Intelligent Design: Tokyo Institutions Open Gates to Art Crossovers
Big Picture / Tokyo
By Kenichi Kondo

Tokyo is one of the most design-conscious cities in the world today. Architects who have completed projects here in the past decade include the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, France’s Jean Nouvel and, of course, Japan’s own cohort of international talent such as Tadao Ando, Kisho Kurokawa and Toyo Ito. Tokyo Designer’s Week and other fairs attract visitors in the hundreds of thousands. Propelled by hyper-consumerism, the city is filled with “cool” products, from Naoto Fukazawa’s INFOBAR cell phone to Tokujin Yoshioka’s Honey Pop chair.

Distinctions between art and craft have never been clearly delineated in practice in Japan, although they were formally instituted with the adoption of the concept of “fine art” in the 19th century. As such, commercial gallerists, who have been at the forefront of developing a contemporary art audience in Japan in recent years, rail against the difficulty of capturing a market share, let alone any attention, in an otherwise booming visual industry. While an older generation of institutional curators and academics gamely tried to enforce the boundaries between high and low art, their successors are proving much more in tune to the vagaries of pop culture, inspired as well by a worldwide rise in interdisciplinary art practice. Against this backdrop, two large group exhibitions covering a broad spectrum of contemporary visual culture are taking place this fall—the Mori Art Museum’s (MAM) “Roppongi Crossing 2007” and the Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MOT) “SPACE FOR YOUR FUTURE.”

Following the series’ successful initiation in 2004 with 360,000 visitors, “Roppongi Crossing 2007,” with 36 participants, is the second exhibition in MAM’s periodic showcase of Japanese contemporary art. While the first “Crossing” focused on emerging Japanese artists, the present installment attempts to historicize recent trends in overlaps between visual genres. It features artists who debuted in the 1960s, such as legendary painter and manga artist Tiger Tateishi (1941-1998) and cult doll-maker Shimon Yotsuya, as well as young mainstream talents Kengo Kito and Kohei Nawa.

Also included, Naohiro Ukawa, a self-styled “media rapist,” graphic designer, video producer, VJ, university professor and artist, contributes a typhoon in a box, wherein scores of banknotes swirl and flutter in a mechanically-produced gale. Masahiko Sato, who produces popular TV commercials and pop music, utilized technology developed by interactive system designer Takashi Kiriyama, a professor at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, to create a 100-square-meter installation in which visitors play a mathematical game using numbered cards containing an integrated circuit.

“Crossing” extends further beyond conventional art practice to include artists such as Kiyoto Maruyama, who paints murals at public bathhouses; popular editor and video game creator Gabin Ito; and theater unit Chelfitch. While this diversity might threaten to obscure the show’s thematic core, Natsumi Araki, one of the exhibition’s curators, explained to ArtAsiaPacific that such juxtapositions reveal unexpected commonalities. For her, ”Crossing” attempts to step beyond cute stereotypes of Japanese art to rediscover the extraordinary creative energy of the local scene.

Across town, MOT has put together “SPACE FOR YOUR FUTURE,” which features 34 artists from 13 countries, including international heavyweights such as Ernesto Neto, Tobias Rehberger, Olafur Eliasson and Carsten Nicolai as well as Japanese talents, many of whom work outside of the fine art world. Compared to “Crossing,” MOT’s show eschews historical perspective for cultural currency.

SANAA—the architect unit comprised of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa—exhibits a half-scale model for Flower House, their recent project in Switzerland that takes the form of a flower-shaped, glass-walled pavilion. Junya Ishigami, who formerly worked for Sejima, adds an architectural cubic structure, 13 meters on an each side, that floats on a bed of gas. The cube’s mirrored surface reflects the constantly changing air currents that support it. Photographer Mika Ninagawa shows a new video piece on goldfish, a favorite motif of hers that also featured in her first commercial movie, the lush period-production Sakuran (2006), about pre-modern prostitution.

Blurring the lines between art and commerce further, graphic designer and TV commercial producer Noriyuki Tanaka has produced a photo series featuring pop idol Erika Sawajiri’s transformation into different personas, images that in turn appear in advertisements for Sony Ericsson. And “Air Relation,” by air conditioner manufacturer Daikin, presents a large glass container filled with air that purportedly makes one fall in love, available for visitors to inhale.

Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator of “SPACE,” cites genetics when explaining the exhibition. Today’s crossovers, she says, “can be considered a process…of producing a new ‘DNA’ for living in these complex times. Many of these creations are aimed at producing new spaces of coexistence and new spaces of communication.”

Yet the exquisite paintings adorning sliding doors and room partitions or refined ceramics for daily use that have been a fixture of Japanese art history suggest otherwise. Why is artistic “border-crossing” suddenly getting a high profile makeover? On an institutional level, one can only cite the struggles that museums have gone through to promote contemporary art. Even the privately-funded MAM has dedicated much of its programming to blockbuster themes such as Le Corbusier or fashion, while public museums such as the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, accommodate craft in their mandates. The answer may be, simply, that in Japan design sells, and exhibitions that attract large numbers of visitors determine both institutional bottom lines and generate favorable publicity. While the alignment of “Roppongi Crossing 2007” and “SPACE FOR YOUR FUTURE” is coincidental, there is a high chance similar shows will be organized in Tokyo in the near future. The only question is, how far are curators willing to go in embracing design and commercial art as a means to articulate a uniquely Japanese perspective on contemporary visual culture?