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More debate surely is needed about Noi Sawaragi's interesting overview in ART-iT here of the 2000s in Japanese art. While most of the essay displayed his usual sharp edge, it was alarming to see the uncritical and exaggerated assessment of Murakami's Geisai organisation. As I have argued in several past blogs, we need to take a careful look at the significance and consequences of Murakami's attempt to "revolutionise" the art education and art market system in Japan – an effect that has been much more damaging and exploitative than Sawaragi suggests.

http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/y0k4HsKjgC39ZAJ6SaGw/

Geisai was copied from the larger Design Festa model, transforming that show’s “punk rock” anything goes attitude with a reality TV style talent contest which offers a promise of success to thousands of young hopeful artists. It charges these often penniless artists rates per day that are not far off kaisha gara rates in Ginza, often in excess of 100,000Yen. Even then they have to pay for extra electricity or spare chairs as they set up their booths. If they are lucky they might get a two second walk-by viewing from a foreign curator judge in town Tokyo on an all expenses paid holiday. Geisai seduces these young artists with the idea that, with Murakami sensei, they don’t need art education to get a break. It is a very damaging, romantic illusion.

Sawaragi writes that Geisai “despite being derided from the start as ‘little more than a street bazaar’, ultimately must be credited with unearthing more unknown talent than any officially sanctioned biennale, triennale, art prize or such like, and offering these up-and-coming talents real opportunities”. Even viewed generously this is a blatant exaggeration. Those very few artists who it did help discover – for example Erina Matsui, or Yasuyuki Nishio, both now (not coincidentally) with Yamamoto Gendai – were artists who had already been through a strong art school training. It is very likely they would have succeeded with or without Geisai. Matsui wisely declined to join the Kaikai Kiki factory in favour of further formal art training and an independent career. And Murakami himself is a consummate product of Tokyo University of the Arts and the outstanding cohort of students he shared ideas and training with in the late 1990s.

http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/HAledbG6CkXOfTyohMaB/

Geisai is an amateur art show, nothing more or less - a view shared by a one time judge at the event, Los Angeles MOCA’s Paul Schimmel. It is a great personal vehicle for Murakami, however, and it certainly provides him with a media platform in Tokyo after having cut so many of his relations with the Tokyo art world that made him. Sawaragi should not be perpetuating the myth but exploring how and why Geisai has been used very consciously as a part of Murakami’s art practice. And spare a thought for the many losers at Geisai. After emptying their pockets of their savings, Geisai takes their combined enthusiasm and hopes and uses it promotionally to further glorify Murakami’s image internationally. At the recent Pop Life show in London Geisai itself was being presented and theorised in a video installation as another one of Murakami’s ironic “works of art”, in line with his other post-Warholian “factory” products. Another triumph for the Wizard of Oz.

Sawaragi's article is here:
http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_columns/KGFt0SIjbf6VJcrDXkZM/

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

While its great to see ART-iT publishing its best of lists and review essays about 2009, it’s a good idea too to get an outside view of the Japanese art scene, so that all its undoubted noise and colour can be put into some kind of global/relative perspective. No-one better to do this than Ashley Rawlings, a long time resident on the Tokyo scene, now features editor at the Art Asia Pacific magazine, based in New York City. Ashley was the editor of the indispensable, and rather beautiful, Art Space Tokyo book, which came out in 2008, published by Craig Mod’s Chin Music Press. This book set itself the task of uncovering some of the lesser known players and locations in the Tokyo art scene, while also documenting the familiar roster of curators, gallerists, and writers that make up its small but dynamic world.

http://www.artspacetokyo.com/

Each year, AAP publishes an almanac which contains a round of the most significant art events and exhibitions that took place in each country the previous year. Ashley does a comprehensive job this year, and it is an essential round up for anyone wanting to know about what is going on in Japan.

I was pleased to see that I’d seen most of the more important things he mentions. Here is a link to my top five shows of the year (just scroll down).

http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_columns/RpLCtBsAvOlNu3a0G51f/

What is missing from this listing are the shows I wish I’d seen, but couldn’t because I live on the wrong side of the planet most of the time. These would include: Teppei Kaneuji at Yokohama, Daisuke Ohba's solo shows around Tokyo in the Spring (at SCAI and Magical), Tatsu Nishi's ever wacky art installation explorations at ArataniUrano in May, and the big Ryoji Ikeda show at MOT during the summer. Ashley gives a strong mention to Nishi’s brilliant and crazed conversion of the Ginza gallery, as well as Ikeda’s big show and Kaneuji’s solo break out at Yokohama. Ohba is the only one missed here: one of the young discoveries of the year.

I met Ashley for a coffee and chat near his office in the hip, but still grim, West Chelsea neighbourhood of New York City in November. Being away from Tokyo had given him some new perspective on the Tokyo scene: it looked a lot smaller, and a lot less important than so much of the international art crowding the scene in New York. He felt basically it had been a quiet year, with nothing really very exciting happening. I always feel that Japan’s greatest strength is the fact it is out of step a little with the rest of the global art world, that walks to a sometimes monotonous beat drummed out by the same old international superstar curators, fads and fashions. But that means Japan is easily ignored, marginal to the major flows. He cites the example of Kohei Nawa who, whenever he is mentioned in the New York context, is written off as too “aesthetic”. New York writers are always looking for a didactic, political edge. Another low spot for Japan was the almost universally negative reactions to Miwa Yanagi’s big show at Venice, something I’ve written about in a previous blog.

http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/Vfji90F5ay3CNK8DhvQS/

Ashley obviously misses Tokyo, but is excited by the speed and power of New York, even comparing it to going back “home” to London (he is English, like me). A number of his former colleagues from the Tokyo Art Beat magazine and the 101 Tokyo Art Fair network, have also moved to New York, to set up a New York version of the popular website there. TAB is another example of how resident gaijin have helped give an outside edge to the Tokyo art world, which would be so dangerously insular without it.

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

I have been helping Miwako Tezuka, curator at the Asia Society museum in New York City, with background work for the major exhibition of Nara’s work she is planning there this autumn. As I’ve written before, there is plenty of reason to think 2010 will be a good year for Nara.

The subject has been Yoshitomo Nara’s music tastes, which he writes about regularly in his blog and in books such as his autobiographical diaries, The Little Star Dweller. Tezuka’s show will place Nara’s work in the context of worldwide popular music culture – and the street culture connected to it – taking him out of the tired neo-japoniste frame he tends to attract via his association with Superflat and otaku art. I may be critical sometimes of too much otaku art, but when it comes to rock music I am for sure a bona fide music otaku, with the same affliction as Nara. A collection of hundreds of old LPs and piles of CDs that are the soundtrack to everything I do.

So Tezuka has been asking me what I think about Nara’s LP collection, and how highlights can be selected. We all know he draws and paints with loud music on. But where does he fit in to a music fan’s view of the world? The one word label “punk”, which Nara loves to use, turns out to be much more of an attitude thing than a narrow definition. Nara, who recently turned 50, stretches back with his vinyl tastes unsurprisingly to the late 1960s when he turned 20. There is a strong showing in his lists for post-Woodstock alt country and long haired rebel rock (Neil Young, or The Band, for example). Then in the mid-70s to late 70s, there is the obligatory turn to glam and then punk (via Roxy Music, Iggy Pop, Bowie, New York Dolls, Ramones, to Sex Pistols and The Clash). So far, so good. From then on, he becomes a regular college radio alternative/indie fan, and his record collection starts looking a lot like mine. There is very little Japanese music to be found in the list. Maybe no-one had heard of Cornelius in Germany. And while his earlier preferences are dominated by American and Canadian greats, later ones show a great deal more interest in English bands. I was particularly delighted to see a strong showing for XTC, The Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen, and more recently PJ Harvey, Pulp and Radiohead. Its where he gets a lot of titles for his work. Tezuka wants to trace the trajectory further. With Nara coming home to Japan, embracing collective art group methods, and engaging in the ambitious shows in his home region that have toured the world as A to Z, Nara’s punk attitude has turned to a kind of rice eating, communal, rebel-folk sensitivity. He wants to be an artist of the people.

The question is: what does the connection of art and pop music all mean? Tezuka sees it very much as part of his populist appeal, with the key thing being the emotion it conveys to viewers – a universal, global appeal, and something which distances it from the detached irony of Superflat and its very Japan-specific references. But at the same time it is impossible to detach Nara from his otaku generation roots. This is an obsessive, regressive art that refuses to grow up or leave the music behind, and makes a sweet and beautiful virtue out of it. Isn’t that why we all have these record collections? Our music in little packages can take us back wherever we want to go by just putting on a track?

And why do we all love Nara’s pictures so much? Don’t Fight It Feel It. Look at this one. An angry girl on a rock ‘n’ roll loudspeaker. They all remind us of someone, I suppose.

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

One of the unexpected side effects of my research on the Japanese contemporary art world has been that I have developed an interest in Japanese contemporary architecture, as an almost inevitable spillover. Not only are many of Japan’s best museums housed in masterpieces by Japanese designers. They are also, undoubtedly more successful and more influential internationally than Japanese artists. This has been underlined recently with the nomination of Kazuyo Sejima – one half of the inspirational architecture duo SANAA – to be the director of this year’s Venice Biennale for Architecture. This is an extraordinary achievement both for a Japanese architect and a woman, but it underlines how massively influential Japanese architects in the world top rankings – from Kishio Kurokawa, Arata Isozaki, Tadao Ando, to Jun Aoki, Ryue Nishizawa and Atelier Bow Wow. I’m no expert, but one of the people who I rely on for insights is Julian Worrall, a lecturer at Waseda University. He has just published this new guide book with Kodansha (above), called 21st Century Tokyo: A Guide to Contemporary Architecture, co-authored with Erez Golani Solomon and Joshua Lieberman, which is an excellent introduction to the subject.

The interesting thing is how architecture is in fact blending into and taking over parts of the fine arts. Much installation work nowadays has an architectural inspiration to it. Avant guard urban thinkers like Atelier Bow Wow essentially make art books as a way of communicating about the city. Some major artists, in the line of Olafur Eliasson, approach their works like architects – or like Junya Ishigami (a favourite of Yuko Hasegawa at MoT) are architects now working as fine artists. And I remember the impressive show, Skin & Bones at Tokyo NACT in 2007, that made connections between contemporary fashion designers and avant guard architects, displayed as an art show. No wonder that gallerists such as Tomio Koyama and Atsuko Koyanagi have also taken an interest recently in the subject. Last summer, TKG put on a show of contemporary architects’ artefacts and designs, as a way of stimulating thought for the need to be creating a proper archive and museum for these achievements.

Worrall is Australian, and worked for the legendary Rem Koolhaas when he was younger. It was an exciting time, but he is convinced that many of the clues to the urban future can be found around him in his home city of Tokyo. Since moving here, he has dedicated himself to explaining the marvels of Japanese urbanism via academic work. He has also launched a research centre at Waseda called LLLABO, “a platform for research, teaching and practice, engaging in contemporary themes in architecture and urbanism inspired by its location in central Tokyo”. His main argument concerns the visionary aspects of “post-Bubble” architecture in Japan and Tokyo, which continues to put this city especially at the forefront of imagining the metropolis of the future. Above all, it’s an architecture that is trying to conceive of more sustainable, modest, and harmonious forms of urban intervention, more in tune with the age and cities we now have to live in. The book is an essential guide for everyone who wants to see this city through fresh eyes.

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Like so many before them, video artists Mai Yamashita and Naoto Kobayashi are walking the long “weg” to Germany for funds to make a living. In their case, the path has taken the shape of an infinity sign, trodden out step by step out on the grass in Berlin’s Tiergarten. The couple, dressed as day trip hikers, are jogging round and round and round as the grass goes yellow. The exhausting work is filmed in a hilarious speeded up silent film that at once mocks the pompousness of Richard Long style “land art”, as well as treading a new line towards an art of the absurd. Keep walking, keep smiling, even as life gets tough for young artists today.

Here is the video on You Tube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KdQ4aV4eB4

The work, Infinity (2006), is a typical piece of dry irony from this cheerful art unit, who have developed an impressive body of short and witty video works that can be viewed on their excellent and fun interactive website.

http://www.yamashita-kobayashi.com/

The young lions filmed ripping apart canvasses (Lion & Canvas, images below) I first saw at Yamashita’s PhD graduation show at GEIDAI in 2008. It suggests a whole line of animal art putting artist materials to better use. Other works include: licking a giant candy ball for six months until it disappears; erasing all the negative words from newspapers; and “rescuing” mineral water by pouring it back into nature. Yamashita had also filed a dissertation on humour in art. It was the outstanding portfolio of the graduation show that year.



Two aspects of their work interest me in particular. One is the dynamic of an “Art Unit” – in this case, also a couple – a practice of doing art that is becoming increasingly significant in Japan. Above all, to practice art as a unit stresses a seriousness of purpose combined and a rejection of the artist’s ego. The unit idea hints at anonymity in even the most compact of small groups. Secondly, they are artists clearly in the line of “gentle intervention”, a modest but distinctive trend in Japanese video art identified by Midori Matsui with artists such as Shimabuku, Saki Satom, and Taro Izumi. The absurdist irony and the maturity of their themes distances them from the humourless teenage angst art that Matsui often favours, but there is a sly political edge to their work that might fit within a “Micropop” frame.



I met the couple at a small house party with Hitomi Hasegawa, a highly active curator who runs the Moving Image Archive of Contemporary Art in Yokohama. It was a delightful evening over home cooked food and drink viewing videos with a group of high spirited friends. In the mainstream global art world, we are more used to video art that plays continually with provocation and baroque excess – the kind of violence, pornography, or shock tactics associated with American enfants terribles like Paul McCarthy or Matthew Barney. So it is refreshing to find uses of video that stress, in such a subtle, understated work, the virtues of humour, observation, and polite wit.

Yamashita and Kobayashi are presenting new works in Leipzig, Germany, as part of their current residency.

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Amazed to see a full half page feature on Yayoi Kusama in my Financial Times the other day over breakfast. The Dots Obsession just keeps growing! Now 80, Kusama is settling into a third (or fourth) age of productivity and acclaim, that makes her arguably the most visible contemporary Japanese artist. It’s a hopeful life story. After all the New York performance art of the 1960s, she fell out of favour with the critics, then was derided by the Japanese press as a crazy old lady. It took a rehabilitation by curators such as David Elliott in the 1980s and 90s to bring her back to what is surely now an untouchable place in post-war global art. She also owes much to the careful stewardship of Hidenori Ota at Ota Fine Arts who has managed her career through good and not so good times, as well as the sustained patronage of Ryutaro Takahashi who has bought many of her works.

What I also like about Kusama’s work is its simplicity. Far from the excess of over-theorised, over-textual art, her art is basically one simple idea played out in endless visual and tactile forms – an obsession that nevertheless reflects a core existential truth. The new show, appropriately titled, I Want to Live Forever, takes place in Milan, Italy until February 14. Apparently it was proposed and curated by the almighty Gagosian empire, the distinct worlds of commerce and curatorship blurring uncomfortably once again.

http://www.mostrakusama.it

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Any foreign observer coming to terms with the contemporary art scene in Japan today will eventually pose themselves this one plaintive question: When will Makoto Aida be famous?

Makoto Aida: the original 60s bad boy, the most revered intellectual-artist of his generation in Japan, and the originator of many of the most consistently edgy and distinctive ideas identified now with Japanese superflat/otaku contemporary art of the 1990s... When will he be appreciated? I don’t mean in Tokyo, of course. In fact, it sometimes feels like Aida has some kind of franchise deal going with Bijutsu Techo. He is always all over the place: in galleries, talk shows, cram classes, openings. You cannot move for Aida in Tokyo. But I mean internationally. Is he doomed to be forever the nearly man of Japanese contemporary art?

Certainly, he has been seeking more visibility lately. Participation in recent shows in New York (“Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video From Japan”) and San Francisco (“Wallworks” at the Yerba Buena Center), with safely packaged talks “introducing” him to a sceptical public, have brought him back to the US (the 2003, post 9/11 showing of his Zeros bombing New York City didn’t go down so well at the Whitney...). His huge wall mural (image above), that debuted in San Francisco, is a big feature piece of the current “Twist and Shout” show in Bangkok. Mizuma Gallery, too, keeps up a steady supply of Aida publications – even now a DVD in English – to promote their signature house artist, this goofy, mercurial, chain-smoking, mid-40s figure, whose talent as a student was immediately recognised and taken under the ambitious patronage of Sueo Mizuma. Prices in the Asian market are rising, they say, and it doesn’t hurt either that Ryutaro Takahashi’s love affair with Japanese cotemporary, after Yayoi Kusama, was ignited by Aida. 30,000 people a month – it is said – saw his joint retrospective at Ueno Royal Museum with Akira Yamaguchi in 2007 (although I was there, and 95% of the public were there for the cult graphics)



One of my favourite (sad) stories about the plight of Aida involves those other famous bad boys of contemporary art, the Chapman Brothers. Brought together for the show “Lonely Planet” at Mito, they and Aida got on like a house on fire. No surprises there. The Chapmans wanted to bring him to London. Mizuma duly followed up, sending all the back catalogue to Jay Jopling at White Cube, only to have the package come back return to sender practically unopened. They just didn’t get it. Huge plastic dioramas of model Nazis killing each other in an orgy of violence don’t seem to face the same problem as loving sculptures of edible Mi-Mi chan. Everyone (in the West) loves a good war movie – as long as its about nasty Germans. But don’t count on M. Pinault or Mr Saatchi buying up Aida’s uncomfortable sensoga paintings any time soon. In this respect, Murakami’s Japan is so much more marketable than Aida’s. Superflat, which featured Aida’s Giant Member as one of its stars, was in many respects Aida-light all the way: a string of unknown graphic artists and friends of Murakami parading cheap, straight-off-the-streets-of-Akihabara lolikom fetichism, but repackaged in plastic, slick, airbrushed, theorised style that stayed just the right side of titillating or shocking. Japanese kitsch, not Japanese hardcore. The rest is history.



It is all about production values, of course: those carefully airbrushed translations, which modulated unhinged otaku ravings for the sensitive tastes of star struck Los Angelenos and politically correct New Yorkers. Aida is just pure unadulterated Tokyo Trash, often as ugly and in your face as the crows in Yoyogi Park as the sun goes down. For a long time he refused translations. Plus Aida gives his own self-defeating game away at the start of the DVD, when he admits his voracious appetite for ideas, tends to lead to an inevitable “falling away” in the final product. You cannot brand and mass market this kind of restless art. The technical wizardry may be marvellous, and the ideas unbelieveable. But Monument for Nothing, in a world of high resolution Taschen art books, easily looks like a half-baked collection of mad ideas thrown together by an art school professor. For every moment of sheer inspiration – for me, this would include Azemichi, Ai-chan bonsai, war paintings, Osama Bin Laden, and the homeless cardboard castle – there are just as many duff items and hungover gags that should have just been left in the closet – monster dog turds, amputated girls, onigiri men, pregnancy snaps, drunken party jokes.



That’s Aida, a Y100 slot machine of ideas, and that’s why he is so loved by the Tokyo art world. They are willing to follow him – whether dashing of a wall of lurid intestines, or sitting musing about dirty old men and school girls on a park bench in Ueno (one of the fun stories he tells in the recent Tokyo guidebook by the Showa 40 nen kai) – because Aida seems to mirror all of its joys, its frustrations, its bile, and its beauty.

Making Aida famous, is the passion of a colleague of mine at UCLA, the young former MOCA curator, Gabriel Ritter, who has been writing a much-awaited book (in Japanese and English) on Aida. Ritter is one of a number of serious, ambitious, American-trained, Japanologists/curators who might be able to help him. Ritter’s Tokyo Nonsense show in LA during the summer of 2008 put on the best of post-Aida art in a hip LA art gallery context, and he wants to bring it back to a suitably scruffy and shitamachi style location in Tokyo sometime soon. Aida needs people like Ritter. One of Aida’s most brilliant and funny moves was also one of his most self-defeating: the refusal to communicate in English, which reached a peak, appropriately during his Yokohama Triennial show, built around his self-assisting suicide machine (that didn’t ever work). Aida is right of course. Why should he speak English? To do otherwise is to play the game of global art, an American colonial game these days. Why should he provide anything more than a battered, half-way useless dictionary to explain Mutant Hanako – to defective observers like me or anyone else who happens to wander into the vaudeville street show of contemporary Tokyo as a naïve, impressionable foreigner. You’ve got to admire the coglione... Yet its Maurizio Cattelan we see on the Venice walls not Aida. Moreover, Monument to Nothing, as well as some of his most recent wall art and girly photos, look and feel like a monument to the bygone 1990s. A lot of Aida’s best ideas, flattened and amputated as they got transmitted around the world in more Western-friendly style, now are more a part of art history. Are the new ideas still coming?

With the inevitable cigarette and can of Sapporo in hand. Aida may still have the last laugh. Flicking through the catalogues or the DVD, you see all the young collaborators and co-conspirators crowding round him, including the now ubiquitous Chim Pom gang, the hilarious method acting Eri-chan who used to model for him, the effervescent Ichiro Endo. There is also the brilliant work of his wife Hiroko Okada, that – extraordinarily – manages to turn out Aida-influenced work in a feminist way. Beyond this, there are all the gallerists and writers who have come under his sway – many during the headiest years of Mizuma in the early 2000s, when the gallery was a late night drinking den and a hot house of ideas for a conceptual Japanese art. And some of the most important people who were there at the time still simply can’t forget Aida in their selections... (So we will be seeing him in David Elliott’s big new Japanese show in New York in early 2011). There is, in other words, a real “school” of art here, an Aida school, of which his contemporaries may be jealous. Like a parent slowly resigning himself to the declining years of middle age, Aida may yet still fulfill some of his wildest ambitions—in his children.



Adrian Favell
http://www.adrianfavell.com

It’s time to wrap up the year. Roll out the Ox, and roll on the Year of the Tiger.

2009 can’t end soon enough as far as I am concerned. I’m sure a lot of people feel that way. Also in Japan. I read the Financial Times and it is never anything but gloomy news these days about the land of the rising sun. Big businesses are going bust; poverty is growing; the economy is going back into its post-bubble slump; the government can’t seem to do anything about it. Plus everyone is looking elsewhere in Asia – anywhere else but Japan, it seems – for something exciting to happen, and for something profitable to invest in. Japan just seems in terminal decline.

All of the doom and gloom applies to art as well, I suppose, if you continue to look at art in terms of the art market, art values, and the ups and downs of art trade. But viewed in other ways, opposed to market forces, what has been going on in art in Japan in 2009 seems to me to point towards some of the most interesting developments going on in art anywhere in the world today. A lot of it is linked to the big problems of social and economic decline that form the backdrop for creativity in this country – not least because abandoned schools, factories, houses, and public buildings provide some of the best locations for making art and being an artist. So, in making my roundup of the year with a selection of blogs that you might have missed, I’d like to restate some of the central messages that I’ve been pushing this year.

The big plastic commercial “pop-life” of 1990s art is over; we have seen more than enough manga, anime, cosplay, techno-orientalism, and post-Warhol neo-japonisme to last a lifetime, thanks.



see my blog (09/10/12): "Cute Ambassador: Takashi Murakami"
http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/V192WJ6wRYKzsUAvNjQ4/

This tacky vision of touristic “neo-Tokyo” is unfortunately still the only thing most people in the West now think of when they think of Japan – if they think of it at all. What observers outside of Japan have to start recognising now is the very different art coming out of the new and younger generations of artists in Japan today, art and art practices that are aesthetically sensitive, intellectually rich, politically aware, and above all sustainable, with an emphasis on craft, labour, renovation, community, and technique – the kinds of things (ironically) that are only taught nowadays in Japanese art schools, while the rest of world teaches artists how to read critical theory, position themselves in art history, and talk about art more than doing it.

Echigo Tsumari for me was one of the big highlights of the year, for its expansive ambitions, its obstinately inefficient natural setting, and the consistently brilliant use of old buildings and rural sites for inspiring new art. It is worth taking Fram Kitagawa’s philosophy seriously...

see my blog (09/07/24): "Echigo-Tsumari: The Fram Kitagawa Philosophy"
http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/QXyh6VkHEgdvOMwJi9ce/

This sensibility and use of space has also been seen at events such as Akasaka Art Flower (in late 2008); in a series of events organised over the months in Sumida ku by the Contemporary Art Factory and other groups concerned with the destruction of the area by the new Tokyo Tower; in the current show at the soon to be demolished French embassy building in Roppongi; and at the atmospheric Tokorozawa biennial, one of the most interesting group shows of the year.



see my blog (09/10/08): "Komazawa or Tokorozawa?"
http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/kVnhD073vbrsQJHu1pXI/

Its also a sensibility expressed in the hopes invested in the upcoming opening of the innovative Chiyoda Arts Centre.



see my blog (09/10/19): "Low Life: Real Art in a Material World"
http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/LKRf38nAmPkvXp2EC1Wu/

2010 might then be the year when some of these developments start to get recognised internationally. That’s the Rubicon that needs to be crossed, by curators and funders of art exhibitions alike. Signs are good. The “Twist and Shout” show, curated by Kenji Kubota and Yoko Nose in Bangkok – and which has for me one of the strongest selections of recent Japanese art that I have seen in a long time – points towards a new and boldly political reading of Japanese contemporary art.

http://www.jfbkk.or.th/2009/art_culture_20090922.php3

Working within a “use pop culture to sell Japan” instruction from the Japan Foundation, they subtly undermine this brief with a “twisted” vision of younger Japanese artists turning away from pop and the market, and using their alienation as “soto komori” to powerful ends (“Shout!”). This is not, as in Midori Matsui’s dreary “Winter Garden”, to withdraw passively into micro-politics and social isolation, but to apply “unbounded creativity and imagination to convey sharp feelings on present Japanese society.”

As the environmental mood of current art suggests, the social and the political is back on the agenda, and we should expect a very different, engaged atmosphere at the one big opening I’m waiting for next year, “Roppongi Crossing 3: Can There Be Art? The Creative Potential of a New Japan”, which Kubota is again one of the curators, along with Chieko Kinoshita, and Kenichi Kondo.

http://www.mori.art.museum/contents/press/RX2010_20091030_e.pdf

I’ve heard that this show will bring the critical legacy of Dumb Type right into the heart of Neo Tokyo itself – the dark, gleaming Mori Tower, that rises high over the devastated hills of Roppongi. And, as the other new Television Tower starts to cast a shadow over the rubble of another destroyed shitamachi in the plains to the north, it seems the forces of good and light in Japanese contemporary art will have to amass together (in a bar near Ueno) for one last struggle, in the name of “Satoyama”, to preserve what is good, romantic and decent about old Tokyo...

Errmmm.... Sorry, folks, I’ve obviously been watching far too many Lord of the Rings repeats this Christmas. Hey, there’s not much else to do in Denmark!

Happy New Year to Everyone!



Adrian Favell
http://www.adrianfavell.com

The first time I met Erina was at Ueno station Starbucks. It was a fun interview, and even though I was late for an appointment, she dragged me around Ameyoko to find a purikura machine for a souvenir before I could leave. The second time, we also met at Ueno station, this time jumping on a shitamachi train to Machiya, to her studio to see new works in progress and her toy collection. It was Christmas, and getting dark early. The neighbourhood was full of twinkling Y100 stores and pachinko parlours. I counted, approvingly, at least three local sento baths still in operation in the streets nearby. Afterwards, at my insistence this time, we found a cosy brown 60’s kissaten for a coffee and cake set. They were playing the Beatles, and there was a corny Christmas tree with musical toys on it that Erina loved.


MY COSMO show at Yamamoto Gendai 2007

In fact, I’d already seen her talking about her work at the opening of her successful first Yamamoto Gendai solo ‘My Cosmo’ in Autumn 2007, but she was mobbed that day by family friends, well wishers, BT journalists, and anxious collectors scrambling to get on “the list”. That was her first big splash on the Tokyo commercial scene. The waiting list and prices have been growing ever since. It’s not easy being successful so young. Fondation Cartier in Paris already acquired and showed works of hers in 2005-6. She had already had a solo show in Europe—at the Fundacio Miro in Barcelona in 2007. When you are young and this successful, as the expression goes, you are only as good as the last great thing you did.

Matsui is “Erina”, inescapably, of course, because of the way she puts herself – her face in contorted self-portrait – in almost all her work. For me, the essence of Erina was already captured in the brilliant cover photo she used for her art school entrance portfolio (the top image above), that is a cheesy parody of one those ubiquitous J-teen magazines, like Cutie or Kera. It was also one of the things that most caught Yuko Yamamoto’s eye when she signed up Matsui, and the gallery continued using it for her fast expanding portfolio of professional works.

What is evident is the ribald streak of humour that runs through all her work—something I see in the Japanese owarai tradition, a kind of “gag art” that in Tokyo is mostly associated with Aida, Ozawa and Mizuma artists. So, mixed in with the cute and infantile (a familiar Tokyo girls idiom) are other things that look grotesque or ugly and play very consciously with a kind of distorted self-obsession. This heady cocktail lifts her clear of the flat illustrations of the Kaikai Kiki girls with whom Matsui often incorrectly gets bracketed because she won Takashi Murakami’s Geisai art fair in 2004. Her works are never flat, but elaborately painted, and play on all the senses; indeed, they sometimes jump off the wall. There is something quite pallid and humourless about the way Kaikai Kiki manipulates overworn teenage girls’ iconography – all fey dreams and teenage trauma – for the western neo-japoniste taste. Erina, by contrast, is irrepressible and unfiltered through male otaku eyes. Nor is it obviously pitched to any market.

Matsui describes art as toys for grown ups. She remembers when very young growing up in a bubble world full of toys – of everything you could dream of – and to some extent she is still surrounding herself with this. She is in good company. Its pretty much what Charles Saatchi admits to in his recent I am An Artoholic book, and we are indeed living in a world where boys and girls everywhere continue to collect dolls, old school hip hop gear, or star wars toys well into their 40s. With Erina the collector’s passion is all energy and invention, sometimes messy and excessive. Increasingly her canvasses are spilling out into the room, with music buttons to press or pop up flaps to pull, or surrounded by home made mechanical toys she has made. The obsessions are clear. But the other thing that is obvious talking to Erina is how hard she is thinking about her work, and how much she is concerned with its conceptual development and her next educational step—probably international. It is something not always immediately obvious behind the vaudeville theatre of its presentation. One thing is for sure. Her work has immediate visceral impact, anywhere and everywhere it is seen.


EBICHIRI (2004), the breakthrough work

The Geisai breakthrough, at 20 years old, was obviously important for her. She is the most successful artist to have won that competition. But it is equally significant in her success that unlike other winners, she chose not to get involved with the Kaikai Kiki organisation, although it was offered to her. The main reason was education – she understood very well that winning an amateur art fair, even with Takashi Murakami’s name on it, cannot replace an art school training, or the years of technical and conceptual development you get by being an individual artist out among other artists. She went from Tamabi into the oil paining MA at Geidai to further develop her techniques. She has found other mentors and teachers everywhere she goes – she mentions, in particular, Motohiko Odani’s steady advice, as well as the peer group pressure of classmates.

It has been a busy couple of years. There was the ‘How to Cook Docomodake’ group show in 2007, that featured a huge painted Tokyo trash classic by her, with her famous namesake, “A Type” baseball player Hedeki Matsui, peering into the screen.



There was her ‘Star Wars’ painting selected for the Tokyo Art Award finalists in 2008. There was the ‘Simple Art of Parody’ show in Taipei, that showed several works, and was also selling Erina toy collectibles. Later in the year she put together a brilliant sketch book, with additional stitching and pull out flaps, for the Moleskin art show that was made for the opening of the “Detour Tokyo” MoMA art store on Omotesando. Here is an interview with her at the opening.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3gL4Aif7KM&NR=1

Right now, you can see work at the “NeoNeo girls” show at the Takahashi collection in Hibiya, and also a room at the spectacular No Man’s Land transformation of the condemned French embassy building in Roppongi, where she opened the work in rococo Franco-Japanese style in a Marie-Antoinette costume (see her art blog on ART-iT). There hardly seems time for it all.

The northern shitamachi years are ending, at least as far as her studio location. She is moving to what she says is a “beautiful new studio” in Kokubunji. Becoming a Chuo line artist, in that other great part of Tokyo strung out in a line of esoteric locations all the way from Nakano to Kunitachi.

2010 is a big year for Erina. The pressure is on, to graduate (in a literal sense, from the MA at Geidai), but also to graduate into the adult art world, with her planned second solo show launched during Tokyo Art Week in early April. Yamamoto Gendai are expectant, and Matsui promises a brace of new big scale and surprise works. It is hard to keep moving, of course, when you have established such a signature “look” at such an early age. But with her prodigious technical talent, sharp analytical mind, and wacky off-the-wall imagination – a very rare three-way combination in any artist – I, for one, am sure she will deliver. No-one can be quite sure what Erina will do next. But there are already lots of people watching.


PIANO CONCERTO (2008)

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

People who don’t live in LA don’t get it usually. If you arrive with ideas of the city based on New York, or Paris, or Tokyo, or even San Francisco, it is easy to be confused and disappointed. There’s no centre, there’s no single LA, and there’s no tidy tourist package trip to take it all in. One Japanese artist in fact who has captured it – the glory of LA – in white marble set in lush greenery – is Yutaka Sone (see image above, of 10/405, and below installed at MOCA LA, of 10/110 – the numbers of course are the freeway intersections). He lives and works in LA, with his wife Min Nishihara, a writer, who is a bit of a legend from the golden years of Tokyo pop art in the early 1990s. It’s a sunny day and I’m on way to their cute little 1920s bungalow in South Pasadena to interview her.


My old house in LA, no longer there

People who don’t live in LA don’t get it usually. If you arrive with ideas of the city based on New York, or Paris, or Tokyo, or even San Francisco, it is easy to be confused and disappointed. There’s no centre, there’s no single LA, and there’s no tidy tourist package trip to take it all in. One Japanese artist in fact who has captured it – the glory of LA – in white marble set in lush greenery – is Yutaka Sone (see image above, of 10/405, and below installed at MOCA LA, of 10/110 – the numbers of course are the freeway intersections). He lives and works in LA, with his wife Min Nishihara, a writer, who is a bit of a legend from the golden years of Tokyo pop art in the early 1990s. It’s a sunny day and I’m on way to their cute little 1920s bungalow in South Pasadena to interview her.

As I pull up in my rented car, I’m thinking: I used to live in a street like this. Friendly little houses, desert trees, a little scruffy and socially mixed up. LA at its suburban/urban best. Min Nishihara is waiting at the door, smiling, and she shows me in. The house is all creative chaos: there are their two teenage boys playing furiously on a video game, a little dog, at least three cats; toy collectibles, books, bits and pieces everywhere; old wooden floors and little painted rooms. Nishihara is in her mid 40s, but still dresses a bit like a Harajuku teenager. I love her gothic skull handbag! I’m taken out back to the garage, which is Sone’s studio. He’s at work on another big floral sculpture that will be cast in marble in China soon. He tells me a story about how a local authority first wanted it, then didn’t want it. There’s one of his monster street plants just round the corner in Pasadena.

Sone is a whirlwind of likeable, fidgety energy. A big grin, long black hair in a pony tail, he looks today like a native American, but you can imagine him cross-dressing in Chanel; a huge personality. We immediately start trading Tokyo art world anecdotes. But I’m here to talk with Nishihara, so we head out to a local coffee shop. I want to hear about the late 1980s and early 1990s in Tokyo, student days and Omori nights. So many people – and especially Paul Schimmel who put me in touch – have identified Nishihara as a key – perhaps the key – intellectual figure in the coming together of the golden period of Japanese contemporary art. This was the early 1990s, and it is still playing out – nearly twenty years later – on the walls of prestigious western art institutions, such as the Tate Modern or in the showrooms of Sothebys.

Noi Sawaragi and Midori Matsui – who came onto the scene later – tend to monopolise the art historical word regarding what happened this period. But Min Nishihara, a writer close to all the neo-pop gang, was perhaps as responsible as anyone for the cocktail of big ideas about pop, Japan, nationalism, sexuality, Tokyo, that were eventually packaged as Superflat and Little Boy, touring the world for Westerners hoping to get a taste of “neo-Tokyo”. Now she is bringing up a family, writing still, but not about art, living a quiet life in LA. A long way from Tokyo.

They were the class of 1986 at GEIDAI. Takashi Murakami, Min Nishihara, Tomio Koyama, Yuko Hasegawa, Masato Nakamura, among others. Ambitious students all, looking for a concept, a set of ideas, a strategy for Japanese art, although feeling “void”. “When we met, we spent six months together, driving everywhere, going to openings, talking about plans, strategies, everything”. Art then in Japan, as elsewhere, was mostly P.C., political in a boring way. They were “political, sure” but “we didn’t really have anything to protest at” – except the residual resentment of American domination. They loved Jeff Koons, the empty but impeccable production values of postmodern art. Other Japanese artists such as Morimura, Miyajima, making their breakthrough internationally at the time, somehow didn’t have a concept in comparison – a typical “Japanese” problem in art. They were inspired by some artists, though, a little ahead of them. Taro Chiezo had already shown the way to make New York contacts and sell Japanese pop art. Noburu Tsubaki and Kodai Nakahara were developing great ideas. There was competition from Osaka: Kenji Yanobe. Murakami, still on a political path, had not yet had the cold water bath of New York as a struggling artist, where Nishihara visited him in 1994, He was still working out his new pop vision. Before New York, he rejected the idea of using “otaku” ideas to brand his products.

Nishihara spent all her time writing. It was the golden age of Japanese magazines. She wrote manifestos for art, reviews, feature articles, projects for artworks. With Hasegawa and Miyajima, she wrote for the important Atelier magazine. Unlike the boys – who were from Tokyo, but suburban – she came from the shitamachi: Sumida-ku. Her family was steeped in the old urban culture of Tokyo, but she had grown up through the endless transformations of the new city too. She travelled all over, writing about art. She went to the breakthrough Venice Biennale of 1989, witnessed the moment that the world awoke to Japanese contemporary art. She saw Documenta 8. For 3-4 years the gang were preparing their first shows. Tsuyoshi Ozawa and Makoto Aida appeared on the scene, a little younger, but live wires too, full of their own ideas. With Nakamura, Ozawa planned the Gimburart interventions that hailed back to the Hi-Red Center avant garde group of the 1960s. At Gimburart, Nishihara herself was a participating artist, writing poetry on the Ginza streets, running off with them when the police showed to break it up. Murakami was less interested in the Japanese contemporary/avant guard tradition. He was looking for something else. But they all went to Korea in 1992, and Nakamura married a Korean woman who was a close friend of Nishihara’s.

Murakami and Nishihara travelled a lot together. They went to Documenta 9 in 1992 and rated everything with a scorecard. They wanted to make their own art magazine, which was to be called Art Sex, at Murakami’s insistence. This was later to morph in to the famous, if short lived, Radium Egg magazine that was to come out of the Roentgen institute with the new artists on its pages, and the ideas of Sawaragi, Hasegawa – and Nishihara – to the fore. They were always looking for spaces to show, always optimistic, but still feeling the “void” of being young and Japanese in the sudden post-bubble moment of the early 1990s. Locked out of the conventional cash-for-space galleries of Ginza, there was the performances at the P-House in Ebisu, one of those infamous “underworld” style locations that are such a feature of Japanese art galleries. Sawaragi, was also around all the time, as well as Tsutomo Ikeuchi, the son of a Ginza art dealer. They persuaded Ikeuchi to open the Roentgen space in Omori.

Even more important perhaps was the fact they were the first generation to talk directly to international art figures. Before this role had been monopolised by go-between “middle men” business agents, such as Fumio Nanjo. Tomio Koyama was ambitious and active at getting out and meeting directly other international gallerists. She recalls talking with Jay Jopling – Mr. White Cube and Damian Hirst’s other half – at the 1992 NICAF art fair, that had been organised by the other maverick art dealer on the scene Masami Shiraishi. No, she didn’t think that the young Japanese artists knew already about the “Freeze” scene among Goldsmiths students in the late 1980s. But there was an uncanny family resemblance with the YBAs, and Jopling immediately recognised the parallel.

It’s all a long time ago. But you can feel the excitement of this old story. She split from Murakami, and after surviving New York in 1994, he went on to fulfil his wildest ambitions, with D.O.B and all that. Yuko Hasegawa became the most important museum curator in Japan. Tomio Koyama the most important gallerist. Nakamura one of the most influential art educationalists. All are huge names in the post-bubble art history of Japan, and still today. “For awhile the group was a tight fit. But we all went our separate ways”. Min Nishihara left it behind.

Sone and Nishihara moved to LA in 1999. Their boys had been born in Japan, and Sone was head hunted by Paul Schimmel to work in the famous UCLA art department. They settled down, and Sone in particular had a moment at the turn of century when his huge, immaculate yet playful sculptures were everywhere.

Why is she not more involved now? “I have been disappointed with so many younger artists”, she says. Murakami and her generation showed that you could make the art world for yourselves, even when everything else was blocking them. “We had our own way. We showed you could create a system, make money from art, from curating, or writing”. It was a also golden age for a good reason: it was a thoroughly social phenomenon. They were a group of brilliant individuals, who gelled as a group, and created a new pop phenomenon. Sociologists know a lot more about “creativity” in this sense that art curators writing in catalogues sometimes do. It doesn’t happen alone, and it doesn’t happen because of “genius”.

I’ve just read a classic of the naïve curatorial genre, by Alison Gingeras – about Murakami at the current Pop Life show at Tate Modern in London. It is a hagiography of his one man global genius. She quotes Roland Barthes writings on Japan profusely, forgetting that he also wrote books about “the death of the author”. There is no social history here, no art world background; no sense of the social environment that Murakami grew up in as an artist, the social networks and interactions out of which he came. The argument is further compromised by its lack of any critical distance. Gingeras, in fact, as director of the Pinault collection, is in charge of managing the same high priced acquisitions that she is writing about as a curator – including the possibly foolish $15 that Pinault splashed in 2008 on My Lonesome Cowboy. Yet Min Nishihara’s story reminds us that “it took a village” – an art school, in fact, a whole group of artists, writers, friends, hangers on – to make one “Superflat”.

Yutaka Sone joins us in the kitchen when we get back. I’m still drinking my take out coffee. He laughs about the Tokyo art world, his struggles with the always tough Yuko Hasegawa. He has shows coming up in three places at the end of 2010: at MOT, Opera City (curated at Sone’s insistence by ART-iT blogger Mizuki Endo), and the new Hermes space. It’s a bit much having three shows at once, he says, but it will be big news. But he advises me not to focus too much on talking to curators about what is happening in Japan. “It’s on the streets – that’s much more interesting.”. They talk about one of their sons, who is apparently already producing commercial manga.

It’s time to go.“But you are right to talk to her”, says Sone, still laughing, with big eyes. “Back then, she really made the artists, discovered them. She made it all happen”. It’s a great story.

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com



As I pull up in my rented car, I’m thinking: I used to live in a street like this. Friendly little houses, desert trees, a little scruffy and socially mixed up. LA at its suburban/urban best. Min Nishihara is waiting at the door, smiling, and she shows me in. The house is all creative chaos: there are their two teenage boys playing furiously on a video game, a little dog, at least three cats; toy collectibles, books, bits and pieces everywhere; old wooden floors and little painted rooms. Nishihara is in her mid 40s, but still dresses a bit like a Harajuku teenager. I love her gothic skull handbag! I’m taken out back to the garage, which is Sone’s studio. He’s at work on another big floral sculpture that will be cast in marble in China soon. He tells me a story about how a local authority first wanted it, then didn’t want it. There’s one of his monster street plants just round the corner in Pasadena.

Sone is a whirlwind of likeable, fidgety energy. A big grin, long black hair in a pony tail, he looks today like a native American, but you can imagine him cross-dressing in Chanel; a huge personality. We immediately start trading Tokyo art world anecdotes. But I’m here to talk with Nishihara, so we head out to a local coffee shop. I want to hear about the late 1980s and early 1990s in Tokyo, student days and Omori nights. So many people – and especially Paul Schimmel who put me in touch – have identified Nishihara as a key – perhaps the key – intellectual figure in the coming together of the golden period of Japanese contemporary art, the early 1990s, that is still playing out – nearly twenty years later – on the walls of prestigious western art institutions, such as the Tate Modern and Brooklyn Art Museum.

Noi Sawaragi and Midori Matsui – who came onto the scene later – tend to monopolise the art historical word regarding what happened this period. But Min Nishihara, a writer close to all the neo-pop gang, was perhaps as responsible as anyone for the cocktail of big ideas about pop, Japan, nationalism, sexuality, Tokyo, that were eventually packaged as Superflat and Little Boy, touring the world for Westerners hoping to get a taste of “neo-Tokyo”. Now she is bringing up a family, writing still, but not about art, living a quiet life in LA. A long way from Tokyo.

They were the class of 1986 at GEIDAI. Takashi Murakami, Min Nishihara, Tomio Koyama, Yuko Hasegawa, Masato Nakamura, among others. Ambitious students all, looking for a concept, a set of ideas, a strategy for Japanese art, although feeling “void”. “When we met, we spent six months together, driving everywhere, going to openings, talking about plans, strategies, everything”. Art then in Japan, as elsewhere, was mostly P.C., political in a boring way. They were “political, sure” but “we didn’t really have anything to protest at” – except the residual resentment of American domination. They loved Jeff Koons, the empty but impeccable production values of postmodern art. Other Japanese artists such as Morimura, Miyajima, making their breakthrough internationally at the time, somehow didn’t have a concept in comparison – a typical “Japanese” problem in art. They were inspired by some artists, though, a little ahead of them. Taro Chiezo had already shown the way to make New York contacts and sell Japanese pop art. Noburu Tsubaki and Kodai Nakahara were developing great ideas. There was competition from Osaka: Kenji Yanobe. Murakami, still on a political path, had not yet had the cold water bath of New York as a struggling artist, where Nishihara visited him in 1994, He was still working out his new pop vision. Before New York, he rejected the idea of using “otaku” ideas to brand his products.

Nishihara spent all her time writing. It was the golden age of Japanese magazines. She wrote manifestos for art, reviews, feature articles, projects for artworks. With Hasegawa and Miyajima, she wrote for the important Atelier magazine. Unlike the boys – who were from Tokyo, but suburban – she came from the shitamachi: Sumida-ku. Her family was steeped in the old urban culture of Tokyo, but she had grown up through the endless transformations of the new city too. She travelled all over, writing about art. She went to the breakthrough Venice Biennale of 1989, witnessed the moment that the world awoke to Japanese contemporary art. She saw Documenta 8. For 3-4 years the gang were preparing their first shows. Tsuyoshi Ozawa and Makoto Aida appeared on the scene, a little younger, but live wires too, full of their own ideas. With Nakamura, Ozawa planned the Gimburart interventions that hailed back to the Hi-Red Center avant garde group of the 1960s. At Gimburart, Nishimura herself was a participating artist, writing poetry on the Ginza streets, running off with them when the police showed to break it up. Murakami was less interested in the Japanese contemporary/avant guard tradition. He was looking for something else. But they all went to Korea in 1992, and Nakamura married a Korean woman who was a close friend of Nishihara’s.

Murakami and Nishimura travelled a lot together. They went to Documenta 9 in 1992 and rated everything with a scorecard. They wanted to make their own art magazine, which was to be called Art Sex, at Murakami’s insistence. This was later to morph in to the famous, if short lived, Radium Egg magazine that was to come out of the Roentgen institute with the new artists on its pages, and the ideas of Sawaragi, Hasegawa – and Nishihara – to the fore. They were always looking for spaces to show, always optimistic, but still feeling the “void” of being young and Japanese in the sudden post-bubble moment of the early 1990s. Locked out of the conventional cash-for-space galleries of Ginza, there was the performances at the P-House in Ebisu, one of those infamous “underworld” style locations that are such a feature of Japanese art galleries. Sawaragi, was also around all the time, as well as Tsutomo Ikeuchi, the son of a Ginza art dealer. They persuaded Ikeuchi to open the Roentgen space in Omori.

Even more important perhaps was the fact they were the first generation to talk directly to international art figures. Before this role had been monopolised by go-between “middle men” business agents, such as Fumio Nanjo. Tomio Koyama was ambitious and active at getting out and meeting directly other international gallerists. She recalls talking with Jay Jopling – Mr. White Cube and Damian Hirst’s other half – at the 1992 NICAF art fair, that had been organised by the other maverick art dealer on the scene Masami Shiraishi. No, she didn’t think that the young Japanese artists knew already about the “Freeze” scene among Goldsmiths students in the late 1980s. But there was an uncanny family resemblance with the YBAs, and Jopling immediately recognised the parallel.

It’s all a long time ago. But you can feel the excitement of this old story. She split with Murakami, and after surviving New York in 1994, he went on to fulfil his wildest ambitions, with D.O.B and all that. Yuko Hasegawa became the most important museum curator in Japan. Tomio Koyama the most important gallerist. Nakamura one of the most influential art educationalists. All are huge names in the post-bubble art history of Japan, and still today. “For awhile the group was a tight fit. But we all went our separate ways”. Min Nishihara left it behind.

Sone and Nishihara moved to LA in 1999. Their boys had been born in Japan, and Sone was head hunted by Paul Schimmel to work in the famous UCLA art department. They settled down, and Sone in particular had a moment at the turn of century when his huge, immaculate yet playful sculptures were everywhere.

Why is she not more involved now? “I have been disappointed with so many younger artists”, she says. Murakami and her generation showed that you could make the art world for yourselves, even when everything else was blocking them. “We had our own way. We showed you could create a system, make money from art, from curating, or writing”. It was a also golden age for a good reason: it was a thoroughly social phenomenon. They were a group of brilliant individuals, who gelled as a group, and created a new pop phenomenon. Sociologists know a lot more about “creativity” in this sense that art curators writing in catalogues sometimes do. It doesn’t happen alone, and it doesn’t happen because of “genius”.

I’ve just read a classic of the naïve curatorial genre, by Alison Gingeras – about Murakami at the current Pop Life show at Tate Modern in London. It is a hagiography of his one man global genius. She quotes Roland Barthes writings on Japan profusely, forgetting that he also wrote books about “the death of the author”. There is no social history here, no art world background; no sense of the social environment that Murakami grew up in as an artist, the social networks and interactions out of which he came. The argument is further compromised by its lack of any critical distance. Gingeras, in fact, as director of the Pinault collection, is in charge of managing the same high priced acquisitions that she is writing about as a curator – including the possibly foolish $15 that Pinault splashed in 2008 on My Lonesome Cowboy. Yet Min Nishihara’s story reminds us that “it took a village” – an art school, in fact, a whole group of artists, writers, friends, hangers on – to make one “Superflat”.

Yutaka Sone joins us in the kitchen when we get back. I’m still drinking my take out coffee. He laughs about the Tokyo art world, his struggles with the always tough Yuko Hasegawa. He has shows coming up in three places at the end of 2010: at MOT, Opera City (curated at Sone’s insistence by ART-iT blogger Mizuki Endo), and the new Hermes space. It’s a bit much having three shows at once, he says, but it will be big news. But he advises me not to focus too much on talking to curators about what is happening in Japan. “It’s on the streets – that’s much more interesting.”. They talk about one of their sons, who is apparently already producing commercial manga.

It’s time to go.“But you are right to talk to her”, says Sone, still laughing, with big eyes. “Back then, she really made the artists, discovered them. She made it all happen”. It’s a great story.

People who don’t live in LA don’t get it usually. If you arrive with ideas of the city based on New York, or Paris, or Tokyo, or even San Francisco, it is easy to be confused and disappointed. There’s no centre, there’s no single LA, and there’s no tidy tourist package trip to take it all in. One Japanese artist in fact who has captured it – the glory of LA – in white marble set in lush greenery – is Yutaka Sone (see image above, of 10/405, and below installed at MOCA LA, of 10/110 – the numbers of course are the freeway intersections). He lives and works in LA, with his wife Min Nishihara, a writer, who is a bit of a legend from the golden years of Tokyo pop art in the early 1990s. It’s a sunny day and I’m on way to their cute little 1920s bungalow in South Pasadena to interview her.

As I pull up in my rented car, I’m thinking: I used to live in a street like this. Friendly little houses, desert trees, a little scruffy and socially mixed up. LA at its suburban/urban best. Min Nishihara is waiting at the door, smiling, and she shows me in. The house is all creative chaos: there are their two teenage boys playing furiously on a video game, a little dog, at least three cats; toy collectibles, books, bits and pieces everywhere; old wooden floors and little painted rooms. Nishihara is in her mid 40s, but still dresses a bit like a Harajuku teenager. I love her gothic skull handbag! I’m taken out back to the garage, which is Sone’s studio. He’s at work on another big floral sculpture that will be cast in marble in China soon. He tells me a story about how a local authority first wanted it, then didn’t want it. There’s one of his monster street plants just round the corner in Pasadena.

Sone is a whirlwind of likeable, fidgety energy. A big grin, long black hair in a pony tail, he looks today like a native American, but you can imagine him cross-dressing in Chanel; a huge personality. We immediately start trading Tokyo art world anecdotes. But I’m here to talk with Nishihara, so we head out to a local coffee shop. I want to hear about the late 1980s and early 1990s in Tokyo, student days and Omori nights. So many people – and especially Paul Schimmel who put me in touch – have identified Nishihara as a key – perhaps the key – intellectual figure in the coming together of the golden period of Japanese contemporary art, the early 1990s, that is still playing out – nearly twenty years later – on the walls of prestigious western art institutions, such as the Tate Modern and Brooklyn Art Museum.

Noi Sawaragi and Midori Matsui – who came onto the scene later – tend to monopolise the art historical word regarding what happened this period. But Min Nishihara, a writer close to all the neo-pop gang, was perhaps as responsible as anyone for the cocktail of big ideas about pop, Japan, nationalism, sexuality, Tokyo, that were eventually packaged as Superflat and Little Boy, touring the world for Westerners hoping to get a taste of “neo-Tokyo”. Now she is bringing up a family, writing still, but not about art, living a quiet life in LA. A long way from Tokyo.

They were the class of 1986 at GEIDAI. Takashi Murakami, Min Nishihara, Tomio Koyama, Yuko Hasegawa, Masato Nakamura, among others. Ambitious students all, looking for a concept, a set of ideas, a strategy for Japanese art, although feeling “void”. “When we met, we spent six months together, driving everywhere, going to openings, talking about plans, strategies, everything”. Art then in Japan, as elsewhere, was mostly P.C., political in a boring way. They were “political, sure” but “we didn’t really have anything to protest at” – except the residual resentment of American domination. They loved Jeff Koons, the empty but impeccable production values of postmodern art. Other Japanese artists such as Morimura, Miyajima, making their breakthrough internationally at the time, somehow didn’t have a concept in comparison – a typical “Japanese” problem in art. They were inspired by some artists, though, a little ahead of them. Taro Chiezo had already shown the way to make New York contacts and sell Japanese pop art. Noburu Tsubaki and Kodai Nakahara were developing great ideas. There was competition from Osaka: Kenji Yanobe. Murakami, still on a political path, had not yet had the cold water bath of New York as a struggling artist, where Nishihara visited him in 1994, He was still working out his new pop vision. Before New York, he rejected the idea of using “otaku” ideas to brand his products.

Nishihara spent all her time writing. It was the golden age of Japanese magazines. She wrote manifestos for art, reviews, feature articles, projects for artworks. With Hasegawa and Miyajima, she wrote for the important Atelier magazine. Unlike the boys – who were from Tokyo, but suburban – she came from the shitamachi: Sumida-ku. Her family was steeped in the old urban culture of Tokyo, but she had grown up through the endless transformations of the new city too. She travelled all over, writing about art. She went to the breakthrough Venice Biennale of 1989, witnessed the moment that the world awoke to Japanese contemporary art. She saw Documenta 8. For 3-4 years the gang were preparing their first shows. Tsuyoshi Ozawa and Makoto Aida appeared on the scene, a little younger, but live wires too, full of their own ideas. With Nakamura, Ozawa planned the Gimburart interventions that hailed back to the Hi-Red Center avant garde group of the 1960s. At Gimburart, Nishimura herself was a participating artist, writing poetry on the Ginza streets, running off with them when the police showed to break it up. Murakami was less interested in the Japanese contemporary/avant guard tradition. He was looking for something else. But they all went to Korea in 1992, and Nakamura married a Korean woman who was a close friend of Nishihara’s.

Murakami and Nishimura travelled a lot together. They went to Documenta 9 in 1992 and rated everything with a scorecard. They wanted to make their own art magazine, which was to be called Art Sex, at Murakami’s insistence. This was later to morph in to the famous, if short lived, Radium Egg magazine that was to come out of the Roentgen institute with the new artists on its pages, and the ideas of Sawaragi, Hasegawa – and Nishihara – to the fore. They were always looking for spaces to show, always optimistic, but still feeling the “void” of being young and Japanese in the sudden post-bubble moment of the early 1990s. Locked out of the conventional cash-for-space galleries of Ginza, there was the performances at the P-House in Ebisu, one of those infamous “underworld” style locations that are such a feature of Japanese art galleries. Sawaragi, was also around all the time, as well as Tsutomo Ikeuchi, the son of a Ginza art dealer. They persuaded Ikeuchi to open the Roentgen space in Omori.

Even more important perhaps was the fact they were the first generation to talk directly to international art figures. Before this role had been monopolised by go-between “middle men” business agents, such as Fumio Nanjo. Tomio Koyama was ambitious and active at getting out and meeting directly other international gallerists. She recalls talking with Jay Jopling – Mr. White Cube and Damian Hirst’s other half – at the 1992 NICAF art fair, that had been organised by the other maverick art dealer on the scene Masami Shiraishi. No, she didn’t think that the young Japanese artists knew already about the “Freeze” scene among Goldsmiths students in the late 1980s. But there was an uncanny family resemblance with the YBAs, and Jopling immediately recognised the parallel.

It’s all a long time ago. But you can feel the excitement of this old story. She split with Murakami, and after surviving New York in 1994, he went on to fulfil his wildest ambitions, with D.O.B and all that. Yuko Hasegawa became the most important museum curator in Japan. Tomio Koyama the most important gallerist. Nakamura one of the most influential art educationalists. All are huge names in the post-bubble art history of Japan, and still today. “For awhile the group was a tight fit. But we all went our separate ways”. Min Nishihara left it behind.

Sone and Nishihara moved to LA in 1999. Their boys had been born in Japan, and Sone was head hunted by Paul Schimmel to work in the famous UCLA art department. They settled down, and Sone in particular had a moment at the turn of century when his huge, immaculate yet playful sculptures were everywhere.

Why is she not more involved now? “I have been disappointed with so many younger artists”, she says. Murakami and her generation showed that you could make the art world for yourselves, even when everything else was blocking them. “We had our own way. We showed you could create a system, make money from art, from curating, or writing”. It was a also golden age for a good reason: it was a thoroughly social phenomenon. They were a group of brilliant individuals, who gelled as a group, and created a new pop phenomenon. Sociologists know a lot more about “creativity” in this sense that art curators writing in catalogues sometimes do. It doesn’t happen alone, and it doesn’t happen because of “genius”.

I’ve just read a classic of the naïve curatorial genre, by Alison Gingeras – about Murakami at the current Pop Life show at Tate Modern in London. It is a hagiography of his one man global genius. She quotes Roland Barthes writings on Japan profusely, forgetting that he also wrote books about “the death of the author”. There is no social history here, no art world background; no sense of the social environment that Murakami grew up in as an artist, the social networks and interactions out of which he came. The argument is further compromised by its lack of any critical distance. Gingeras, in fact, as director of the Pinault collection, is in charge of managing the same high priced acquisitions that she is writing about as a curator – including the possibly foolish $15 million that Pinault splashed in 2008 on My Lonesome Cowboy. Yet Min Nishihara’s story reminds us that “it took a village” – an art school, in fact, a whole group of artists, writers, friends, hangers on – to make one “Superflat”.

Yutaka Sone joins us in the kitchen when we get back. I’m still drinking my take out coffee. He laughs about the Tokyo art world, his struggles with the always tough Yuko Hasegawa. He has shows coming up in three places at the end of 2010: at MOT, Opera City (curated at Sone’s insistence by ART-iT blogger Mizuki Endo), and the new Hermes space. It’s a bit much having three shows at once, he says, but it will be big news. But he advises me not to focus too much on talking to curators about what is happening in Japan. “It’s on the streets – that’s much more interesting.”. They talk about one of their sons, who is apparently already producing commercial manga.

It’s time to go.“But you are right to talk to her”, says Sone, still laughing, with big eyes. “Back then, she really made the artists, discovered them. She made it all happen”. It’s a great story.



ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com