巡回展を行ったりした。

The essays in this book retell the story of these two remarkable artist-entrepreneurs, as well as others close to them – both in terms of what they achieved and what their success prevented during their two decade long rise. They portray the social and cultural milieu out of which they came, and get inside the Japanese contemporary art world to explain its rare successes – and more frequent failures – on the international stage during these years. Based on over five years of interviews, documentary research and participant observation as a visiting writer on the Tokyo art scene as well as its outposts in Asia, America and Europe, it is a sociologist’s account of the Japanese contemporary art world today. Placing art in context this way is in fact one way of narrating the dramatic social and generational change of Japan since its own economic “Bubble”. This was when Japan's incredible post-war boom years came to an end at the beginning of the 1990s, and it entered a period of long, slow decline that have continued through to the new shattering disasters of 2011.

これは、このまれに見る傑出した美術家兼起業家の2人とそしてそれに近い人々についての話であり、彼らが達成した事、そして20年に渡り彼らの成功が妨げている事、この両方の面について書かれた本である。彼らが現れた社会的、文化的環境を描き、この間の国際舞台でのまれな成功例とより頻繁な失敗例を説明するために日本の現代美術の世界に踏み込んでいる。5年以上にわたるインタビューやドキュメンタリー研究、東京やアメリカ、ヨーロッパのアートシーンでの作家としての参与観察などを基に、社会学者の視点による日本の現代美術界の話である。実際、美術をこのように位置づけることは、バブル経済以降の日本の社会や世代の劇的な変化を物語ることにもなる。それは、2011年の新しく強烈な災害に至るまでの日本の戦後の夢や90年代初めの好景気の崩壊である。

Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara did it “their way”, but not by themselves. They joined forces with a new generation of art world entrepreneurs – leading gallerists, impressarios, and writers in Tokyo, as well as foreign dealers and curators. Together these people invented an international art scene, with new networks of museums and curators, and a new contemporary art market in Japan. Japanese government and corporations ignored this until it became something they too could use. Artists, curators and entrepreneurs tapped into an extraordinary creative boom of crisis-stricken Japan in the mid 1990s. They invented ideas, attitudes and imagery that were later made successful on a global scale. Yet along the way, an essentially radical and transformative cultural movement was hooked to much more powerful conservative forces of urban development and political nationalism. Big financial interests such as the Mori Building Co., and big political concerns, such as Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara’s Olympics-driven vision for Tokyo, were able to appropriate the creative surge to their own ends. So did bureaucrats and ambitious leaders of Japan’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party, desperate to find a new image for Japan internationally, using Cool Japan to boost its “soft power”.

村上隆と奈良美智は彼ら独自の方法で開拓して行ったのだが、全く1人でではなかった。彼らは東京の一流ギャラリスト、プロモーター、ライター達、海外のディーラーやキュレーターといった、新世代の美術界の起業家達と手を組んだのだ。彼らは共に美術館やキュレーター達の新たなネットワークで国際的なアートシーン、そして日本の現代美術市場などをつくり出した。日本政府と企業はこれを自分達も利用することができるようになるまで放置していた。アーティスト、キュレーター、そして起業家達は、90年代半ばに危機に見舞われていた日本で途方も無いクリエイティブブームに足を踏み入れたのだ。彼らが創案した考え方、態度やイメージは、後に国際規模で成功した。しかし後には、もともと革新的で因習を打ち破ろうとしていた文化運動は、都市開発と政治的国家主義といったより強力な保守勢力と繋がったのである。森ビル株式会社といった所からの大きな経済的関心や石原都知事の東京オリンピック誘致のための未来像作りといった大きな政治的関心は、彼ら独自の目的のために、その湧き上がる創造性を利用する事が出来た。そして国際的な日本の新しいイメージを見つけることに必死だった官僚や自由民主党の野心的な指導者達もその後に続き、「クール・ジャパン」を使い、その「ソフトパワー」を後押ししたのだ。

As part of the global Cool Japan mania, superflat art came to dominate the world’s view of Japanese contemporary art, monopolising spaces and opportunities where other visions might have been seen. It offered false promises to young artists who thought they could follow the path of these older artists, leading many astray. Meanwhile, the world grew tired of Murakami and Nara’s pop production lines in the international art world, with nothing emerging to take its place. It was already clear by the end of 2010 that there would be a terrible void in Japanese contemporary art the day that Cool Japan ended. The Western art world was already getting bored with images of Akihabara and cute cartoon characters. Its interest had long since moved on to other, hotter, Asian destinations such as China and India.

国際的な「クール・ジャパン」熱の一部として、「スーパーフラット」なオタクアートが世界の日本現代美術観を占めるようになり、他のビジョンが見られたかもしれない場所や機会を独占している。そして、これらの年上のアーティスト達と同じ道を辿れると思い込んでいた若いアーティスト達に誤った見通しを与え、多くの道を迷わせていた。一方、他にとって変わるものが出てこない中、村上や奈良の国際美術界でのポップアート製造ラインに世界が飽き飽きしだした。「クール・ジャパン」が終わった日には日本の現代美術のひどい空虚となる事は、2010年の終わりには既に明らかだった。秋葉原や、60年代の北国での孤独な子供時代のイメージに西洋の美術界は既に飽きていたのだ。関心はとっくに中国やインドといった他のより流行のアジアの国々に移ってしまったのだ。

Still, something important started in the difficult years before March 2011. A younger generation of artists, now in their late 20s and 30s, absorbed the business lessons and international ambitions of Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara, while rejecting their aesthetic stylings and obsessions. Others initiated distinct forms of creativity under the influence of various less well recognised figures from the early 90s wonder years. More idealistic entrepreneurs in the art world inspired extraordinarily ambitious festivals and redevelopment projects that brought in art and architecture to some of the most declining regions and urban neighbourhoods in the country. And the disasters of 2011 inspired a new kind of community engagement from artists looking for a redfined role in a troubled society. After the rise and fall of Superflat, there may still be hope for a fresh and more sustainable vision for Japanese art.

しかしながら、2011年3月以前の困難な年に重要な何かが始まっていた。20代後半から30代の若い世代のアーティスト達は、村上と奈良の審美的なスタイルと執着を拒絶する一方、彼らのビジネスの教訓や国際的な野心を吸収した。また他の人達は、90年代初期の驚異的な時代に活躍したそれほど有名ではない様々な人物の影響を受け独自の表現スタイルを生み出した。そして、より理想を追い求めるアート界の起業家達は、日本の最も寂れた地域と近郊都市に美術と建築を招き入れた非常に野心的な祭典や再開発事業に影響を与えた。そして、2011年の災害は問題を抱えた社会の中で再定義された役割を求めていたアーティスト達の新しい種類のコミュニティーへの取組みに影響を与えた。スーパーフラットの上昇と下降の後には、新鮮でより持続可能な日本美術のビジョンへの希望がまだあった。


BOOK LAUNCH AND PARTY: April 4th 2012, NADiff a/p/a/r/t, Ebisu, Tokyo. Please join us!

エイドリアン・ファベル　
出版トーク＆パーティ

日　時：4月4日（水） 18:30－20:00
会　場：NADiff a/p/a/r/t　1F店内

http://www.nadiff.com/fair_event/adrianfavell_talk.html


ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Surprise of my weekend in New York was to see the Chim ↑ Pom video KI-AI 100 in the main foyer of top alternative art museum PS1 in Queens, New York City. Curated by Christopher Lew, the video features the gang with some local kids doing one hundred martial arts style "energy shouts" in a circle amidst the wreckage of the Tohoku earthquake disaster area in Soma City.



It's the typical, over the edge, Chim ↑ Pom production in which, led by Ellie-chan the gang shout out a bunch of inane Japanese political slogans -- and whatever else came in their heads -- as a way of dealing with the unbelievable destruction around them. It's as offensive and brilliant as usual. What is doubly funny is the straight faced curatorial description, in which we are told in a deadly serious tone that the gang "made friends with local youth many of which has lost their home". The description goes on: "This is the KI-AI shouted from the bottom of their hearts, to the midst of sorrow and delight, by those who live simultaneously as victim and aid worker. This is their reality".

Curious New Yorkers didn't know whether to be outraged, or nod sagely at a moving gesture on the anniversary of the disaster. And nobody had a clue who on earth these kids were. Somebody really needs to be contextualising this stuff and explaining the rough Japanese humour going on here.

Here are some of the things they shout out:

"Let's go for it Tohoku!"
"Japan is awesome!"
"Let's all go for it!"
"Screw you nukes!"
"Radiation is great!"
"Is Radiation really great?!"
"It's not great!"
"I want to go swim in the ocean!"
"I wanna see a swimsuit"
"Buy spinach!"
"Soma has great strawberries!"
"We are not gonna lose against radioactivity!"
&
"Let's do our best to move to a brilliant future!"

Laughter in the dark if ever I heard it.

The video shows until April 23rd.

I write about Chim ↑ Pom -- and lots of other things, in my book BEFORE AND AFTER SUPERFLAT: A SHORT HISTORY OF JAPANESE CONTEMPORARY ART 1990-2011, by Timezone 8 publishers, Hong Kong 2012. Available now.



You can see a preview of the book here:
http://www.adrianfavell.com/BASF%20blurb%20page.htm

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

NOBUO SEKINE, PHASE MOTHER EARTH (1968)

Gallerists Blum and Poe are using the full scope of their extraordinary Los Angeles art gallery to put on a stunning museum-scale show of the legendary late 60s Japanese art movement of Mono-ha. The show, which opened on Friday, has been put together by the US-based curator Mika Yoshitake and runs to April 14th, with a catalogue to be published in May.


NOBUO SEKINE, PHASE OF NOTHINGNESS-CLOTH AND STONE (1970)

Mono-ha (school of things) is a highly intellectualised form of abstract sculpture that often uses raw, untreated and natural or industrial materials such as clay, oil, glass, water, stone, steel, wire, light bulbs, leather and cotton, arranged on the floor or in outdoor space, to make points about perception, space, and the "in-between" of subject and object. A lot of the work was location and time specific, focusing on process and production: there is thus an interesting relationship with its documentation and archiving, which involved important photographers such as Shigeo Anzai. While Mono-ha has been strongly recognised in Asia and Europe, it has had only very rare exposure in North America. The Blum and Poe show is very likely to be the first step in a comprehensive re-evaluation of the place of Mono-ha in world art history.


KOJI ENOKURA, UNTITLED (1970)

The title Requiem for the Sun refers to the aesthetic detachment and focus on materials that these young artists in the late 60s felt as a result of the loss of belief in object based art in Japanese postwar art practice at that time. The exhibition includes works by Koji Enokura (1942-1995), Noriyuki Haraguchi (1946- ), Susumu Koshimizu (1944- ), Katsuhiko Narita (1944-1991), Nobuo Sekine (1942- ), Kishio Suga (1944- ), Jiro Takamatsu (1936-1998), Noboru Takayama (1944- ), Lee Ufan (1936- ), and Katsuro Yoshida (1943-1999). Included in the show are recreations of Nobuo Sekine's Phase-Mother Earth (1968), where a huge cylinder of earth is dug out of the ground and positioned as a shadow next to the hole; Lee Ufan's (1969) rock-breaking-glass Relatum (Phenomena and Perception B); Susumu Koshimizu's Paper (1969), a massive granite boulder inside a fragile paper bag; and Kishio Suga's (1970) Infinite Situation 2, in which the triangular spaces in a staircase are filled solid with sand.


LEE UFAN, RELATUM (1969)

The overall effect of the show is breathtaking in its scope, and the assertion it makes about how Mono-ha was at the global forefront of transformations in art and art practice in the 1960s is convincing. Unlike minimalism and other schools of abstract sculpture, the Mono-ha artists were concerned not to create new art objects or transform the meaning of matter, but rather use found material and represent it as it is: most of the works were time and location specific, and therefore ephemeral. The emphasis was not on contemplation but on eliciting a momentary affective response: the shock of the object-in-itself; the frisson of the happening; the vertiginous shift in consciousness as perception shifts. And yet, as art historian Reiko Tomii points out, their work also had contradictory elements of object-based, discursive and instititutional art: one of the reasons that despite its anti-art and ephemeral origins, Mono-ha works as objects show up very well in many leading contemporary art museums in Europe, such as Louisiana in Copenhagen.

The opening was preceded by a quite remarkable symposium at USC which brought together six of the surviving Mono-ha artists, together with leading North American Japanese art historians. What was striking about the discussion was how articulate and reflective these artists were in philosophical terms, even as their work suggests a much more non-verbal, physical relation in its intentions and visualisation. Formulating their ideas in terms of phenomenology and "being-in-the-world", their thoughts are close to traditions of what was named in the West "existentialism", a philosophy itself via Heidegger influenced by the Kyoto school of Kitaro Nishida. The proceedings of this symposium will be published by the Review of Japanese Culture and Society next year.

The opening also provoked questions about the unusual blurring of art world domains at stake in the show. Why wasn't this show at LACMA or MOCA, for example? Why are the major museums moving so slowly to recognise the importance of this work? Far-thinking commercial gallerists, such as Tim Blum, clearly see their role in an expanded way: as curators as much as dealers, willing to support work which may not always have commercial value and which has huge historical importance but needs advocates. At the same time, several pieces apparently had been sold lucratively to LA collectors: there is a business at work here. Viewed from the other (museum) side, the blurring is becoming a familiar part of high art internationally. At the recent spectacular David Hockney show at the prestigious Royal Academy in London, it was obvious that a lot of the big artist consigned works on show were using this venerable location as a showroom for future sales once the exhibition is over.

The opening and the symposium were a who's who of Japanese contemporary art. Gallerist Tomio Koyama, Artist Koki Tanaka, BT editor Teiya Iwabuchi, and MOMA curator Doryun Chong attended the symposium, which was packed. Koyama and SCAI The Bathhouse's Masami Shiraishi were also at the opening, Alexandra Munroe had flown in from the Guggenheim in New York, and Takashi Murakami -- with whom Yoshitake worked on the ©MURAKAMI Los Angeles show of 2008 -- also made an appearance.


NOBUO SEKINE, PHASE DRAWINGS (1968)

At the opening, it was a little bizarre to see the spacey and contemplative Mono-ha works overwhelmed by wisecracking LA hipsters and über rich, plastic surgery enhanced stock holders from the Hollywood hills, all out on an early evening art aperitivo before dinner in Culver City. But it was fun listening to their clueless comments: "Wo! This art makes me scared!"; "Hey -- these guys were really extreme". Some of us were not sure that a parking lot with bouncers was the best place to see Sekine's and Haraguchi's most spectacular works. On all these scores, a real museum showing might be a more appropriate location. But nevertheless, Blum and Poe, Yoshitake and the organisers of the USC symposium all deserve a huge round of applause for these important and comprehensive events.

More information from the gallery here:
http://www.blumandpoe.com/exhibitions/requiem-sun-art-mono-ha#images




ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

What could be better than ten days in Tokyo? People often wonder how it is I do my research, when the fact is I cannot be in Japan so often. Basically, I live on the other side of the world. I like to reply that ten good days hanging around, listening, looking and marvelling at the Tokyo art world is, for me, if not exactly a lifetime, at least good enough for a year in many other places.

As we pass from the Rabbit to the Dragon, I haven't done my usual round up of the past year, this year. Let's face it: it was a bad year: "the rabbit that always tricks you" as artist Mai Miyake mentioned to me about her recent show, that in Tokyo has been on at Bunkamura, Down The Rabbit Hole. The Dragon will surely be better.


MAI MIYAKE

So instead I want to offer my ten days "sampler" of the best of October and November (with a few other links to highlights of the year). What I saw during an average week in the city. Or: why I still love the Tokyo art scene.


DAY ONE. FRIDAY.

I got in late on Thursday. Only time for the requisite first stop: a hokke setto with omori raisu at Ootoya in Ueno. It's cheap and delicious. I'm ready to start.

Friday, my first stop is Omotesando. I have a few minutes to spare, so I check out Yoko Ono's space 360°. Im looking for old fluxus memorabilia, or something historical. I used to live around the corner, and for years didn't know this gallery was here. Today it's just full of some anonymous pop art. I suppose it sells to tourists.

I'm on my way to Spiral Garden, where there is the young "Emerging Director's" gallery show. Sponsored and selected by the brilliant veteran who started it all, Tsutomu Ikeuchi. I'm going to miss the talk show tonight with art cheerleader Yumi Yamaguchi. But I do run into my old friend Haruka Ito, who used to run the Magical artroom, until she launched her own gallery and art platform, Island, that is based out of both Kashiwa "in the suburbs" and the new 3331 building.

We swap some news, and documents, and I'm particularly interested in the thrown together works on the wall she has by Ichiro Endo, who has become quite a figure with his determined engagement in the post-Tsunami art movement. In fact, I see his vans all around the city during the week; he seems to be everywhere. I last met him when he gave a talk at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. I'll see Haruka later in the week again.

On Ichiro Endo:
http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/0NukOMi9jWBVv8pXLKRe/

Later, I'm over near the Sumida River, and happen to go by the Yaso Gallery. My friend Kiki Kudo used to run this space, associated with the famous goth/underground magazine. As always its a fantastically weird experience: the shop upstairs is a cornucopia of bizarre Victoriana; the concrete space downstairs like a seedy garage in which lots of unmentionable things have been left to fester. There are two exhibitions of taxidermic and doll art inspired by the cult Czech film maker, Jan Svankmajer. You just don't see stuff like this in the left bank or east end galleries I hang out near in Paris or London!

The evening is dedicated to a music performance: a piece of Noh chanting by Ryoko Aoki set to electronic music. Ryoko is a friend I met a long time ago in an English style cafe in Sendagi, who I also see occacionally in London where she studies. It is an intense, perfectionist performance in a spectacular setting: Kazuyo Sejima's brilliant set piece Shibaura House art centre near Tamachi. The crowd is specialised and warmly appreciative of Aoki's innvative approach, which she says is not approved by many of the conventional teachers in the art form. There is a long, academic discussion about the piece afterwords.

On the way out, I get an excited text message from Erina Matsui about the opening she is going to Shibuya: it's a show of girls' art including something by her and Ellie chan of Chim Pom. I want to go but I am running late, and feeling desperately jet-lagged. Time only for a delicious tan tan ramen in Yushima before sleep.


DAY TWO. SATURDAY.

Day two has been scheduled for Yokohama. I'm just in time to catch the last week of the Triennial. Omens were not good this year, the fourth time it has been held. Japan Foundation had withdrawn funding, waterside locales had been given up, and much of the show was shrunken to the size of Yokohama Museum. Still, weather and attendance has been good, so all is not yet lost for this now minor Asian event, which was once hoped for as Japan's biggest global showcase of art to the world.

As it is, it is a poor triennial. The international curator Akiko Miki has brought in some big names who grabbed all the attention -- everyone is talking about Christian Marclay's time videos which has been reproduced from Venice. There are rumours that Miki has been impossible to work with, and neither Eriko Osaka or Taro Amano seem to have been much engaged (the exhibition surely would have been better had they been). The title is vacuous and meaningless, the waffle in the catalogue pointless, the foreign language public relations as useless as ever. It seems a show without a mission.

Let's dwell on the good bits. I love the room by Koki Tanaka, one of the few artists given a distinctive space of his own, and with the imagination to create a complete experience for viewers who wander into his ramshackle cardboard den to watch some of his quirky conceptual videos. I particularly like the one about a bus ride in Los Angeles I have made many times along a rougher stretch of Sunset boulevard. Tanaka takes his bike on and off the bus. I met him here for an interview a little over a year ago:

http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/TjKIsrLvniZ5pCNbw9EY/

The other big name Japanese artist who delivers is Hiroshi Sugimoto. I've never seen one of his big shows, but I like the humourous jumble of antiques and philosophical musings about serendipitous happenings in this elegant mini-gallery, announced by his word play poem about Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du sel). The only problem is the crowd: which makes it impossible to dwell long on his pieces. So many other parts of the show go by in a big blur. There are too many people shuffling around, hardly any of the artists is given enough space, and by the time I try to see my way around the second site at Bank Art, I am thorughly fed up with the experience. A pity that I can't spend a bit more time with Mai + Naoto's sand hill work, for example. On the other hand, the bookstore is a joy, with a handful of hard to find catalogues from the 1990s and 2000s on sale.

It's a long day. The walk is nice, though, and the bus shuttles work when you need them. I would also single out Shimabuku for praise, for his startling, very un-Japanese bill board sign over the bridge between Sakuragicho and the city centre. Here is what he has to say:


SHIMABUKU, THE CHANCE TO RECOVER OUR HUMANITY

The real highlight of the day, though, comes in the much quieter and less trampled "real city" part of the show in Koganecho, down under the railway tracks east of Sakuragicho which have been renovated as part of the city's ongoing creative city projects: this year's Koganecho Bazaar. The transformation since I last saw the area -- a couple of years ago, when there was still some yakuza and red light activities going on -- is quite remarkable. Now it's all artist studies, performance spaces and cafes selling caffee ratte.

It's dark and getting late and the tour has to be rapid, including a few tastings of street food that are on offer. I'm happy to catch a video work by Mitsuhiro Ikeda -- I talked with him over beers a couple of years ago.



Next door, in a small converted house gallery is Tsuyoshi Ozawa's "Happy Island", the fully worked out installation / video of the performance I saw him give in Düsseldorf in May. See my special report (the same piece as the one on Endo, my most debated blog of the year:)

http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/0NukOMi9jWBVv8pXLKRe/

It's a brilliant piece, made homely here by the front room atmosphere. At the end of the sombre poem, the table the television is standing on starts jolting widely, a home made earthquake machine. Its a nice touch of bathos.





Elsewhere in the streets the galleries are closing. There is time to catch a photo of one of Ichiro Endo GO FOR FUTURE wagons, and the latest tireless plans he has for taking his message back up north. In a wonderful small renovated traditional house, with strange and convuluted stair ways and tiny polished rooms -- Mujikobo (the Kogane Mini Residence) -- there is striking set of photos, called the Last Portrait Series by Takuboku Kuratani -- people of all ages posing for their graveyard portrait. I also catch new work by Yosuke Amimiya and Tomoyuki Noda's "rocker eye doll" project.

And what better way to finish the day than tempura soba in a tiny popular sobaya under the railway? I think about my favourite blog of last year: my visit to Mrs Orimoto and her son Tatsumi in a grimy part of Kawasaki:

http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/yNLX5pgtG2WHUu3IkRrw/


DAY THREE. SUNDAY

Sunday starts in Shibuya, in the rain, on the way to see Erina Matsui's new work, a mural that looks like "a year in life of", part of Parco's I00 Girl Creator's festival, Shibukaru. She has texted to say she has already headed back to Okayama. I've never seen the Parco Museum, which is famous of course for launching Superflat. It's shiny and glamourous and on the third floor but a tiny space, like a showroom. Perfect for girly art however, there's lots of spangly things, toys, kawaii and pink stuff, and the odd bizarre twist. Erina has one wall to herself. It reminds me to check up on her forthcoming exhibition at Ohara, Sunrise Erina (on now, until April 8th, which means I still have a chance to see it).

Toyko Wonder Site is nearby, where I can catch up with a mini retrospective of photographs by another friend, Tomoko Yoneda, who is in Tokyo on a fellowship. There is also work by much talked about video artists Meiro Koizumi and Masaru Iwai, as well as a number of other East Asian artists, in a show ponderously titled, "Where do we go from here?". Yoneda's answer is always historical: to go looking at the now quiet, almost empty places where once something terrible happened; documentation from the Pacific War, Manchuria, the Western front. My favourite is the picture of an empty muddy field, in front a number of ugly new big McHouses, in the suburbs of some European city -- it is in fact a former minefield near Sarajevo in Bosnia. There is also a photo where we can look through Trotsky's cracked glasses at some political text; it was the first time they tried to assasinate him.

It's a nice walk from Shibuya through Harajuka, and there is another yellow Endo van in the streets. He really is everywhere!



At Watarium, I cannot wait to see the Yayoi Kusama 60s retrospective. Finally, she is getting the serious art historical recognition she deserves in Japan. This is a fantastic show, filling the odd sized shapes of the museums with even odder Kusama imaginings, including a gloriously batty videoed song in which the 80+ year old sings about how great anti-depression drugs are in a multicoloured dress and wig. It's a good advertisement for mental hospitals. The main room downstairs is full of vintage 60s photos, when everyone was nude, sexy and crazy. Not much like this in New York now. Upstairs, her red and black blow up rubber pieces look fantastic crammed into this claustrophobic mirror space. Thumbs up to Watarium. Could be the show of the week? And this was before I saw the show in Paris:

http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/Siwp0OxF7XWu85mJydKQ/

I'm on a roll, so there's even time to swing by Traumaris and NADiff in Ebisu before the shop closes. Chie Sumiyoshi is out, but I check the show in her cool bar/art space. There's an interesting outdoor/window installation by Tetsuro Kano, who I will see more of later this week. Downstairs at NADiff I can load up on books, and also see a small show by Jiro Takamatsu, the man who made art of wooden chairs and bricks, and put the high in Hi Red Centre. Again, it's an education into some important avant garde art of the 60s and 70s, and there's more from him on its way this week, as it turns out.

Evening: Its Halloween and head off to the maniac all nighter at Art Gig Tokyo in the dead hospital behind Shinjuku. This one I blogged about live from my hotel bedroom. Enjoy (I did):

http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/pJc4MY9ETAbwmvsd5Unl/


DAY FOUR. MONDAY.

After the late night Art Gig Tokyo yesterday evening, Monday is a slow starter. I'm headed over to Ikebukuro to meet the photo curator, Hiromi Nakamura. We co-curated a show/event on the post- "girl photography" of Mika Ninagawa and Mikiko Hara in early 2008 at UCLA.

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7mq7n279

I have always valued Hiromi's ironic, staunchly independent and often critical view of the Tokyo art world. At the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography she put on brilliant shows: I especially remember the Mika Ninagawa show where they created a miniature model kit of one of Ninagawa's girly bedrooms as part of the catalogue. Hiromi is currently working for Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, developing a new art space for them.

We head to a small villagey area, Zoshigaya, where there is a cute old-style kissaten. It's always amazing to find these small pockets of neighbourhood life, nestling inside the big city. There's also a stop for one of my favourite icons of northern Tokyo: the To-Den tram, which is memorably captured in the coloured ink print by the first artist I met in Tokyo, Ryu Itadani.


RYU ITADANI, TO-DEN

After lunch, I walk back to Ikebukuro with one destination in mind: Junkudo book store, particularly the 7th floor where they have the art, design and photography books. I get loaded up with some catalogues or journals I've missed: Shimabuku, the 2003 Echigo-Tsumari catalogue, a Katsuhiko Hibino book, some back editions of BT. Interesting to see Yoshitomo Nara's monumental two volume catalogue raisonné (Complete Works, 2011) finally on sale after all the effort to try to find every work -- however obscure. There is an extraordinary sales note on the shelf by the book. I can't believe it! Junkudo are actually apologising for the fact that pictures #D2000-203 and #D2000-204 in the second volume have been found out to be fakes. That is so Japanese!! Yeah, at 25,000Y, I want my money back! As I argue in my book Before and After Superflat, the fact that there are fakes in circulation should hardly bother the prolific Nara, since he is uniquely an artist who has encouraged all his fans to copy his work as much as they want. That's how the Nara brand proliferates and grows bigger ever year.




NARA FAKES, APPARENTLY

The view from the 7th floor is amazing: it's a clear day, and we can see the mountains out towards Nagano.

Not much on this evening, so I go for a long soak in my favourite sento in Asakusa: one of the few traditional places in Tokyo they haven't turned into a McDonald's, Pachinko or miniature parking lot yet.


DAY FIVE. TUESDAY.

The hotel I am staying in does a shitamachi bike rental. The bike is too small, and the tyres are flabby, but it is so much fun to be an anarchist Tokyo biker again. I cycle from Ueno to catch Mizuma Gallery at early opening. After a chat with the gallery assistant, Miho Osada, and buying a couple of new publications by Makoto Aida and hearing the big news about his now announced November show at Mori Art Museum (remember where you read it first: "When Will Aida Be Famous?"), I sit through the new anime video by their star "girl" artist, Akino Kondoh. Although she is widely collected, it is her first solo exhibition in three years, since she moved to New York. The theme plays with memory and déjà vu, with the familiar feeling of childhood nostalgia and unease running through the video. It's an intuitive piece, but the arresting imagery and graphics don't reveal much to me while I sit there on my own.

I cycle all the way along the Soto-bori moat, then across the Sumida river, then south for my next meeting: lunch with artist-photographer Tomoko Yoneda. Tomoko is in Japan on a fellowship with Tokyo Wonder Site, but I know her from London, where we occasionally meet up in the East End for a drink.

She takes me over to the Kiyosumi building to see her new show at Shugo Arts. Apparently I missed a good night on Friday at Chie Sumiyoshi's Traumaris, where they were drinking late with Johnnie Walker, and former Mori Art Museum director David Elliott, who was in town.

Yoneda makes photographic art that explores the invisible history and memories that linger in places and objects. Her work is often the result of intense archival fieldwork, as well as an elaborate process of selection and composition. In the new series she photographs the interiors of a number of Japanese style houses that were built in Taipei during Japanese occupation. Some of the houses have fallen into disrepair, others have had new stories written into them by their more recent owners. As was apparent in the series of photos taken in an old Ministry of defence building in Korea -- seen at Roppongi Crossing 2010 and in Elliott's Bye Bye Kitty!!! in New York 2011 -- Yoneda's work is now taking an almost abstract painterly style of composition, as she captures geometrical forms, blocks of colour, and only the subtlest hints of specific individual intervention. This is quiet, understated, yet wholly effective work, perfectly at place in Shugo Satani's classic gallery space. Yoneda's eye pulls in the viewer, leaving them mentally to re-invest the work with the historical noise and chaos that she has almost -- but not quite -- evacuated from the photo.


TOMOKO YONEDA, KIMUSA

I am always promising I will (try) to write something about Tomoko's work. It is some of the best art by a Japanese artist of the last twenty years, but it is not an easy task. I make a bid with my editor at Art Forum to write a Critic's Pick for them about the new show, but someone has already chosen to write about it, they say. Here is the review that appears later (in turns out by Midori Matsui -- nice!):

http://artforum.com/index.php?pn=picks&id=29542&view=print

Next door to Shugo, something special. In Miyake Fine Arts' small space, there is a version of Yukinori Yanagi's World Ant Farm.


YUKINORI YANAGI, WORLD ART FARM (1990)

It is a spin on the original themes he first displayed in 1990 (the concept in fact dates to 1985) with the 9 or so flags (glass boxes of coloured sand) being the flags of the British Commonwealth. Her Majesty's Pompous Ensign gets its just reward in each box, by being gnawed away by ants. I think the ants have long gone, so what we have left is the damage they did, tunneling their way through the proud red, white and blue on multiple Union Jacks. Apparently one of the most difficult challenges that the artist faced when showing this seminal work internationally -- one of the absolute masterpieces of the early "Tokyo pop" era -- was that it was very difficult to transport the ants across national borders. We still face a world locked into nation-state-containers and nation-state-mentalities, a world of "ghettos" as the young Yanagi described it at the time (in the catalogue for Wandering Position, 1992), a world he was desperate to somehow escape. Tomoko and I say hello to Shinichi Miyake, Yanagi's long time friend and art dealer, who has a very protective relationship to this quiet superstar artist who lives and works in Hiroshima (I interviewed Miyake and Yanagi for my book in June).


DAY SIX. WEDNESDAY.

The next day, I am back at Kiyosumi-Shiragawa. Again lunch, but this time with Midori Mitamura, another long time Tokyo insider who has helped me hugely with my research. She also wants to go briefly over to the Kiyosumi Galleries to check a piece of business: there is going to be a group show she is involved in at Ai Kowada's new gallery in the building.

There is a quite violent and grotesque video by Takeshi Ikeda playing in the gallery. It's somewhere in the vicinity of recent successful work by Taro Izumi and Meiro Koizumi. The artist is smashing plastic bags of something like tomato sauce on the screen and getting quite dirty, while shouting pop slogans in English.

Midori is happy to go with me to MOT to see the shows on there. We phone a curator at the museum to see if we can get some kind of tour. On the way over, though the very charming Miyoshi district, we drop by Mujinto Productions to see what's happening. The owner, gallerist/producer, Rika Fujiki is there. The gallery is a former nomiya, lovingly preserved and modified into an art space, that is good for shows and great for events -- especially given its wide opening doors at the front, which open out with an awning to the street. On show are new works by Lyota Yagi, A View From A Higher Dimension. He has been showing some of his older, turntable works, as part of the Yokohama Triennale. The current work appear to be mathematical sculptures, made out of metals tubes, both standing on plinths and hanging from the ceiling.

At MOT, we are shown the new Bloomberg Pavilion, an odd airy construction on the promenade at the front of the musuem, by the architect Akihisa Hirata. The pavilion creates a self contained space for young artists to do solo installations, events or performances of a temporary nature. Installed is a work by Tetsuro Kano (who was also on show at Traumaris) made of nets and webbing within which has trapped a live bird in the building.

We are here to see the much discussed venture of the Museum into architecture, Yuko Hasegawa's collaboration with top archtecture duo SANAA: Ryue Nishizawa and last year's director of the Venice Architecture Biennale, Kazuyo Sejima. In some ways, it is a logical next step for Hasegawa after her signature opening show at MOT, Space for Your Future (2007), which was at the time a scintillating selection of global art, design and architecture. Architectural Environments for Tomorrow is a selection of leading global architecture as art show: Japanese architecture is hip worldwide, the idea was no doubt was to jump on the cache of the Sejima show in Venice, and try to raise more appreciation for the achievements of Japanese architects in their own country. Amazingly there is no museum or archive devoted to their work.

Unfortunately, however, this attempt to turn architectural models into a show of art installations is a pointless failure, that underlines all the problems of trying to show architecture as abstract art. Yes, there are some interesting models, but architectural models are neither art or installations, and without extensive explanation and texts -- there is virtually nothing provided, even in Japanese -- they are just empty fragments of the architectural imagination. The presentation is conventional white cube, the layout is cluttered, and we learn nothing -- except that Hasegawa wants to be taken seriously in the company of architects. The big final room then offers an incredibly self-indulgent video by Wim Wenders ("If Buildings Could Talk...") about SANAA's utopian research institute for Rolex in Lausanne, Switzerland -- again a beautiful bulding -- where the two buzz around smugly on little two wheelly scooters set to plinky plonk ambient music. The only interesting art work is a hanging installation by one of the new stars of the Tokyo scene, Haruka Kojin, who David Elliott also selected for Bye Bye Kitty!!! I hear later from another Tokyo writer that all the talk at the opening was how the redoutable Ms. Hasegawa again drove everyone crazy by changing her mind continually and failing to deliver written materials and selections on time. As if to underline the hubris, the star piece of the show -- an inflatable glass floor by superstar Junya Ishigami -- had cracked and collapsed under its own weight. Pretentious? Moi?

Midori and I are tiring but our ticket includes a permanent show of selections from the collection in the rest of the museum. Time for a quick whizz around: it's usually a good education in post-war Japanese art. Today there is a fine spread of Gutai and Mono-ha works to prove that MOT did acquire some of the essentials at the right tme. I spend most time however in a lovely room of Oscar Oiwa paintings. This most unlikely quiet partner of the Showa 40 nen kai gang is a traditionally sensual and intuitive painter, with a feel for nostalgia, place and the disorietation of a global life lived between different continents. I think of it as a kind of "magical realism" ( a term usually applied to the epic literature of Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges or Isabelle Allende). Oiwa also worked for many years in an arcitectural firm, and is now based in New York. He has a particular exquisite eye for downbeat urban landscapes: the Real Tokyo disappearing before our eyes every year. There is a video of him working on Flower Garden, and I spend time poring over White (Os) Car, with its empty cartoon car, and a quiet neighbourhood in the city (Oscar later confirms to me it is a place in Tokyo).


OSCAR OIWA, KITA-SENJU BAR WITH SHOWA 40 NEN KAI SHOCHU BOTTLES ON SHELF

I spent a week with the Showa boys in Düsseldorf in May. Here is the link to my blogs about their triumphant German show:

http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/Nkzn2v6rRlWAZLImcqHT

The other highlight is a live artist room in progress by Yusuke Asai, who is developing ever more his technique of painting with natural colours derived from different shades of soil and mineral.

Saying goodbye to Midori, I rush to catch the second round of Tsutomu Ikeuchi's ULTRA "Emerging Directors" Art Fair at Spiral garden before it closes. I go chat with my friend Ei Kibukawa of eitoeiko who has an intriguing wall of eitoeiko artists who have all painted somethng about 3/11.

http://eitoeiko.com/

It is catching a lot of passing attention as Ei explains their sharp political observations about the issues and political figures surfacing in the the aftermath of the earthquake and the disaster at Fukushima reactors. It's not a good time to wonder what may be glowing inside my cheap Ootoya meals.


DAY SEVEN: THURSDAY.

I'm busy writing in the morning, and by the time I get going it's mid afternoon. I make the short walk into the crazy land of Akihabara, which is always a fantastic surreal jolt of visual energy. Where do all these folks come from? I'm particularly impressed by some of the electronics stores I wander into. After checking out the Blythe Doll collection at Mandarake, I go looking for the new installation space by Chaos Lounge. I've been determined to investigate this Takashi Murakami-supported group of young otaku artists who made such a splash in mid 2010, led by the very vocal new curator/thinker, the baby faced, Yohei Kurose (born 1983). Chaos Lounge, driven by Kurose's corrosive manifestos explicitly set out to make provocative and divisive art, rejecting the emptiness of the 2000s, asserting otaku is the only true culture of Japan, and plugging into all kinds of new social media and technology trends. For a while, Murakami hitched a lift on the group, just the latest bunch of young creators he could patronise as a way of snubbing the mainstream Tokyo art world. However, it's questionable how representative Kurose and his gang are, given the rival agenda and much broader social base of ShibuHouse (of which more later). Kurose apparently also has split from Murakami now.


CHAOS LOUNGE

With their new show, Chaos Exile, there is first an entry exhibition, that is like a fun fair and gives you a ticket and map to a second site, located in a battered building above a hairdressers. Here basically a bunch of young, moderately talented artists have thrown a lot of paint at the wall, including quite a bit of rude graffiti ("ALL ART IS SHIT, ALL SHIT IS ART"), as well as constructing a kind of tent -- a temporary shelter set up for homeless otaku victims of the tsunami or reactor disaster.

The interesting part is the voice tape that is playing over and over. I presume this is an electonic vocoder version of one of Kurose's manifestos - I try to scribble it all down (with a few mistakes) -- here is the gist. See what you make of this:

"We are Artists
We are Engineers
We are O-T-A-K-U
We are Geeks
We are Japanese

A year ago, there was a festival
We enjoyed participating
But soon there was an earthquake
Also We like other people changed
We have several people who lost their jobs
Some of us have a sick mind
We distrust each other now estranged
The audience has also changed
People are no longer so tolerant
People can no longer afford no festival
Some proposed to escape abroad
However I love to go abroad with our beloved culture
We dont want no foreigners
Their favourite things to have along with our beloved culture
Which is going overseas

Help our Project
No One believes in the future
No One can accept the future
No Art No Laifu (Life)"

In the evening I head to the Mori Art Museum to see the big Metabolism show. Im sure they have never spent this amount of money before on a show at MAM. It is a truly spectacular attempt to represent and bring alive the magnificent, futurist dreams of Kenzo Tange and his students, who were so convinced that the amazing new urbanism of Tokyo in the 1960s was the future of the world. I'm blown away by the models and CG recreations, that are well documented throughout (although annoyingly the English catalogue had not yet appeared when I visited). It is so much better than the show at MOT. There is a brilliant small room where suddenly the influence of Jikken Kobo artist Katsuhiro Yamaguchi and Hi Red Centre's illuminary Jiro Takamatsu becomes apparent. Then there is an extraordinary recreation of the entire Osaka Expo 1970 in one room.

Apparently, Mr Mori took some persuading to do this show: and yet it is obvious that the utopian dreams of Roppongi Hills lie in a direct line from the Metabolist programme of the 1950s and 60s. When Tokyo really was the future.


**Coming soon!**
Extracts from my new book, Before and After Superflat: A Short History of Japanese Contemporary Art 1990 - 2011. Based on my blogs, interviews, and observations of the Japanese art scene over the last five years: the full inside story of just what is wrong -- and right -- with Japanese contemporary art. Check out the preview here:


http://www.adrianfavell.com/BASF%20blurb%20page.htm

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

One Thousand Boats Show (1963)

Yayoi Kusama's steady ascent to art world domination continues apace in the new show recently opened in the South Wing of the Pompidou Centre, Paris. There is always lots of Kusama to see everywhere, and she recently also had the honour of a deeply interesting historical show about the 1960s at Tokyo's Watarium Museum (which I will write about as part of my ten days in Tokyo blog soon). But there hasn't been a full scholarly retrospective quite like this before in Europe, and the Pompidou Centre show surely represents another staging post in her rise to immortality.

The over 80 year old Kusama continues to be active and prolific. But in Paris, the emphasis is on a remarkable presentation of older work, beginning with a selection of her surrealist influenced works as a young woman before she went to New York. I thought these had all been destroyed, but whereas her style was not yet developed, she was already experimenting with abstract forms of auto-portraits based on circles, blobs and -- yes -- dots. This would lead her towards her first version of dots obsession that is here represented in an extraordinary room of original white on black Infinity Nets that have been compiled from collections all over Japan and the West. There is also her quite amazing 10 metre long rough piece that she cut from canvas by hand for a show at the Stephen Radich gallery in New York, 1961.

The following rooms plant us firmly in the high 60s. Her idea of mechanical repetition or aggregation can be seen as paralleling Andy Warhol's style while offering a consistent development on her own self-obliteration themes. There is, of course, considerable controversy on who influenced who in the artistic cauldron of New York in those days. Japanese art scholars, such as Midori Yoshimoto and Reiko Tomii have firmly argued that Kusama's innovations were picked up and made famous by male American artists, who subsequently became a lot more famous: Claes Oldbenburg, Andy Warhol, Lucas Samaras. This historical injustice contributed to Kusama's growing psychological fragility. The evidence for her case is presented again here. Her first installation -- of a while fabric stuffed boat against black reproductions -- is here recreated, as well as a whole corner of similar sculptures. At this point in time, Kusama was simply way ahead in her sense of what could be done with installation. Another corner documents her sixties' happenings and performances.


1960s sculptures displayed on a bed of macaroni

After a brief survey of her very troubled and much less original work from her suicidal phase in the 1970s after she returned, scorned and overlooked, to her native Japan and took up residence in a psychiatric hospital, the later rooms fill out the onward development once her place in history had been established by curators such as Akira Tatehata and David Elliott. There is familiar dots and mirrors installations here, as well as more sculptures and paintings. It all becomes a lot more seamless and corporate, but still her own self-exploitation is a convincing spin on the commercial tendencies of all pop-art during this period.

Only a couple of weeks in, and the small essay based catalogue had sold out already, bought up by crowds of Kusama ravenous Parisians who have clearly exceeeded in number any expectations the museum might have had. This history sensitive show will make it easier now to read and understand the full corpus of Kusama's work in its full six decade long context.

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Macoto Murayama

I have been in Japan for the last two weeks, but before that I was able to swing by the CutLog art fair in Paris to meet up with Tokyo gallerist Rodion Trofimchenko, and see his offerings from Frantic Gallery which he fronts and is based out of Setagaya. According to the website, Frantic is directed by someone variously known as Yasuhisa, Yasunobu and/or Yasutoshi Miyazaki (???), but whatever the case the gallery has a smart website and is dedicated to "resisting stereotypes and the stupified image of Japanese contemporary art". I met Rodion a couple of years ago at the opening of one of Tsutomu Ikeuchi's curated shows at Spiral Gallery, Omotesando, which was a prelude to a long evening of hard nosed drinking and discussion about the failings and frustrations of the Japanese art world, and yet the passion for the place that still drives our long term engagements with it. Rodion came out of the curatorial programme at Musachino art school, before taking on the global mission of representing young Japanese artists and Frantic Gallery at major art fairs around the world, and he has been on the road permanently this year, with showings in Paris, Shanghai, Taipei, Basel and Tokyo.

There was not much evidence of Japanese contemporary art at the Paris art fairs this year. At FIAC, which by all accounts has risen to become a major world event on the art calendar, rivalling Frieze and the Armory Show, the only Japanese gallerist listed was Take Ninagawa. Rodion was also on his own at CutLog, out there with his distinctive young Japanese art in a small booth at the Bourse building near Opera. More evidence of the dreaded Galapogosization, methinks.

Rodion was easy enough to find with his newly peroxided white hair and edgy, energetic personality dominating the booth, and he explained how the work of the young 80s artists on show embodies both the characteristically obsessive, craft heavy young Japanese style, while having no trace of the more obvious pop cultural themes typically associated with the place.


Macoto Murayama creates computer generated botanical drawings, that play with a fascinating edge of computer technology being used to execute almost quaint Victorian style botanist's visions.


Cousteau Tazuke meanwhile has developed an extraordinary abstract technique of painting in which he minutely carves lines and strips into clear acrylic panels, pours paint on the block with its holes and elisions, and then exhibits them backwards, so the colour and textures are seen through the clear screen of the untouched side. It sounds like home made DIY, but the results are quite elegant abstract tableaux, almost architectural in their feel, again a somehow digitalised, plastic version of an older line of work -- in this case, Jackson Pollock (although one might also trace a link to the work of Kohei Nawa).

When he was young, back home in Russia, Rodion wanted to be a film director. He also studied business management, and then later art history. He says that being a gallery curator is the perfect way of combining all three. The beautiful people of Paris are gathering for a prize giving by TV channel ARTE to a selected prize winning artist, and we are keen to snag some of the free Kir Royales and hors d'oeuvres doing the circular rounds of the hall. The only Japanese collector I spot is a Takashi Murakami lookalike in a denim workman's hat. He doesn't look very happy, while chatting with his model escort. Could it have been Mr.TM himself, who was meant to be in Paris in connection with Emmanuel Perrotin? No-one else seems to think so. Whatever the case, he was certainly not laughing today: Japanese contemporary art seems to have disappeared off the European radar.

For more information about Frantic Gallery:

http://www.frantic.jp

Check out also Rodion Trofimchenko's writings on the evolutionary curatorial network, Entomorodia:

http://www.entomorodia.com

Cousteau Tazuke can be seen at Frantic Gallery in Tokyo, from 23 - 27 November, and Macoto Murayama from 6 - 11 December.

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Chim ↑ Pom

Two big prosthetic thumbs up, Ebert and Roeper Style, to curator/art producer Shai The Great for the brilliant and spooky ARTGIG "Mommy I'm Scarred" oddball art installation/event at the abandoned Tamai Hospital in Honmachi tonight. Sure, there were too many snotty prep-school American East Coast exchange students in attendance, and an abundance of halloweened-up Japanese kids who looked like they might run a mile if they saw a real ghost, but this was a truly inspirationally dingy, screwed up location for an art show on a rainy Sunday night, costumes or not. With little or no security in evidence, and certainly health and safety out the broken window, the punters had the full run of a totally gothic, dead and still dangerous hospital, that is full of abandonned terminal wards, cancer scan technology out of the sixties, and that je ne sais quoi of prefab shabbiness familiar to all Japanese public buildings of the cheap pre-Bubble years. Apparently, it has been lovingly "preserved" as a location for horror movie film shots, hence rentable for off the cuff left field art events such as this. This was Echigo-Tsumari re-shot as a cheap budget Hammer horror. Sponsored by Electrolux.

The building was the star: for starters since to see the show you had to descend into the dark, inferno like hell of the basement, a kind of maze of no way out corridors in which in which the artists had been invited to set up works, create or perform. With barely no lighting except flash lights, no obvious exit in case of fire, earthquake or stampede, and no end of broken windows, putrifying latrines, and random twists of broken machinery and hospital trash shoved into every corner, it was not for the claustrophobic. Artworks on show, the highlights: a class act as always from Satoru Aoyama, with a "bearded" Madonna in a dead-end corridor (see below); a cute video by Akino Kondoh; Matsukage impaling himself à la Mishima; and a Jim Lambie neon light offering his pop fan homage to Jason The Spaceman's Spiritualised. This room remained shut a lot of the time: few of the kids here would know that this was the only work here worth stealing.

Top of the bill was Chim ↑ Pom. They out-spooked everyone with their starving buddha sculpture in a back room, but apart from smashing a couple of wondows, they seemed to baulk when it come to perform to the adoring masses. Instead, we just had a lame "kampai" from Ellie chan with Ushiro and bemused organizer Shai looking on. The music later on didn't recapture the vibe that Jim Bingham had brought with a fabulous techno set at around 8pm. Still: it was an evening that vindicated Shai's worry that it is no wonder no one ever hears about Tokyo art internationally, because there's no scene. This was, for one night only, a scene.

Not too many art world ghouls in evidence; except me, that is; although Johnnie Walker and ex-Mori Art Museum director, David Elliott, swung by briefly at around 10pm, for the costume prize award, and by the end it was the drunken expats propping up the bar, all on average ten years older than any of the Japanese here, the invited Brits having passed out on booze far too early in the evening.

Please enjoy the photo show below:


Kowa-Kawaii from Mizuma's Akino Kondoh


Satoro Aoyama's Madonna, which miraculously grows a Jesus Christ beard with flash photography


Hammer House Hospital fun with Shibuhouse and friends


Chim ↑ Pom 3 in "You're Only as Good as the Last Great Thing You Did" dilemma at 10:25pm


Shai The Great and Ellie-chan


Ellie Chan and Ushiro's "Kampai"


Jim Lambie: Steal this one Kids


Scary Monsters and Super Creeps: the crush on the dancefloor


Its a Dead Hospital really

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com