Installation view of Ai Weiwei’s Cube Light (2008) at Misa Shin Gallery, 2010. Photo ART iT.
In recent years Tokyo has seen an influx of young galleries focusing on a new generation of Japanese artists. While certainly new, the latest entry to the city’s art scene is hardly a novice. After leaving her post as director of Art Fair Tokyo earlier this year, Misa Shin is launching an eponymous gallery Nov 19 with an exhibition of Chinese conceptual artist and activist Ai Weiwei. This inaugural exhibition is a convincing statement of Shin’s ambitions to immediately establish a top-flight international program in her gallery, which is housed in a converted factory space in the Shirokane neighborhood, not far from the Roppongi cultural hub that includes the Mori Art Museum. Other artists on the gallery roster include Kimsooja, Ken Lum, Shomei Tomatsu and the architect Arata Isozaki.
Shin told ART iT that she will focus on artists who are socially and politically engaged. “I don’t want artists who only produce beautiful or cute paintings,” she said. “Art’s function is to go beyond those boundaries.”
Shin acknowledged that in Japan there is a limited market for such art, but expressed optimism that she will be able to work with major domestic collectors and institutions. She also said that she plans to be active in the regional and international market, where she will be able to draw upon previous connections from directing Art Fair Tokyo.
Shin said that the Beijing-based Ai is himself an old connection, and that he agreed to exhibit with the gallery as soon as she approached him. He will be displaying a single work, the freestanding chandelier installation Cube Light (2008). Measuring more than four-meters-square, the work fills up almost the entire gallery space, which still retains many of its original industrial features. Ai, who was recently placed under house arrest by authorities in Beijing, will not be able to attend the opening reception but is scheduled to give a lecture in Tokyo at a later date during the exhibition run.
The arrival of Misa Shin Gallery is also yet another addition to an expanding art axis in the vicinity of Roppongi. Already in the Shirokane neighborhood is a complex that includes Kodama, Nanzuka Underground and Yamamoto Gendai galleries, while the galleries Take Ninagawa and Side 2 are located a five-minute taxi ride away in Higashi-Azabu, and rumors continue to circulate of a planned gallery complex in the shadow of the Roppongi Hills development.
In the meantime, the far-flung Kiyosumi gallery complex, home to established galleries ShugoArts, Tomio Koyama, Taka Ishii and Hiromi Yoshii, continues to attract aspiring tenants. On Nov 27 the new gallery Sprout-Curation will debut on the sixth floor of the Kiyosumi complex in space that formerly belonged to Hiromi Yoshii with a solo show for painter Saeka Enokura. The gallery has been established by Yoshikazu Shiga as an extension of his Sprout art and cultural publishing enterprise. In a statement in Japanese and English on the gallery website, Shiga explained that he plans to approach the business from an “editorial perspective,” and that he sees himself as more of a curator than a dealer. He writes that he hopes to create a “space that can give rise to a new context for Japanese art.”
Also on Nov 27, Ai Kowada Gallery will unveil a new space in Kiyosumi, also on the sixth floor, after moving in from the Ebisu neighborhood. On display will be multi-media artist Aki Inomata.
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