adrian's blog

Hiraku Suzuki and Takehito Koganazawa's "Panta Rhei" (Everything Flows) at Talion Gallery in Nippori, Tokyo was one of my highlights of 2012, so I was happy to hop on Eurostar this week to catch Suzuki's talk about his work at Daiwa Foundation in London. Although hugely nervous about his public appearance, Suzuki delivered a fascinating talk about his "alternative archeology" and the show "Excavated Reverberations" that has been running at Daiwa from 21 March to 10 May 2013 .

http://www.dajf.org.uk/exhibition/excavated-reverberations-by-hiraku-suzuki

Hiraku Suzuki (b.1978) is a hugely popular cult figure in Japan with a background in experimental music and street art performance. As a recognised contemporary artist -- one of a group of mid to late 70s born "after the gold rush" artists that I have written much about -- he has developed very fast in recent years, extending his visibility to several prestigious international residencies and shows. At Daiwa he put the accent in his talk on its roots in a fascination with archeology dating back to his childhood. Citing Indiana Jones, he recounted how he used to visit the vacant sites of Jomon excavations in Kanagawa, where he grew up, to dig up his own fragments -- of ancient pottery, perhaps, but also old foreign coins, bits of plastic, old rubbish. The process captured his imagination, as one underlining that the real world also contains other hidden layers, unknown things, dormant under the surface.



In a sense, this process has become his dominant modus operandi throughout his career, a process mostly applied to the act of drawing. Suzuki talked animatedly about his attempts to "expand the field" of drawing, with ordinary paper an excavation site for remembered signs and images drawn out of everyday observations and experiences. His central work thus became his hugely successful GENGA series, which appeared as a book published by Kawade Shobo in 2011. The title refers to a word play between the words "gengo" (language) and "ginga" (galaxy), with "genga" also meaning primal or original pictures. In this work, Suzuki draws his own lexicon of signs and hieroglyphs -- which take anything from two months to two seconds to execute -- which echo as much his own phenomenology of place (cities, landscapes, travels) as (pre-)historical archetypes and trans-cultural psychological subconscious. Hence drawing becomes a kind of "alternative archeology".

Suzuki illustrated this particularly effectively (I thought) via explaining how, for example, he used fragments of asphalt to create new sculptures in natural forms such as ammonites (reminding us that right up close, in microscopic detail, the glass and concrete artifice of the city is also composed of ancient natural minerals and crystals); or how he might take a small element from an everyday piece of signage in the street (a Japanese road "stop" sign), then re-cycle it as a new element of his lexicon. In other installations, he has taken familiar signs and re-projected them on gallery walls, so they take on almost mystic significance. In the book GENGA he chose about 1000 of these images as entire self contained language of line drawing. Behind him at the talk, these signs appeared as a constantly shifting set of animated drawings in a video made from the GENGA work. Also on display, were the spectacular "ammonite" spirals of silver hieroglyphics seen at Talion -- obvious commercial works that illustrate the power of Suzuki's formidable technical control with lettering.

As the new work at Daiwa shows, there has been a marked shift in Suzuki's work, under the influence of a recent residency at Chelsea art college. Suzuki has tried to dig deeper in his process by tracing natural patterns of light, as well as the shapes of antique objects, re-projected now in silver paint as (photographic) "negatives" or "reverberations" of these lines and shapes. It is primal art that evokes the first "negatives" of hands painted onto walls in Paleolithic caves. The process also evolved from his first experimentations with sand cast sculpture, producing aluminium plinths on which his ever-morphing "glyphs" appear. There is a purity and simplicity to this work -- and a clear personal evolution -- but it will be interesting to see if he keeps his audience as he moves further away from the street and performance art associations that made him such a hit at the 2010 Roppongi Crossing.

The event at Daiwa ended early, so I was also able to trundle across town on London's creaking underground, in time to catch the opening at the Japanese art focused ICN gallery in Shoreditch.



From 2-25 May 2013, it is showing Nagoya based conceptual artist Seijiro Niwa (b. 1967) who, in a series of striking installation and photographic works, explores the phenomenological conumdrum of how consciousness (i.e., vision) is both "in" and "outside" the world -- producing objects not seen by anyone ("Ankyo") and objects visualisable only by a blind artist ("Mesashi").

http://www.icn-global.com/gallery/exhibition/2013/seijiro_niwa.html

I chat with the artist and a friend about his education in Aichi with the legendary Professor Hitsuda (who taught Yoshitomo Nara, Hiroshi Sugito and many others). Niwa will make a public talk about his work at ICN on Saturday 4 May 2013 at 2pm.

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Just a few days left in Tokyo to see some amazing art works from the 1990s: Hideki Nakazawa's small retrospective, "Systems and Methods in Hidden Functions" at The Container in Naka Meguro.

Nakazawa, the artist, has been an influential but singular presence in Tokyo art world for more than two decades. He first emerged as a talented graphic artist in the context of the pulsating 1980s Tokyo scene in graphic arts. By 1990 he was also established as an art writer for Bijutsu Techo on global conceptual trends. In the early 1990s he entered an alliance with some of the brilliant young Geidai artists about to change Japanese art forever; his ideas contributed to the effervescence of the group, notably the Hi Red Centre homage/parody Small Village Centre, the ad hoc performance group which united Nakazawa with Ozawa (Tsuyoshi), Murakami (Takashi) and Nakamura (Masato). Long before the days of Illustrator and Photoshop, he embraced the possibilities of computer technology in contemporary art, transposing his graphic art into a new on-screen generated genre that was discussed as Baka CG (Silly Comuter Graphics)(*1). In a brave new world in which artists could no longer technologically compete with the immaculate skills of graphic designers, the conceptualism of his heta uma (clumsy or low skill art) had to be answer (at least until the success of Yoshitomo Nara made a more expressivist version of heta uma credible again).


ESSAY ON INVISIBLE FUNCTIONS DURING INSTALLATION

The central piece which fills Shai Ohayon's industrial alternative white cube -- a tin can gallery located inside a hipster hair salon -- is from this earlier period in Nakazawa's work: "Essay on Invisible Functions" from 1996. It is, extraordinarily, a cartoon machine, fronted by what looks like a steam age vintage personal computer. For years it was installed at the ARTPIA, Nadiya Park in Nagoya; the last couple of years it has been languishing in a children's museum in Sasayama; a new lick of paint, and a bit of rewiring, and Nakazawa's 3D vision has been reborn again as a gloriously funny and absurdist art work. Pressing the choice of words on the computer screen causes -- by some "invisble function" that we never know -- classic Nakazawa-style Baka CG images to pop up on the screen. Silly voices also accompany the words or expressions. You are composing a poem on screen, except there is also a degree of unpredictability. Words are mostly correlated with images and colours, but sometimes random things splash on to the screen. Effectively you create your own digital painting, before it gets wiped clear for the next visitor.




SCREEN SHOTS FROM ESSAY ON INVISIBLE FUNCTIONS

In his notes for the show, curator Shai Ohayon argues: "It may look like a retro video game, but Nakazawa's associative use of language examines the conceptual, functional, and pictorial interrelationships of text and image as explored in the most recent critical theory". There is an eloquent thread here to some of the most important long term international trends in conceptual art.

I met with Nakazawa during the summer to discuss the show he was planning. After a delicious teishoku lunch in one of my favourite small places near Yotsuya, Nakazawa insisted on taking me for coffee at an old school kissaten nearby for further discussion. I hypothesised that his deliberately clumsy engagement with these now dated technological forms was a kind of intentionally anachronistic appropriation of fast moving techniques and possibilities that artists inevitably cannot stay abreast of. But Nakazawa resisted my interpretation, insisting that the antiquity of the technology or some kind of nostalgia was not the point; a new version of the machine could in theory be made with newer technology. "Essay in Invisible Functions" was, in other words, a work of conceptual method not form; a meditation on the invisibility of the relation between signifier and signified, and one which heralded his sharp turn towards a more ascetic, systematic practice from 1997 on.

Soon after the word machine was produced, Nakazawa's art took a new direction: towards the "Methodicism" he would formalise as a manifesto in 2000. From 1997, Ohayon has thus selected two of Nakazawa's original methodicist paintings, "Letter Coordinates Type Painting", Nos. 1 & 2. These are glowing light boxes, displaying a grid into which kanji and kana have been placed in systematic fashion. The kanji can be read, while the kana are upside down; in No.1, for example, the kanji have been selected according to a standardised linguistic ordering related to the basic Chinese elements. But meaning or form is not the point; they are rather exercises in a particular method replacing the usual pixel-like "data" of colour, so that we must indeed re-imagine these works as paintings; albeit "pathologies", as Nakazawa calls them, in which the neutral perfection of Chinese character codes taken from the Japanese Industrial Standard, has replaced the emotional "pleasure" caused by colours.


LETTER COORDINATES TYPE PAINTING NO.1

The "Letter Coordinates" works are nonetheless beautiful works, that look stunning in the Naka Meguro space. They were once displayed with works by the celebrated Chinese/New York artist Xu Bing, but the concept is quite different. Nakazawa invites us rather to view painting as a "structured arrangement of data", rejecting "the sensualist immersion in pleasure that exploits the lack of foundations in the arts". By introducing his own alternate method, he places himself at the moment of the formation of a "new genre." Here I quote from an early essay by Akira Tatehata on Nakazawa, which succinctly captures the intellectual drive of his work.

Nakazawa trained as a doctor and retains his boffin-like aura. In person, though, he is warm and funny, as well as inspirational. Parts of my book Before and After Superflat would have been impossible without his advice and encouragement; his own Contemporary Art History: Japan (from 2008) was a crucial reference for me, in its eloquent attempt to situate the 1990s in the longer history of Japanese modern art and its always difficult relationship with global trends. We must thank Shai Ohayon for reminding us of these semi-forgotten treasures from that amazing period in Japanese contemporary art. And I urge everyone to get down to the quiet streets of Naka Meguro and see Nakazawa's classic works before they get unplugged again.

Notes

*1. Nakazawa's story about the origin of the idea is that the phrase "Baka CG" was first coined and introduced by artist Gabin Ito in BT at the end of the 1980s. BT editors Kiyoshi Kusumi and Kenichi Arai (a.k.a. Noi Sawaragi) shouted "Baka CG!!" when they first saw photos of Nakazawa's CG works in January 1990. Nakazawa adopted and advocated the term, and over time became the artist most associated with the idea.


BAKA CG

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Why do the Japanese sometimes fail to recognise great artistic talent in their own backyard? The story of the performance/communication artist, Tatsumi Orimoto (born 1946), is a classic case in point. Venerated in elite art circles in Europe -- particularly in Germany -- he remains obscure, misunderstood, even not taken seriously sometimes in the high art circles of his own country. Yet his work is some of the most important art by any living Japanese artist.

The issue obviously vexes Orimoto, for he talks about it a lot. It was a rainy October day last year when my friend, the artist Midori Mitamura told me on the phone of a change of our plans to meet that evening. She was at the house of an artist in Kawasaki doing some archival work. Would I mind coming over and joining them for dinner? It was in fact, the legendary house of Mrs Orimoto and her son, Tatsumi, which has been immortalised in so many graphic, sensitive, and difficult-to-view images of their home life together. His life is his art, and his art now for over two decades has been devoted to the care of his nearly 90 year old mother who suffers from a particularly hard version of Alzheimer's as well as the side effects of all the medicaments she has had to take. She is close to incapicitated, and Orimoto -- who says bluntly he has no wife or children, this is his mother, and she is his "God" -- looks after her full time as a carer in the old family house.



It is an ordinary neighbourhood in a poor city: the house is full of stuff piled high everywhere. There are no end of magazines, art books, memorabilia. We have to make room around the dining room table, and I squeeze in as Orimoto makes us oden, rice and shochu for dinner. I clean off a plate and tuck in. His mother enjoys a special delivery of good quality sushi and follows our conversation. We are watching championship ice skating on the television. A very girlish looking Japanese boy who is a local hero. Later, there is a music show and a Korean girl band. Orimoto tells me all the details, so I can learn something about real Japanese culture. I try to ask about art works like Bread Man, but Orimoto doesn't want to repeat himself. He gives me some magazines and catalogues. Read that. Let's talk about other things. He makes sure that I don't pretend his mother is not there. I have to talk to her as well.

He discovered performance art in New York in the early 70s, becoming an associate of the Fluxus artist Nam June Paik. He started making performances even though he like everyone then wasn't sure if or how it could be art. Famous for his Bread Man work, in more recent years the art has focused on the immensely gentle attempt to find ways of living his life and communicating with his mother: an artwork for life at the most intimate, personal scale. The photos we see are a documentation of something living. Although a lot of Japanese tend to not want to see this kind of reality, they are always immensely touched by the sight of such art unashamed to be close to home, so lacking in style or artifice, so unlike what art usually is. In Europe, Orimoto's work fits very well with all kinds of performance theories, and has sat at the edge of an avant guard for many years. Venice in 2001 was the moment it arrived big time.

Last week, I made it to Berlin to see an Orimoto show. DNA gallery in the new east has been working with Orimoto for ten years. They opened their gallery in 2001 with his show, and the current show is their tenth anniversary. The gallery shows a number of his Mama + Son photographs, plus downstairs a selection of 23 performance videos. I watch the video of the opening from a few weeks ago. It is packed with a hip berlin crowd of art lovers and curators; I spot local resident David Elliott in the audience. Orimoto makes a strange performance opening a suitcase full of dolls and toys, many of whom he positions to represent himself and his mother. There is love and tenderness; family stories; there is also anguish. At one point, Orimoto makes one doll strip the other doll, before stopping it. "Bad boy!" he says. "A dream", he gasps. Where is mother? She should be here. She is a long way away. There seems to be a catharsis; he is expressing his love and devotion; also the pain of seeing his mother's disease. At the end he seems to expire, as he lies down on the floor. He gets up, laughing, telling everyone how he likes to be in Germany. He says today this was a funny performance, not so much pain.

Downstairs, there is also a Japanese TV documentary of his work in Japan. I can't follow everything, but parts of this show are almost intolerably moving. I feel emotional maybe because I have met Mrs Orimoto and her son for real, at their own house. At one point I watch with rapt attention as Orimoto plots the idea with his mother of their big Drum Can installation/performance. She will stand in the Drum, with him behind her in another, and they will make photos. Then more photos with more people and more drums. It is surreal; funny; an unforgettable image. His mother understands everything. She is always happy to volunteer. He once got in trouble with critics for taking photos of his mother with her two neighbours with old tyres hung on their neck (above). It is a beautiful photo of three marvellous old people, two of whom passed away shortly after. The photo, he says, is evidence of their having been in the world. He was accused of bullying the old people for a funny image; but the opposite was the case. It is a photo that makes vivid how we never look at old people in art, like we never look at old tyres. It is a moving and beautiful work.



Afterwards, the documentary follows Orimoto as he goes to visit an old people's home near Akita, the famous Green Hospital run by collector Hisashi Hozumi who believes in art as a form of therapy. He is a big collector of Yayoi Kusama, but it is clear too that Orimoto's ideas are at home in this quiet place. The old people are all suffering from similar, incapacitating diseases. It is a depressing place, but for a few hours Orimoto sparks life and energy as he talks to the old people and convinces them to take part in his "Big Shoes" performance and make photos with him. These are the famous big green shoes he made for his mother, who is very short, and for years found it difficult to walk. In the shoes she looked dignified and proud.



I visited the streets where many of Orimoto's most famous photos were taken. I'm curious about this old industrial city, Kawasaki, said to be one of the poorest in Japan. In the West, we don't think of that when we hear that word. We think of superfast motorcycles, futuristic technology. It's like when we dream of Japan as "Cool Japan", all pop culture and weird fantasies. We don't think of old ladies with Alzheimer's living at home with their son eating oden. What kind of art does Japan need now, now that "Cool Japan" is over? I think more than ever it needs art like Orimoto's: full of love, tenderness and reality. It needs to connect, it needs to communicate.

Orimoto promises me that next time I come to Kawasaki, he will take me to see the bicycle races, with all the gamblers. He used to accompany his father there when he was a boy, to keep him out of trouble. He was always his mother's son, though. We shouldn't be drinking but we get through a whole cardboard box of shochu. It's pouring with rain when we have to leave. Orimoto takes us out to the bustop, holding the umbrella. As we say goodbye, I'm thinking: it's about time I visited my mum again.

"LIFE + REALITY", DNA, Auguststr. 20, Berlin, until Aug 13
http://www.dna-galerie.de/en



ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Meanwhile, in a universe far far away from "Cool Japan", artists in Japan and around the world are wondering: What is the appropriate response -- and the role for art -- in the aftermath of the disasters of March 2011? A couple of weeks ago I sat in the small, but beautifully formed showroom of Ei Kibukawa's eitoeiko gallery in Kagurazaka, as Kibukawa showed me all the latest high tech online data about daily earthquakes in Tokyo and fluctuating radiation levels in the city. He has a young child and like many would have liked to have got out during this period. It was difficult to focus much on talking about what was happening in the Tokyo art world.


ICHIRO ENDO

The same week, I also saw a talk show at Fukuoka Asian Art Museum by roving performance artist, Ichiro Endo. Enthusiastic and charismatic as ever, Endo took his van and his message "GO FOR FUTURE" to the people and places of Tokoku most devastated by the Tsunami. He also teamed up with installation artist/painter Yusuke Asai, to do some on-site performances with homeless people in Fukushima. They were fresh from a parallel social intervention into a poor village in Northern India in February organised by the social activist group Wall Art Festival, which is led by Akiko Ookuna and Kazanori Hanao. The message was inspirational: they were visibly bringing fun and a little hope to people whose lives who have been devastated by poverty or disaster. Its a small gesture, but it made perfect sense for Endo as an artist of and for people. A small good thing. He was also one of the key artists showing in a special art donation show I saw at 3331 Arts Chiyoda in Tokyo, where photos from his Tokoku trip were also displayed.


ENDO GOES FOR FUTURE IN INDIA

So: DO FOR JAPAN is the message. But it is a difficult one for artists, as I discussed with Satoru Aoyama over coffee in Tokyo after. Endo has been saying that everyone should make an intervention like him. Artists should all go and do something in Tohoku or Fukushima. But as Aoyama points out, a lot of art is not going to make any difference at all to the reality of these suffering people. Yes, maybe if you brought the Mona Lisa over from Paris, or something, that might make a difference to them. But not all artists can make social interventions and nor should they. They are artists, not politicians or social workers. It would also be ridiculous if everyone tried to do what Endo was doing. This was his unique way of intervening. Like a lot people, Aoyama wanted to see and smell the devastation for himself -- to get a sense of it as a human reality, but as an artist he was troubled by making fake gestures not true to his own art. His own response was the quiet and understated offering of beauty in his recent Mizuma show: a series of exquisite sewn red flowers, a one off. Nothing political, this time.


AOYAMA ROSE

Aoyama also pinpointed the problems with some of the well meaning artist donations and auctions going on. As well as being scattered and rather disorganised in Tokyo, Art was basically being used as little more than a collection box for charity. Just one more way to get rich people to hand over some money. The "excuse" is they are collectors, and that the artists feel they need to do something. But as a way of "collecting" and "valuing" art is neither good for the collectors or the artists. The money should be given anyway. It doesn't help answer the terribly difficult question of what Art can do in the face of social disaster or political impotence. I suggest to him that perhaps the meaning of these actions is something else: not so much in the money collected, but in the fragile of sense of community it has given disperate artists in Berlin or New York, when they "came together" to do something one day. Everybody feels helpless and lonely in the face of such disasters.

On this score, the next big charity/NGO event coming up in New York is on July 21st: "Voices from the Ground":

http://asiasociety.org/events-calendar/voices-ground-civil-society-reports-japan

Please forward this information.


OZAWA TALKING WITH HITOMI HASEGAWA ABOUT THE SOY SAUCE GALLERY

Which brings me to Tsuyoshi Ozawa. Although he is one of the other key figures from the early 90s in Japan -- indeed, with Makoto Aida and Yukinori Yanagi, a contender for the honour of being the most important Young Japanese Artist of that decade -- I have found it difficult to write about his work. It just needed the right time. What is obvious now, is how much his gentle, humanistic, socially oriented, communicative art work is the kind of art that finds its true place and role after March 2011. Also a few weeks ago, I was describing my meeting with Ozawa and his "Fukushima" performance at the Showa 40 Nen Kai opening to Ayumi Minemura in Berlin. Minemura, who works in Berlin under the artist name "Are You Meaning Company", is like Ozawa, a relational artist, someone who uses art to find new modes of communication across cultures and between people. She put it very simply: "Yes, this is Ozawa's moment".

For the Showa 40 Nen Kai show in Düsseldorf, he had first of all commissioned a new version of the Nasubi gallery. It was an empty boxed, lacquered in immaculate, traditional style by a famous artisan from the region.. The box sat in a line of other Nasubi exhibitions that told their own story of Japan since the bubble. A painting of a Sarin bottle. A photo of a Nasubi hung on a collapsed building in Kobe. A Nasubi with an Otaku figurine inside (reduced to 3 inches rather than blown up to 3 metres). Now, there was an empty lacquered Nasubi.

Ozawa is a shy person, not given naturally to grand gestures. His long running "series" such as Jizoing have been ways of giving a more structured meaning to his social interventions. He has been wondering ever since the beginning: What is the point of Art? Who is it for? How can we create new spaces for art in a society where is no space or time? A milk box hanging on a street wall is one way. A couple of days out of time with local residents shopping and cooking together is another.

On the evening of the opening, Ozawa gave a talk and slideshow. It was a kind of poem or children's story, read out quietly (in Japanese, with German translation) to a packed and attentive room of Germans and resident Japanese. No-one expected, wanted or needed images by Akihabara otaku or "Neo-Tokyo" viewed from Roppongi Hills. There was a need for something a little more real tonight.

He talked about an artist who lived in a big city. It was about 200 km away from a terrible fire that was burning. The artist sat at home wondering what he could do. He always wanted to help people with his art, but it was not easy. What could you do with art that could make any difference? This time, he was like everyone else in the big city. They sat there watching the terrible news on the internet and TV.

One day, about 1000 people -- lots and lots of children -- arrived in his hometown. They stayed at the local school, camping rough. He visited them, to see if he could help. They were trying to improvise the graduation ceremonies they had missed at the school that had been closed down. He talked to one child who was sad about his rabbit, which he had lost in the earthquake. He proposed to have a workshop making kites with the children. They tried to have some fun. After the workshop, the kids played with the kites, they were happy and smiling again, for a little while. He was happy to see it.

The artist thought he should visit where these people came from. He and his friends travelled to this place. They had to take a bus, there were no trains working. In the city there was just a few people. The atmosphere was fear. They had to wear masks, and be careful everywhere. The smell was bad. It was Spring. Even here there were flowers blooming, cherry blossom. He took some photographs.

The artist talked with his friends. He had an idea. There was an art work he sometimes made. He sometimes made weapons -- guns and bazookas -- made of vegetables. He would travel to different places, in different countries, and meet some locals. They would go shopping for local vegetables. He would make a gun out of the vegetables, then take military style photos of girls holding the guns. Then everybody would get together and cook the vegetables in a big party, according to a local recipe. The art work was the whole event. The relation between the people. The small new space in time it made. After, he had a cook book made.


VEGETABLE WEAPON

They went back to the city. The people living there had to leave their houses and live in public refuges. This place, not far away, was famous for its vegetables. But because of the fire, the people growing the vegetables could no longer sell them. They got together with some of the locals living rough, mostly young people. They bought some of the vegetables they shouldn't buy from the farmers. Some of the farmers were desperate: there had been suicides because they had lost their livelihood. Some of the locals were angry: they didn't understand or appreciate what the artist was doing. Others were happy: it was an important event. The art was relational, and it was conflictual. An intervention.

They made two guns, and two sets of photos. They were sitting eating under the cherry blossom. One of the guns they could eat, one of them they couldnt. They cooked everything in a stew, and also made tempura.

It was an art event. He was a famous artist. But he didn't have any plans for an exhibition of these photos. He needed time to think about it. It was a very delicate projet. It was a fun dinner, though.

Many of the people in the city are still homeless. It ia a very sad situation.

That was the end of the story. The artist ended what he had to say quietly. Nobody knows if, after all this, the country will get well again or not. Nobody knows.



Tsuyoshi Ozawa's facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ozawa-Tsuyoshi-artist/172655399620

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

I thought Yukihiro Taguchi's current show at Mori Art Museum had been cancelled because of the Earthquake. So I was delighted to find out when I bumped into MAM curator Kenichi Kondo last week at the Mizuma opening nijikai for Satoru Aoyama, that, no, it was on and up. Kindly furnished with free tickets, I was then able to check out the show late one evening, sneaking in backwards so I didnt have to first go through the tedious French conceptualism exhibition in the main part of the museum (fairplay to MAM: it was nice to see some of the Duchamp original readymades, but I was here for Taguchi).

Anyway, I was very pleased to see my profile and predictions last summer for Taguchi's MAM debut to have been right on the money. This small show (and catalogue) is a great introduction to one of Japan's most interesting young artists. Go see, ASAP. At least before 28 August.

Nobody ready my blog first time round, so here it is again, with some photos from the show. Please enjoy!


YUKIHIRO TAGUCHI


PERFORMATIVE HILLS

My best tip for great things in 2011 has to be the Berlin based video/performance artist Yukihiro Taguchi, who is lined up as a future Mori Art Museum Project in April during Tokyo art week. Born in 1980, Taguchi has been living and working in Berlin since 2005, when he dropped out of the MA at Geidai because he says he wasn't learning anything. He got frustrated with having ideas, asking to do them, then being told he had to ask someone else, who then told him to ask someone else -- a vicious circle. Sounds familar? It is typical of the educational, financial and conceptual frustration that has driven so many young Japanese artists to find refuge in the open minded international art world of Berlin where, with a little effort (but a lot less than in Tokyo), young artists can find the spaces and resources to pursue radical, experimental art.

It is a good job someone back in Japan is paying attention to these artists, though. Mami Kataoka selected Taguchi for MAM and he has worked recently with Yuko Hasegawa, Fumihiko Sumitomo and Mizuki Takahashi. Meanwhile, gallerist Rika Fujiki at Mujinto Productions saw the commercial potential with his video art and its playful and attractive animation style.

You can get a good introduction to Taguchi's work from the commercially available, "Moment" video, which includes the "Performative Installation" (2007) and the "Performative Spazieren" (2008).


TAGUCHI SETS TO WORK DISMANTLING ANOTHER GALLERY

This "show" at a Berlin gallery is Taguchi "performing" the making of a film in stop-start animation in real time during the duration of his time in the gallery. We then see the video made afterwards as the document of what he did during these days as the artist in residence. In the first of these two works, he takes apart the white cube space, pulling up about two dozen planks from the floorboard, has them dance around the gallery in various ways and constructions -- including at one point facilitating a game of badminton among gallery visitors -- and ends with a bounenkai party sitting on the planks and then the boards being respectfully re-installed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khyCvR-K_rA

In the second, he takes the planks out for a walk around the Berlin streets, parks and even the metro, before returning in good humour back to where they came from.

As the planks spill out of the window into a precarious construction, or as they move around the gallery into another architectural form, the influence of his first teacher Tadashi Kawamata is obvious. The work is a kind of homage to his constructions, only with Taguchi they are constantly mobile and inventive physical forms, which seem almost to be celebrating their temporary freedom from the built form. At the same time, the possibilities of movement and the actual choreography is formally very restrictive.

It's a brilliant idea and spin on the idea of how to make a "performance" work in the static confines of a gallery "show". The animation ideas, meanwhile, will no doubt be stolen by Western ad agencies when they see it -- as they have, for example, shamelessly ripped off Akira Yamaguchi's graphic art or Naoki Honjo’s "Small Planet" photos of miniature city life. The intellectual property problem with this work is literally Rika Fujiki's biggest problem, because it is not quite clear how you sell this work. Is the artwork the finished video? Or was it the stop-start performance during the time of the show?


MOMENT AT MAM

This is precisely what is interesting here. Taguchi's performance is bound quite tightly by space and time, but it is constantly moving. Very little art actually moves in time, mostly we are always stuck watching screens or paintings on a wall. Performances meanwhile are simply evanescent moments, which are then frozen in time as documentation. But when the museum lights are turned off and the doors are locked, the museum becomes literally a morgue of still life. Taguchi thus poses interesting questions about what happens in the gallery when we are not looking. It helps that he also imposes a certain anonymity to the work, erasing himself from the process. This distinguishes Taguchi's own "drawing constraint" method formally from the rococo self-obsession of Matthew Barney. Formally, some of what he does seems closer to British conceptual star, Martin Creed -- but so many of Creed's works are just tedious one line conceptual gags for art theorists, and nothing to look at. You can bring your kids to look at Taguchi's animations.

This is also a clue to Taguchi's significance. As is well known, it has been almost impossible to think of Japanese contemporary art without thinking of anime. Of course, everyone loves Hayao Miyazaki, and rightly so. But it has licensed a confusion about the use of anime in contemporary art, most famously by Takashi Murakami, which actually confounds the two art forms -- as if it is enough for contemporary art's to simply appropriate anime art and put it in a gallery in order to put high art value on it. Yet when contemporary art is simply derivative of other forms' technological and aesthetic superiority, it becomes nothing but a pale imitation. Taguchi as a video artist shows how anime technology and ideas can be used to change the institutional space and content of the artwork itself.


I AM AN ARTIST, FOR THOSE THAT DON'T READ GERMAN

Taguchi lives as the epitome of the "survival artist" in Berlin. Not much income, just the occasional gallery or museum commission, or perhaps a short residency. He makes each of these solvent periods an actual artwork -- performing the residency by documenting the non-stop motion of his interaction with the space and the materials he finds in the building. But the constructed "art life" he lives outside these periods is also interesting.

He invites me to meet him at the famous Sunday flea market in East Berlin. A grumpy official shouts at me in the usual gruff Berlin style when I ask if they know where a young Japanese guy might be selling postcards among the sea of bargain stalls. It is a dumb question. So instead I follow my instincts and Taguchi's vague instructions to find an open space in the sun, nearby where they are selling ice cream. A few minutes walk around in the burning summer sunshine and I spot him, sitting on his one metre square rented patch, dressed in traditional Japanese work man clothes and head scarf, cross legged, goateed, big ironic smile. He is selling postcards, small litho works on handmade paper, with orientalist "mystic" images. There is a steady stream of curious customers to this ascetic performance in the sunshine. How much are the cards, they ask? Taguchi tells them they can pay what they like; what they think its worth. These are kindly Asianophile Germans, perhaps with a little classroom Japanese to share, and they routinely hand over 10 and 20 Euro notes for one or two of these postcards. Taguchi makes more than 100 Euros in a few hours in the sunshine. It's not art, but it is survival.


SOME OF TAGUCHI'S POSTCARDS, ONSALE AT MAM NOW!

Taguchi's home made postcards -- about as far from Kaikai Kiki and Nara corporate spin offs as you can imagine -- are, of course, not the point about his work in Berlin. To make sure there is no confusion, he invites me the next day to visit him at home to watch some videos and talk about his work over coffee and cakes. The house in an immigrant neighbourhood in North Berlin is a huge and cheap apartment he shares with about ten other multinational student / creative types -- I'm impressed by the remarkably tidy and organised kitchen conditions. Upstairs his room is a mass of junk, memorabilia, bottles, and works in progress.

We watch a series of videos, beginning from his quite amazing student work where he uses bits of wood to engineer a gravity defying construction in a small space in which he wedges himself into. It keeps collapsing, until he gets the balance right. Taguchi hit upon the idea of using stop-start video when he realised he wanted to document the process of creating a precarious structure, which might then collapse. Have an idea. Photo. Have another. Photo. Then the next. Photo. Each one leads to the next, there are only limited options, but always various options for a move. It visualises a kind of butterly effect, foregrounding time, motion, space and choice in the work. It starts and it moves, it goes somewhere not foreplanned, yet is always tightly constrained by the starting conditions.

The residency at North East Tokyo's Alpha M gallery, curated by Mizuki Takahashi, builds on "Moment" by using lights and all kinds of other found objects. He also shows me a number of other videos made during residencies -- one made in Brazil where he is running on a beach between two lovers who are communicating through him in Portuguese, another in Hong Kong, where we catch a series of Hollywood moments where he is running away from something in the city.

This was a side work for the main installation work in a museum, invited by Yuko Hasegawa. Filmed as a video, this becomes a kind of moving theater of the gallery, deconstructed into pieces while all the other installations, paintings and photography remain fixed all around him. It was perhaps this brilliant piece that led Kataoka to select him for MAM. Although the plans are still secret I get some glimpses of his ideas for this show, where he talks about deconstructing the room and the walls, have pieces of the museum literally moving around the 53 story building and out into the Roppongi Hills complex. Given how disappointingly little MAM uses the amazing space it has in creative ways, this all sounds quite amazing -- the only precedents I can think of are Kusama's art virus around the time of the opening, or the telescope and monster clock down in the city below by another former MAM Project artist Nishi Tatzu (perhaps Taguchi's closest peer).


MAKING PLANS FOR MAMI

Taguchi as ever, wants to put the show in motion, foreground what is usually architecturally static, and put the gallery itself into the show as a moveable piece. When he looks at paintings or even videos (which move but are still so static), Taguchi says his impulse is just to have everything moving on the wall, and then even the wall itself.

So much art nowadays is about going outside of the white cube or breaking its constraints. Taguchi though doesn't turn his back on the white cube, so much as literally seek to turn the white cube inside out. Everything in his art is relative, even time and space, no fixed points. It is indeed a kind of quantum art. Let's hope Mori let him do new things with the museum.


TAGUCHI PLAYS TABLE TENNIS WITH BITS OF MORI MUSEUM

See Yukihiro Taguchi's website:
http://yukihirotaguchi.com/

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

I know Tabaimo is old news for most people, but it seems a fair bet that her animated film installations about post-1990s disaster struck Japan are going to be a huge hit at Venice this year. Cool Japan is over, Tokyo has dropped off the tourist map, and Tabaimo's work -- easy to consume as it is -- continues to capture compellingly the gloom and anxiety of contemporary Japan. It is Japan as the world now finally sees it after March 2011. It's not the whole story; but there is a lot of truth in it. All through the lens of a typical mid 1970s born post-bubble child, who was too young to have enjoyed the 1980s, and who has instead grown up through the bursting of the bubble, the 1995 zero year, the long slide of the 2000s, the 2008 crash, and now 2011. Live through this, she says.

Hopefully, then, the time is right for the West to finally start understanding. I met Tabaimo at Louisiana in Copenhagen in 2008, where she had to put up with the indignity of one of her most harrowing works, Public ConVENience (2006), being presented as part of a naive celebration of Japanese Manga Art. She was furious, but there was nothing to be done. Superflat and Little Boy had set every agenda. Clueless Western curation has done her no favours, even as her popularity and recognition has grown through the past decade. But I am sure that in the hands of Osaka National Museum's Yuka Uematsu -- herself part of a new generation of smart young internationally savvy Japanese curators -- the show at the Japanese Pavilion in Venice will set the right tone at last.

I just saw for the first time her original graduation piece, Japanese Kitchen (1999) at Hara Museum, Tokyo, yesterday. It is a juvenile piece, designed to provoke and shock, but it contains all the essense of Tabaimo in one concentrated, inspired dose. Those delicious animated colours, the wobbly, sickening images. That slightly off-beat Monty Pythonesque portrait of Japan that so easily seduces. The scraping of a discordant violin. The sarcastic little subtitles. The hum of a radio weather broadcast, and the screaming of a politician inside a microwave. Someone punching holes violently in a paper screen. A despondent salary man, sitting in the fridge, waiting to have his head severed and put in the pot. The final horror. Postmodern Japanese gothic.

Above all, like many of her later works, the installation creates its own unique environment. Japanese Kitchen is literally a wooden box, into which the viewer has to step. At Hara, most Japanese visitors were unable to bring themselves to walk, profanely, into the room with their shoes on -- even though that is the clear instruction. From inside the little box, all perception is directed at the windows, by the stage of warped Tatami leading up to the screen. There is meant to be no escape. A story unfolds on the central screen -- an overweight housewife at work in a kitchen -- with side panels offering alarming high rise window views out into some depressed suburb of the big city. Simple lines capture the visual landscape of the Japanese city; the power lines scarring the sky, the ugly prefab architecture. Bugs crawl across the screen. A couple of schoolgirls pass by laughing. Then bodies start falling from the sky.

Apparently about 90 people a day commit suicide in Japan. An annual tally of about 30,000. A small town in the provinces somewhere. Its a grim reflection. After the final gun shot, bodies lay strewn briefly in the streets. The screens close again. All we are left with is an immaculate hinomaru. Red on white. The video begins again ...

While the obvious social reading of her work, and the easy televised narratives are the first reason why her work is so immediately successful, it is obvious that Tabaimo's real strengths run much deeper. With a strong family support team -- her older sister goes everywhere with her -- Tabaimo's work in the twelve or more years since 1999 has only got better as it became more abstract and less didactic, and she experimented with all kinds of 3-D installation and sound affects. The recent small book of images and poetry is like a ground work of visual archetypes: Tabaimo's world, A-to-Z. She is, reputedly, a workaholic, driven and singular in her vision. Still only 36, she remains the artist of her generation most likely to put Japanese contemporary art back on the map.



ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Japanese artists nowadays are routinely global, but it is nevertheless interesting to see that different global cities have different conceptual effects on young Japanese artists when they live and work in them. To take two of THE ECHO generation artists I have written about a lot in this blog: Satoru Aoyama and Kei Takemura, born in 1973 and 1975 respectively (*see blogs below). Viewed conceptually, Aoyama is distinctively an artist who came out of Goldsmiths, London at the time of the YBAs -- he is nothing like Damien Hirst, but you still know that he studied there in every stitch he makes. Takemura's art, meanwhile, is all about her Berlin-Japan memories and connections, her mix of poetical Japanese-German texts underlying the conceptual freedom this art capital city has given her. Similarly, Yuken Teruya -- born in 1973 -- who has lived and worked in New York City since the turn of the millenium, is a "global" Japanese artist whose work is decisively inflected by the distinctive influence of NYC.



He says it is because it wasn't until he moved to New York, after studying at Tamabi in Tokyo, that he began to feel comfortable about his "identity" as a native Okinawan. The fact he was not from mainland Japan was always a negative issue for him when he was in his home country. He didn't feel comfortable as a "Japanese" artist. But the concern with feeling a comfortable global identity is itself a typical preoccupation of the USA, where everyone and everything is struggling over a kind of post-ethnic "identity" politics. Race, gender, culture and sexuality are all part of the mix, and you are never allowed to forget it (or be satirical -- i.e., "incorrect" -- about it). New York colonises the mind, even as it convinces you that you are living in the one true big global city (and don't need to go anywhere else).

Quietly, slowly, but surely, Teruya has become one of the most successful younger generation Japanese artists in New York. Perhaps he is the post-Murakami Japanese artist the world is waiting for. There are quite a few Japanese resident artists who were like him featured in the immaculate and emotional Making A Home show at Japan Society in New York (in 2008, curated by Eric Shiner, with Reiko Tomii and others) but many of them are still totally obscure -- etching out declining incomes in the tough, expensive and very very big artist fishpond in New York. One often wonders why New York is so venerated. It seems to constrain artists to direct their work to the market (and to brute "survival"), as much as it might inspire them by their daily floating in the distinctively Americanised "global" atmosphere of the Big Apple.



No such problem for Teruya. Straight out of the MFA at the School of Visual Art in New York in 2001, he was getting ecstatic reviews and prizes for his brilliant opening works, the Notice-Forest series (ongoing), in which minutely cut paper trees sit inside the throwaway bags of luxury brands like Vuitton and Dior, or takeaway giants like McDonalds. It was a great "no logo" art, an apposite and sad environmental commentary, and also exquisitely subtle, small and beautiful. Not a bad riposte to the big, plastic, dumb, corporate art that Takashi Murakami was launching in the US around the same time with Superflat, and was going on to make ever more famous in the silly global era before the crash of 2008. Whereever and whenever they have been shown, these paper bag white cubes astonish. They are like a kind of post-neo pop version of Tsuyoshi Ozawa's Nasubi galleries or Yoshihiro Suda's carved flower installations. It is so easy to miss them, and I think that is the point: I remember the first time I saw one at the Takahashi collection show, Neoteny. I didn't know what I was looking at (just as we don't always know the damage we are doing with our consumer purchases ...). As a signature, it's such a good one. There was even an image in the April 11 New York Times magazine, in an article by the Nobel prize winning critical economist Paul Krugman: a tiny installation by Teruya of US dollar notes out of which he has cut fragile little "green" shoots.

The problem for Teruya is that the action has been very slow for him back in Japan. He was featured in Tadashi Kawamata's 1995 Yokohama Triennial, and we saw him stealing the audience prize last year at the Mori Museum's Roppongi Crossing. There was a small sampler show, My Great Grandma was USA at the Ueno Royal Museum in 2010. But, perhaps for network reasons, he has not been linked up with the growing wave of Japanese artists, born in the 70s and who matured in the "zero years" of the 90s, who have similarly embraced a kind of reflective, minutely crafted, small scale and sustainable art practice (see my essay "After the Gold Rush":

http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/hM5OPpsLUrWje0vGDwo4/?lang=en

Teruya obviously needs to be located here; and would be a great follow up to Tabaimo at Venice this year, if anybody is watching...

When I was in LA, in late March, I had heard there was a show of Teruya's work from Ei Kibukawa of eitoeiko gallery, who was in town to launch the Torrance show that he part curated:

http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/9DLfkMYmbVp7ri3TUjev/

One of the pioneer galleries of Santa Monica's famous Bergamot Station, Shoshanawayne Gallery had put on Teruya's solo show, his fourth at the gallery. I was getting in to the Big Orange on the Sunday after it closed, though. No matter: a phone call to the gallery, and I was invited to drop in on the closed day, Monday, to see the show before it was taken down.



Teruya can fill big spaces, as well as he can work on a microscopic scale. The big main room included a forty foot long tapestry, any number of cut up ("Teruya-style") brand name consumer boxes and packet, a series of wall paintings (actually fabric-colored stencils), and a lot of wall graffiti of flowers, birds, waves and bicycles. The main visual technique he has now adopted is the ancient Okinawan craft of bingata, making designs with stencils, then using natural dyes on fabric to decorate them. This is usually used to decorate kimono. Here, taking the basic images of a series of masculine heroes -- Ultraman, Geronimo, Obama and, controversially, Emperor Hirohito -- he decorates them in this most feminine, near-kitsch style.



The point becomes clearer with the brand name packaging strewn around the room: stuff like Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes from a take away, or old Pocky packets and Cheerios boxes from the conbini around the corner (7/11 being a universal these days). Each is both coloured with stencils, and also cut up into fine and delicate paper/card vegetation, growing up the walls. It is a pick and mix of Okinawan, Japanese and American pop/consumer culture: the material and daily detritus of an artist living between all these places.



The wall "paintings" were selling for $30,000 -- quite a big price for a junior artist -- and the box packets for $1-$5,000: an impressive value mark up for what were once throwaway junk materials. I wonder, though, if he runs into any brand copyright issues for this kind of parasitic commodification? Interesting to know who might be buying it: the gallery mentions a number of museums collecting his work.



In the smaller west gallery room, a number of artfully strewn cardboard boxes, also cut into shapes to make them resemble little houses or warehouses, were used as the galleries for minature video installations. These depicted small paper boats, with flags of central American countries, riding the dirty water in the gutter, under cars and down drains, in Teruya's home neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn. The idea here is, again, a rather trite commentary on American "identity". But it is impossible not to be charmed by the sweet little videos, for which you have to bend down and crawl around to see.

Teruya apparently was working in "just in time" fashion up until the last minute before the opening to fill the gallery. He works with materials to hand, and ideas as they pop up. I was intrigued by the political aspects of the large tapestry, also stencil dyed, hanging across the room. Apparently no-one else had really asked about the heavy textual references Teruya makes on the tapestry to post-war American military policy on Okinawa. A text from 1947, in which a US military advisor writes a memo for the head of the occupying forces, General MacArthur, reads: "Mr. Terasaki (on behalf of the Emperor) stated that the Emperor hopes that the United States will continue the military occupation of Okinawa and other islands of the Ryukyus, a hope which undoubtedly is largely based on self-interest... In his opinion the Japanese people would therefore be convinced that the United States has no ulterior motives and would welcome the United States occupation for military purposes". Nowadays, Japan welcomes Burger King or Krispy Kreme Donuts on the same basis. But, at a time when the Japanese government still lacks the courage just to tell the colonials to leave, it is good that Teruya reminds us that Okinawa is still, over 60 years (!!) later, the US's largest aircraft carrier in the Pacific. His empty pizza boxes at Roppongi Crossing, dumped perhaps by a squad of a hungry American servicemen, made the same point, even more graphically. I personally got very tired of big, lumbering Apocalypse Now US Air Force helicopters flying over my apartment in Omotesando, like it was still the last days of Saigon, to land in a military airbase in the middle of Roppongi that officially "does not exist". Colonialism begins at home, and it begins in the head.



This may be a concern for Teruya as he moves on. The heavy "political" aspects of some of his work -- riffs on the US flag, or commentary about being an "immigrant" -- look familiarly like generic radical New York speaking to me. I hope, instead, than he can continue to articulate his peripheral Japaneseness, not through the ideas and the more obvious "conceptual" take away, but more through the methods, materials, and aesthetics he uses. This, at least, might be one way to "come home".

Images coutesy of Shoshanawayne Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

*More on Satoru Aoyama and Kei Takemura:
http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/2010/07/taking-a-flat-approach.html/

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

I left London nearly twenty years ago. That means I missed it all: "Cool Britannia" and everything that happened with the rise of young British artists. When I knew it, in the days of Mrs Thatcher, London was anything but glamorous: it was grim, rough, and life was hard. Nowadays, when people think of the world's capital, they think of maybe New York ... or London.

Hiraki Sawa (born 1977) is one of several young Japanese artists and curators who moved to London to study, live and work when the city was still up and coming. When I visit him at his studio in the East End working class neighbourhood of Dalston, he tells me that he moved here aged 19 at the end of the 1990s because of his sister. He didn't really speak English, but his Kanazawa family were happy for him to go study in England if he could live with his sister. He wanted to be a sculptor and he studied at the University of East London. It was there that his teachers helped him start using video as a way of doing gallery installations. They told him that every frame and image had to count.



Like a number of other young Japanese artists of the same "post-bubble" generation (for example, Satoru Aoyama, who I write about here: http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/SUK0P9lIveXo3Acr6iN8 ) Sawa essentially uses technology as an anachronistic strategy to explore what art can do with "primitive" technological forms, while the technology itself moves on new stages. Artists like Sawa and Aoyama have adopted a slowed down approach to the shocking speed of technological change; artwork as an alternate evolution, enabling aesthetic discoveries and reflections in places that would otherwise be seen as dead-ends. Sawa has thus principally used black and white single channel, stop-motion animation to explore whimsical or trippy alternate worlds that are like snapshots of his imagination slowed down and replayed. Sometime in the mid 2000s, he started adding two more channels, with music and a more painterly landscape approach to filming, on a bigger scale. Either way, using a very simply video editing technique, he has been able to explore effects of time, the aesthetics of black and white visuals and atmospherics, and the possibilities of the earliest digital technology before it became commercially widespread and technically perfected. Although sometimes evocative of old classic film directors, this is not Hollywood, but something made with modest resources out of an English art school sensibility. Sawa completed his education with an MFA at the famous Slade College of Art in 2002-3.



The studio in Dalston sits on the famous Ridley Road market street. This is a perfect vision of London today. Chaotic stalls and cardboard boxes, the smell of fish and meat, the sound and smell of ragga, and migrant shop sellers from all over the world -- lots of African, West Indian and Turkish stalls -- the whole planet in one street. In a roughed up warehouse building, Sawa has a large, open plan loft-studio space, which is big enough for him to try out projections and the use of large gallery spaces for his videos. He is talking about having to give it up soon, if he moves to do a residency in San Francisco.

Things are really happening now internationally. I first saw his work at NACT, Tokyo and at THE ECHO, Yokohama in 2008, but he had already notched up several impressive shows in the UK by then. He has now just opened a very well-reviewed show with his gallerist in New York, James Cohan, and from March 18, he will be part of a major new selection of contemporary art by David Elliott at Japan Society, Bye Bye Kitty!!! There is a catalogue coming out from the solo show, with texts by ART-iT editor Andrew Maerkle. French and German curators have also shown a lot of interest in his work, which seduces first with its slightly quirky otaku-style charm, before impressing with its cool, typically "post-bubble", technical poise and often simply beautiful visuals and soundtracks.

Despite the financial crisis, this part of London is still booming. There's a new overground metro line via Shoreditch to Dalston, and new bars, boutiques, galleries and restaurants. Everything has moved East, to the old industrial streets where once Jay Jopling and the YBAs were edgy upstart gentrifying pioneers in a no-go zone. Now you cannot move for yuppies drinking in the glitzy bars near to Hoxton Square's White Cube gallery. I am out one night drinking with Kiki Kudo and a group of her London Japanese friends: they are all musicians, fashion designers, club promotors or djs. I also meet up with another longtime local resident, Tomoko Yoneda, who will also appear in Elliott's new show. We go for a bite to eat at Terence Conran's flash new hotel/restaurant in Shoreditch, Boundary. We enjoy the up-market fish-n-chips with white wine, while laughing at the pretty but vacant serving staff. As we leave, small world...! Also getting a drink are artist Peter McDonald (brother of Tokyo curator and writer Roger McDonald) and the young Kanazawa curator, Chieko Kitade. They are planning a new show in Japan for McDonald, a well regarded painter who was born in Tokyo and won the 2008 John Moore's prize. More on my meeting with Tomoko Yoneda next time.

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

It is great to see Yutaka Sone back on show in Tokyo, both at Maison Hermès in Ginza and a new show opening this weekend at Tokyo Opera City, curated (at Sone's insistence) by iconoclastic curator Mizuki Endo. Sone is surely the one Japanese artist of the 90s generation whose methods and output bear comparison with the leading similar Chinese artist of the era, Ai Weiwei. In case you missed it last time round, this all gives me the excuse to reprint my meeting / interview in late 2009 with Sone and his partner, the writer Min Nishihara, herself a legend of the 90s (with translation).



Yutaka Sone & Min Nishihara: LA Story

曽根裕と西原みん：ロサンゼルス物語

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.

ロスに住んでいない者にはわからないだろう。ニューヨーク、パリ、東京、あるいはサンフランシスコといった都市を期待してロスにやってくると、驚いてがっかりするかもしれないことを。街の中心部や、ここがロスといえる場所、またパッケージ旅行として、名所全てをうまく組み込むことが出来ないのだ。日本人アーティストの曽根裕は、青々とした緑の中に設置された白大理石のセットでロスの栄光ともいえるそれをうまく表現している（画像参照。上は10/405で、下はMOCA LAに展示された10/100。番号はもちろん高速道路の号線名）。曽根は、妻の西原みん（彼女は文筆家で90年代初期に東京ポップアート全盛期のちょっとした伝説だった）と共にロサンゼルスに住み、活動の拠点としている。それはある晴れた日のこと、私は西原をインタビューするために、South Pasadenaにある彼らの小さくて可愛い1920年代のバンガローに向かっていた。


My old house in LA, no longer there
昔住んでいたLAの家。今はもうない。

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 totally 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 produced 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.

レンタカーを停めながら、物思いにふけっていた。ここは私が昔住んでいた通りと似ている。親しみのある小さな家、まばらに生い茂った木、そして少し寂びれた感じで貧富の差や人種が入り混じって住んでいる通り。都会で田舎、ロスの一番の魅力だ。戸口で笑みを浮かべながら待っていた西原みんは、私を中に招き入れてくれた。家の中は創造性あふれるカオスだった。テレビゲームに夢中になっている10代の２人の息子達、小さな犬と少なくとも3匹の猫、コレクターズ向けのおもちゃ、書籍、そこらじゅうに散らばるこまごまとした物、古い木製の床、そして塗装された小さな部屋が目に飛び込んできた。40代半ばの西原は、原宿にいるティーンエイジャーのような格好をしていた。彼女のゴシックな頭蓋骨のハンドバックがかっこよかった！私は曽根のスタジオになっている外のガレージに案内してもらった。曽根は間もなく中国で制作される、大理石を使った大きな花の彫刻に取りかかっていた。彼は、ロスの自治体が最初にそれを欲しがっていたのだが、後から拒否された話をしてくれた。Pasadena通りの角に彼の巨大な植物の作品の１つがある。

Sone is a whirlwind of likeable, fidgety energy. A big grin and long black hair in a pony tail, he looks today almost like a native American, but you can still 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.

曽根裕は、好感がもてる人柄でエネルギーに満ち溢れている。大きな笑顔にポニーテールにした長い黒髪、今日はインディアンのようにも見えるけどシャネルで女装した姿も容易に想像できる、とにかくおもしろい個性の持ち主なのだ。私達はすぐに東京のアート界の裏話をし始めた。だが、今日は、西原と話すためにここにきたのだった。ということで、私は西原と近所の喫茶店に行く事にした。私は80年代後期から90年代初期にかけての東京での学生時代や大森の夜の話を聞きたかったのだ。今回、私に西原を紹介してくれたポール・シーメルを筆頭に多くの人が、西原は日本の現代美術の黄金期の到来を共にした知識人であり、キーパーソンの一人であると認識している。もしかすると西原こそが唯一のキーパーソンかもしれない。90年代初期に訪れたこの黄金期は、約20年経った現在もテート・モダンの壁や、サザビーズのショールームといった、有名な西洋の美術施設に残っている。

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, and 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.

後に登場する椹木野衣や松井みどりも、この期間に起こった事柄に関するアートの歴史的な話に終始する傾向がある。しかし、全てのネオポップアーティスト達の近くにいた文筆家の西原みんも、おそらくポップ、日本、国家主義、セクシュアリティー、そして東京といった大きな思想が混在するカクテルが生まれた背後にいただろう。そしてそれは、後に「スーパーフラット」や「リトルボーイ」といったパッケージになり、「ネオ東京」に期待する西欧人向けの世界ツアーが行われたのだ。現在西原は、アートに関してではないが文筆業を続け、東京から遠く離れたロスで静かに暮らしながら、家庭を守っている。

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.

1986年、彼らは東京芸大の学生だった。村上隆、西原みん、小山登美夫、長谷川祐子、中村政人などを含む人達だ。野心的な学生達は皆、概念、思想、日本の芸術のための戦略などを探し求めたが「空虚」を感じていた。
「私達が集まった時、6ヶ月間を共にして、あちこちをドライブしたり、オープニングに行ったり、プランや戦略など、とにかく色んな事を話し合っていました。」
日本のその当時のアートは、他の国と同じように、たいていがP.C.　（政治的に正しい表現）であり、それはつまらない感じの「政治的」だった。彼らは「政治的」ではあったのだが、残留するアメリカ支配に対する不満以外に
「抗議する対象がなかったのです。」
彼らは、ポストモダンアートの空虚だが完璧な生産体系を創り出した、ジェフ・クーンズを敬愛した。その他の森村泰昌や宮島達男といった、当時国際舞台に踊り出た日本の芸術家達は、どういうわけか比較できるようなコンセプトをもっていなかった。これは、アートの典型的な「日本の」問題だった。彼らは、彼らより少し前のアーティスト達に影響されていたのである。太郎千恵蔵は、既にニューヨークでのコンタクト先を確保し、日本のポップアートを販売する方法を見出していた。椿昇と中原浩大は、素晴らしい構想を練っていた。ヤノベケンジという大阪からの競争相手もいた。村上隆は、社会批判性の高いアートに従事し、彼のニューポップ構想を作り上げていた。この時は、未だ低迷時代のアーティストとしてニューヨークでの苦境を味わっていなかった（西原は1994年に彼を訪ねている）。ニューヨークに行く前の村上は、「おたく」を彼の作品と結びつけるというアイデアを拒否していたのだ。

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 Yuko Hasegawa and Tatsuo 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 1988, 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.

西原は暇があれば書き続けていた。当時の日本は、雑誌の黄金期であった。彼女は、アートのマニフェスト、批評、特集記事、そしてアート作品のためのプロジェクトなどを書いていた。長谷川祐子や宮島達男と一緒に、雑誌『アトリエ』に寄稿もした。東京の郊外出身の男性群と違い、彼女は下町である墨田区出身である。彼女の家族は、東京の古い下町文化に染まっていたのだが、彼女は限りなく変化を続ける新しい都市で育った。西原は、あちこちを旅し、アートについて書いた。1988年、彼女は画期的だったヴェネチア・ビエンナーレを訪れ、世界が日本の現代美術に眼を向けた瞬間に立ち合った。また、ドクメンタ８も見にいった。３，４年間にわたって、彼らグループは最初のショーの準備をしていた。この頃に小沢剛と会田誠が、現れた。少し若い彼らは、独自のアイデアにあふれていた。中村と小沢は、60年代の前衛芸術グループである、ハイレッド・センターを彷彿させるかのようなザ・ギンブラートを計画したりした。ザ・ギンブラートでは、西原自身が参加アーティストで、銀座の路上に詩を書き、巡察に来た警察から逃げ回ったりした。村上は、日本の50、60年代や前衛芸術の伝統にはあまり興味を示さなかった。彼は、何か別のものを求めていたのだ。1992年、彼らは皆韓国へ行き、中村は西原の友人の韓国人女性と結婚した。

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 Tsutomu Ikeuchi, the son of a Ginza art dealer.

村上隆と西原みんは、よく一緒に旅をした。1992年、彼らはドクメンタ９を訪れ、スコアカードを使って全てに評価をつけていた。彼らは、自分達の美術雑誌を作ろうとしており、村上はそのタイトルを『アートセックス』にするように主張していた。これが後に、かの有名な『RADIUM EGG』となった。短期的ではあったが、レントゲン藝術研究所から出た新鋭アーティストの特集や、椹木、長谷川、そして西原のアイデアを前面にだした雑誌である。いつも楽観的だった彼らは、常に展覧会のスペースを探し、90年代初期の突然のポストバブルの時期に、若い日本人であることに対して「空虚」も感じていたのだ。従来の銀座の貸し画廊から締め出された、悪名高い恵比寿のP-House（「暗黒街」スタイルの場所の象徴的な画廊の１つ）でパフォーマンスが行われたりした。椹木野衣や銀座の古美術商の息子である池内務は、いつも身近にいたのだ。

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 “middle men” 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.

おそらく、更に重要なのは、彼らが国際的な美術界の人物達と直接話をした最初の世代であったという事実だ。以前なら、南條史生といった「仲介人」が、この役を独り占めしていたのだ。小山登美夫は、直接他の国際的なギャラリスト達と交流するのに野心的かつ行動的だった。西原みんは、ジェイ・ジョプリング（White Cubeのオーナーであり、ダミアン・ハーストの相棒）と話した時のことを語ってくれた。それは、1992年に別の一匹狼的アートディーラーである白石正美が総合プロデュースしたNICAF のアートフェアであった。西原は、80年代後半に若い日本人アーティストが、ゴールドスミスの大学生達と同じように「Freeze」のシーンについて知っているとは思わなかった。しかし、そこにはYBA達との不気味なほどの類似点がみられ、ジョプリングはすぐに共通点を認識した。

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. Masato 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.

それは全て遠い昔のことだった。でも、この昔話に興奮を覚えるだろう。西原と別れた村上は、その後1994年のニューヨークでの苦境を乗り越え、彼の野心をDOB君やその他で全うした。長谷川祐子は、日本で最も重要な美術館のキュレーターとなり、小山登美夫は、最も重要なギャラリストとなった。そして中村政人は、最も影響力のある美術教育者の一人となった。彼らは皆、日本のポストバブル期の美術史の中に名を馳せ、今現在でも活躍している。
「しばらくの間は、私達のグループは結束力が強かったんです。でも皆別々の道を進んだんです。」
そして、西原みんはそれを後にしてきた。

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.

1999年、曽根裕と西原みんは日本で生まれた息子達と共にロスに引っ越してきた。曽根はポール・シーメルに、有名なUCLAの美術部門で働くようヘッドハントされたのだ。彼らはロスに落ち着き、特に曽根は彼の巨大で無垢な、だが遊び心のある彫刻が、世紀末にあちこちで見られるくらい成功したのである。

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”.

何故、彼女は現在のアート界にもっと関与していないのだろうか。
「私は、何人もの若手アーティスト達に失望させられたんです。」
彼女は言った。村上と彼女の世代は、どれほど困難であっても自分自身のアートの世界を作り出せることを証明した。
「私達は、自分達のやり方があったんです。私達はシステムを作り、アート、キュレーター、執筆業でお金を稼ぐことが出来ると指し示しました。」
それは、正当な理由での黄金期だったのだ。そして、完全なる社会現象だった。彼らは、個々が素晴らしい才能を持った結束力のあるグループであり、新たなポップ現象を創り出したのだ。社会学者は「創造性」については、時にキュレーターがカタログに書くもの以上によく知っている。それは、それだけで起こるのではなく、また「天才」がいるから起こるのではない。

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”.

私は、丁度アリソン・ジンジェラス著の典型的なナイーブでキュレータースタイルの本を読んだばかりだ。それはロンドンのテートモダンで行われた村上隆の「ポップ・ライフ」ショーについて書かれていて、彼の国際的な天才聖人伝記的なものだった。彼女は、日本について書く時、ロラン・バルトをやたらと引用していたが、バルトが『作者の死』という本を書いたことは、頭から抜けていたようだ。彼女の本には、社会的な歴史や、アート界の背景がなく、また、村上がアーティストとして成長してきた社会環境や彼自身の社会ネットワークとその相互関与も記述されていない。彼女の論点は、客観的視点の欠如によってかなり妥協されている。ジンジェラスは実際、ピノー・コレクションのディレクターとして高価格な購入品の管理を担当しており、またキュレーターとして、それらについて書いているのだ。2008年にピノーが1500万ドルも散財し、ばかげた買い物となり得る「マイ・ロンサム・カウボーイ」もその中に含まれている。しかし、西原みんの話は、私達に「子育ては村中みんなでするもの」の格言を思い出させてくれる。それはつまり1つの「スーパーフラット」を作り出すのに、美術学校やアーティストグループ、文筆家、友人、アート愛好者などが必要、と言ったところだろうか。

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 different places at the end of 2010: at Opera City and Maison Hermès. It’s a bit much having different 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 boys, who is apparently already producing commercial manga.

私達が戻ってきた時に曽根裕も台所にやってきた。私はまだテイクアウトしたコーヒーを飲んでいた。曽根は、東京のアート界や、常に辛口の長谷川祐子との苦闘を笑って話した。彼は、2010年の終わりに何箇所かで個展を行う事が決まっていた。 東京オペラシティアートギャラリーそしておそらくもう１つ別の場所での展覧会だ。同時に別の会場で展覧会を開催するのはちょっと多すぎるのだが、大きな話題になるだろう、と彼は言った。彼はまた、私に日本で起こっている事柄について、キュレーターと話すことを重要視しすぎないように、と忠告してくれた。
「路上観察が一番おもしろいよ。」
彼らは、息子の1人がどうやら漫画を出版しているらしいと話していたりするのだ。

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.

もう行かなくては。
「でも、彼女と話して正解だったよ。」
と曽根は笑いながら大きな目をして言った。
「あの当時、彼女は本当にアーティストを作りだし、見出していたんだ。彼女が全てを可能にしたんだよ。」
それは素晴らしい話だった。



ADRIAN　FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

My best tip for great things in 2011 has to be the Berlin based video/performance artist Yukihiro Taguchi, who is lined up as a future Mori Art Museum Project in April during Tokyo art week. Born in 1980, Taguchi has been living and working in Berlin since 2005, when he dropped out of the MA at Geidai because he says he wasn't learning anything. He got frustrated with having ideas, asking to do them, then being told he had to ask someone else, who then told him to ask someone else -- a vicious circle. Sounds familar? It is typical of the educational, financial and conceptual frustration that has driven so many young Japanese artists to find refuge in the open minded international art world of Berlin where, with a little effort (but a lot less than in Tokyo), young artists can find the spaces and resources to pursue radical, experimental art.

It is a good job someone back in Japan is paying attention to these artists, though. Mami Kataoka selected Taguchi for MAM, and he has worked recently with Yuko Hasegawa, Fumihiko Sumitomo and Mizuki Takahashi. Meanwhile, gallerist Rika Fujiki at Mujinto Productions saw the commercial potential with his video art and its playful and attractive animation style.

You can get a good introduction to Taguchi's work from the commercially available, "Moment" video, which includes the "Performative Installation" (2007) and the "Performative Spazieren" (2008). This "show" at a Berlin gallery is Taguchi "performing" the making of a film in stop-start animation in real time during the duration of his time in the gallery. We then see the video made afterwards as the document of what he did during these days as the artist in residence. In the first of these two works, he takes apart the white cube space, pulling up about two dozen planks from the floorboard, has them dance around the gallery in various ways and constructions -- including at one point facilitating a game of badminton among gallery visitors -- and ends with a bounenkai party sitting on the planks and then the boards being respectfully re-installed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khyCvR-K_rA

In the second, he takes the planks out for a walk around the Berlin streets, parks and even the metro, before returning in good humour back to where they came from.

As the planks spill out of the window into a precarious construction, or as they move around the gallery into another architectural form, the influence of his first teacher Tadashi Kawamata is obvious. The work is a kind of homage to his constructions, only with Taguchi they are constantly mobile and inventive physical forms, which seem almost to be celebrating their temporary freedom from the built form. At the same time, the possibilities of movement and the actual choreography is formally very restrictive.

It's a brilliant idea and spin on the idea of how to make a "performance" work in the static confines of a gallery "show". The animation ideas, meanwhile, will no doubt be stolen by Western ad agencies when they see it -- as they have, for example, shamelessly ripped off Akira Yamaguchi's graphic art or Naoki Honjo’s "Small Planet" photos of miniature city life. The intellectual property problem with this work is literally Rika Fujiki's biggest problem, because it is not quite clear how you sell this work. Is the artwork the finished video? Or was it the stop-start performance during the time of the show?

This is precisely what is interesting here. Taguchi's performance is bound quite tightly by space and time, but it is constantly moving. Very little art actually moves in time, mostly we are always stuck watching screens or paintings on a wall. Performances meanwhile are simply evanescent moments, which are then frozen in time as documentation. But when the museum lights are turned off and the doors are locked, the museum becomes literally a morgue of still life. Taguchi thus poses interesting questions about what happens in the gallery when we are not looking. It helps that he also imposes a certain anonymity to the work, erasing himself from the process. This distinguishes Taguchi's own "drawing constraint" method formally from the rococo self-obsession of Matthew Barney. Formally, some of what he does seems closer to British conceptual star, Martin Creed -- but so many of Creed's works are just tedious one line conceptual gags for art theorists, and nothing to look at. You can bring your kids to look at Taguchi's animations.

This is also a clue to Taguchi's significance. As is well known, it has been almost impossible to think of Japanese contemporary art without thinking of anime. Of course, everyone loves Hayao Miyazaki, and rightly so. But it has licensed a confusion about the use of anime in contemporary art, most famously by Takashi Murakami, which actually confounds the two art forms -- as if it is enough for contemporary art's to simply appropriate anime art and put it in a gallery in order to put high art value on it. Yet when contemporary art is simply derivative of other forms' technological and aesthetic superiority, it becomes nothing but a pale imitation. Taguchi as a video artist shows how anime technology and ideas can be used to change the institutional space and content of the artwork itself.

Taguchi lives as the epitome of the "survival artist" in Berlin. Not much income, just the occasional gallery or museum commission, or perhaps a short residency. He makes each of these solvent periods an actual artwork -- performing the residency by documenting the non-stop motion of his interaction with the space and the materials he finds in the building. But the constructed "art life" he lives outside these periods is also interesting.

He invites me to meet him at the famous Sunday flea market in East Berlin. A grumpy official shouts at me in the usual gruff Berlin style when I ask if they know where a young Japanese guy might be selling postcards among the sea of bargain stalls. It is a dumb question. So instead I follow my instincts and Taguchi's vague instructions to find an open space in the sun, nearby where they are selling ice cream. A few minutes walk around in the burning summer sunshine and I spot him, sitting on his one metre square rented patch, dressed in traditional Japanese work man clothes and head scarf, cross legged, goateed, big ironic smile. He is selling postcards, small litho works on handmade paper, with orientalist "mystic" images. There is a steady stream of curious customers to this ascetic performance in the sunshine. How much are the cards, they ask? Taguchi tells them they can pay what they like; what they think its worth. These are kindly Asianophile Germans, perhaps with a little classroom Japanese to share, and they routinely hand over 10 and 20 Euro notes for one or two of these postcards. Taguchi makes more than 100 Euros in a few hours in the sunshine. It's not art, but it is survival.

Taguchi's home made postcards -- about as far from Kaikai Kiki and Nara corporate spin offs as you can imagine -- are, of course, not the point about his work in Berlin. To make sure there is no confusion, he invites me the next day to visit him at home to watch some videos and talk about his work over coffee and cakes. The house in an immigrant neighbourhood in North Berlin is a huge and cheap apartment he shares with about ten other multinational student / creative types -- I'm impressed by the remarkably tidy and organised kitchen conditions. Upstairs his room is a mass of junk, memorabilia, bottles, and works in progress.

We watch a series of videos, beginning from his quite amazing student work where he uses bits of wood to engineer a gravity defying construction in a small space in which he wedges himself into. It keeps collapsing, until he gets the balance right. Taguchi hit upon the idea of using stop-start video when he realised he wanted to document the process of creating a precarious structure, which might then collapse. Have an idea. Photo. Have another. Photo. Then the next. Photo. Each one leads to the next, there are only limited options, but always various options for a move. It visualises a kind of butterly effect, foregrounding time, motion, space and choice in the work. It starts and it moves, it goes somewhere not foreplanned, yet is always tightly constrained by the starting conditions.

The residency at North East Tokyo's Alpha M gallery, curated by Mizuki Takahashi, builds on "Moment" by using lights and all kinds of other found objects. He also shows me a number of other videos made during residencies -- one made in Brazil where he is running on a beach between two lovers who are communicating through him in Portuguese, another in Hong Kong, where we catch a series of Hollywood moments where he is running away from something in the city.

This was a side work for the main installation work in a museum, invited by Yuko Hasegawa. Filmed as a video, this becomes a kind of moving theater of the gallery, deconstructed into pieces while all the other installations, paintings and photography remain fixed all around him. It was perhaps this brilliant piece that led Kataoka to select him for MAM. Although the plans are still secret I get some glimpses of his ideas for this show, where he talks about deconstructing the room and the walls, have pieces of the museum literally moving around the 53 story building and out into the Roppongi Hills complex. Given how disappointingly little MAM uses the amazing space it has in creative ways, this all sounds quite amazing -- the only precedents I can think of are Kusama's art virus around the time of the opening, or the telescope and monster clock down in the city below by another former MAM Project artist Nishi Tatzu (perhaps Taguchi's closest peer). Taguchi as ever, wants to put the show in motion, foreground what is usually architecturally static, and put the gallery itself into the show as a moveable piece. When he looks at paintings or even videos (which move but are still so static), Taguchi says his impulse is just to have everything moving on the wall, and then even the wall itself.

So much art nowadays is about going outside of the white cube or breaking its constraints. Taguchi though doesn't turn his back on the white cube, so much as literally seek to turn the white cube inside out. Everything in his art is relative, even time and space, no fixed points. It is indeed a kind of quantum art. Let's hope Mori let him do new things with the museum.

See Yukihiro Taguchi's website:
http://yukihirotaguchi.com/

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com