Art@Agnes Agnes Hotel Art Fair 2008
at Agnes Hotel and Apartments Tokyo
in the Shinjuku area
This event has ended - (2008-01-12 - 2008-01-13)
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Art@Agnes 2008
Held at the Agnes Hotel and Apartments in Iidabashi and now in its 4th year, “Art@Agnes” brings 33 of Tokyo’s top galleries together for a weekend-long bed-bound contemporary art fair.
Ashley Rawlings. After a year of studying painting and mixed media at Chelsea College of Art & Design, he did his BA in Japanese Studies at the University of Cambridge. He moved to Tokyo in 2005, where he was a research student in the history of Japanese postwar art at Sophia University, and worked as a freelance editor, writer and translator. In addition to being editor of TABlog from 2006 to 2008, he contributed regularly to online and printed publications such as the Japan Times, ART iT.jp, Saatchi Online, ArtReview, ArtAsiaPacific and Artforum.com. He is also the editor of Art Space Tokyo, a 272-page guide to the Tokyo art world published by Chin Music Press in 2008. In 2009 he moved to New York, where he works as features editor of ArtAsiaPacific. » See other writings
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TABlog's writers and video reporters deliver regular reviews, features and interviews to stimulate discussion about all sides of Tokyo's creative scene.
takashi yamada
2008-01-14
was it me or did everyone look like the work was like our mothers and fathers cleaning out our closets of our childhood memorabilia? IT was fun but there was nothing i coveted, really. Is this what the Japanese art world has come to? I guess I can’t wait to get back to NYC next week. I had the misfortune to see Roppongi X-ing and the space of somebody’s future too. As a Japanese I am deeply saddened. What is happening here?
Aneta Glinkowska
2008-01-14
what did you expect? it was just another artfair, where we go to shop not only for childhood memorabilia, but to also look for childhood closet skeletons. did you find any?
Kevin Mcgue
2008-01-16
Attending an art fair in a hotel was a bit like going to a Saturday morning garage sale in a suburban American town, only everything is priced much higher. Kudos to Ashley for making some sense of this somewhat confusing event and showing that an art fair can be fun even for those who can’t afford to buy anything.
takashi yamada
2008-01-16
apparently i cant expect much and thanks for your agreement.
Ashley Rawlings
2008-01-18
I think it was a real shame that they didn’t have Boice Planning show again, as their performative piece really was the highlight of last year’s fair. Overall, this year was an improvement on last year, though. More galleries seemed to have come to the realisation that less is more and that cramming as much as possible into those little rooms just looks awful unless it’s meant as a some kind of installation piece. Still, negotiating those small rooms with so many people going in and out was exhausting. If this art fair grows in popularity any more, it’s going to have to start controlling visitor numbers.
Ashley Rawlings
2008-01-19
It turns out in a follow-up press release that the art fair just sent out that due to last year’s overcrowding, this year’s visitor number were already being controlled!
With 2500 people who visited this year, that’s roughly 5 visitors in each of the 33 rooms per hour on each day.