There is a certain grandeur at the Mori Art Museum that commands (if just a little) respect when visiting. To situate what is a rather large museum on the 52nd floor of a skyscraper is quite a feat in itself, but it can also be a huge and somewhat overwhelming pedestal on which to make equally grand claims. Inevitably, common sense would have it that the higher you place something, the more dramatically it will fall.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/roppongicrossing2007_1.jpg" alt="Chu Enoki, 'RPM-1200' (2005) H 3.3m, Dia. 4.5m, Metal" width="518" class="imgcaption" title="Installation View: One Man Show by Chu Enoki, KPO Kirin Plaza Osaka, 2006. Photo: Yuto Hirakakiuchi" />
So, with the 2007 instalment of the “Roppongi Crossing” exhibition we find a show tottering rather dangerously atop its prestigious position. Of course, the general response, as with most survey shows, has been mixed and due to the large number of participating artists and the restricted lengths of most review columns, formal critique is made rather difficult. So let’s address the slippery question that the show seems to be asking of itself and of its viewers: ‘What is art?’ This eternally problematic question may not be one that comes up during everyday conversation for most people, but the organizers here would seem to hope that it is. Their answer is that ‘Art’ exists in the process of crossing over with something else. The curatorial team that put this show together, Kazuo Amano, Natsumi Araki, Noi Sawaragi and Naoki Sato, has essentially brought together work made in a whole range of disciplines – from design to computer games to crafts and so on – under the banner of ‘Crossings’ and hails all of the people behind this work as ‘artists’. As Naoki Sato states in the exhibition catalogue: 
It is not about what art crosses with that concerns us [sic] surely the point is that art is what emerges when two different things cross.1
These words conjure up images of curators working like mad scientists, bolting together a Frankenstein-like display. When Natsumi Araki points out that ‘the first motivation’ for selecting the artists was ‘Which artist do you like best?’2 you know that trouble might be brewing away like some bizarre potion and that the result could be fairly repulsive. This is not to say that a genetically mutated flower cannot be beautiful, but it is still somewhat ‘unnatural’. 
So what of these ‘Crossings’? What artworks are we presented with as conclusive examples of the work of ‘artists’? Sadly, the exhibition is composed of a ‘hit or miss’ range of work. One of the significant ‘hits’ is the inclusion of Keiichi Ikemizu, an artist who, through his clever public-centred works commands as much respect as Yoko Ono and On Kawara. Kiyoto Maruryama, one of the few remaining bath house painters, is also a welcome inclusion that draws attention to a ‘dying’ art form. However, it’s ironic that the heart of these works isn’t actually present in the exhibition itself: Ikemizu’s representative work within the museum’s walls is a corpse in comparison to his public installation in Roppongi High School and Maruyama’s bathhouse painting isn’t even displayed in the major gallery space at all, overlooking instead the entrance’s escalators. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/roppongicrossing2007_3.jpg" alt="Yuichi Higashionna, Installation view: 'Roppongi Crossing 2007: Future Beats in Japanese Contemporary Culture' (2007) Mori Art Museum" width="518" class="imgcaption" title="Courtesy: Yumiko Chiba Associates. Photo: Keizo Kioku. Photo courtesy: Mori Art Museum" />
Unfortunately, the exhibition’s attempt at including younger artists produces much of the ‘misses’ as they pale in the presence of such experienced individuals. The accompanying texts only make it worse, employing far too much rhetoric to describe the works. Unnecessarily pretentious descriptions such as “These household goods, reborn into a new form of beauty at the hands of Higashionna, are at times pure nostalgia” (Yuichi Higashionna) or “Using the slightest of modifications to throw social conventions into upheaval” (Iichiro Tanaka) tended to make me cringe. Furthermore, both the display texts and the exhibition catalogue left me with the feeling that I was having an opinion forced onto me. Sentences like “Viewers are struck by the detail…” (Yoshio Yoshimura) or the “works are marked by the special care given to an object’s surface, which is what people first notice when something enters their field of vision” (Kohei Nawa) come across as assumptions that try to make up for the viewers’ lack of familiarity with the artists’ work. Assumptions in art are never a good idea and yet they seem to form the core of Naohiro Ukawa’s wind machine if you believe the text: “based on the assumption that Hurricane Katrina… is sealed inside the typhoon apparatus… Ukawa has created a space within his machine where all the paper money in the world can be sent to dance in the wind”. Rather, what has been created here is a cliché, a fairground attraction of sorts that is almost sickening to the stomach.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/roppongicrossing2007_8.jpg" alt="Iichiro Tanaka, 'Drop-eyed DARUMA' (2002) dimensions variable, mixed media" width="257" class="imgcaption floatl" title="Courtesy: Yuka Sasahara Gallery, Tokyo" /><img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/roppongicrossing2007_5.jpg" alt="Takahiro Iwasaki, 'Reflection Model' (2001)
115 x 90 x 60 cm, Japanese cypress and wire" width="257" class="imgcaption floatl" title="Photo: Nozomi Tomoeda" /> 
In some aspects, I do agree with Sato about art being ‘that’ which exists in the interstice and not the medium itself. Yet my initial steps into the art world twelve years ago were always grounded in the understanding that art and design are different. Art is that which exists in the empty void; it is the ineffable that will always be beyond the reach of the artist. Yet the word ‘Design’, to quote the philosopher Vilém Flusser, “fits into a context involving cunning and craftiness. A designer is someone who is artful or wily, a plotter setting traps.”3 This is not to say that what the individuals have done in their respective careers is futile or doesn’t command respect, but the contrived bringing together of their works by the curators to put a finger on the pulse of Japanese contemporary art creates the same effect as when you push too hard for too long on your pulse – it hurts. What is elevated here is not ‘art’ but a ‘designed’ exhibition, which presents a variety of talented people as show ponies; the ‘art’ never really got in the same elevator. But of course, to refer to European etymologies when defining Japanese contemporary art is to leave myself wide open to criticism; one that Noi Sawaragi emphasises: 
The word ‘art’ only came to Japan in the Meiji Period, For example, works by Hokusai weren’t defined as ‘art’ or ‘design’; they were both. So the division comes about with the opening to the West. With this exhibition, I wanted to go back to that idea of them not being separate.4
Sawaragi’s statement is very true but the works he refers to were made during a period of isolation and those in this exhibition are not. Sato speaks also of art being a global economy and if this is the case, surely it should be measured against the same yardstick? 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/roppongicrossing2007_2.jpg" alt="Nobuhiro Nakanishi, 'Layer Drawing/Sunrise' (2007)
100 x 100 cm (x 50), laser printer on transparency films, acrylic and fishing lines" width="518" class="imgcaption" title="Installation view: 'Roppongi Crossing 2007: Future Beats in Japanese Contemporary Culture' (2007) Mori Art Museum. Photo: Kioku Keizo. Photo courtesy: Mori Art Museum" />
Perhaps I’m being too cynical? Maybe I was not communicating with the exhibition on the right level? Perhaps I was being too naïve in my understanding of what an artwork can be? Or perhaps I was taking too much of a lofty view of some of the tired clichés in the show. In any case, whether this exhibition gets its point across depends on how the public receive it, not the writers or the critics. Despite some of my criticisms of the catalogue text, I found it to be more useful and actually more interesting than the exhibition itself, and this is one of the key points where the show fails terribly. The exhibition aims to reach out to people and yet prices them out of the means to connect with the artwork on a deeper level: how many casual visitors are going to shell out nearly 3,000 yen for the catalogue when they have already paid 1,500 yen for the entry? The show is big, it is glossy and it is ‘spectacular’ in the Debordian context of the word, but it is also shallow: a novelty. As the curators rightfully point out, the world of art is becoming more popular to those with less knowledge. In Britain, a media frenzy engulfs the Turner Prize every year, and the inescapable question of ‘is this art?’ rings hollow and tired bells in the lives of the people to the point where the whole spectacle has become a joke. The illusionist David Blaine’s stunts are also an example of the ‘spectacular’ capturing the people’s attention and subsequently inviting speculative criticism. Is this to be the fate of “Roppongi Crossing”? Ironically, when Blaine spent 44 days without food in a clear plastic box suspended over the River Thames in London and declared it ‘performance art’5, the public’s reaction was to throw things at him, direct laser pointers at him, and even use a remote-controlled toy helicopter to fly a hamburger around him. Perhaps the “Crossing” show’s 52nd storey plinth only guarantees that it will be shot at. 
So, what left the most resonating impression in my mind after I had left? Whilst watching Kohei Kobayashi’s video sequence of someone counting fruit in and out of a bag, a young boy of no more than three years old was trying to guess the fruit in the sequence. He ventured a “mikan?” (tangerine) and “nashi?” (pear) to his mother, hoping she would be able to answer his question. Needless to say, she couldn’t. Later his father asked him if he could understand the video, to which the boy cried to the tune of laughter “wakaranai!” (“I don’t get it”). As Sato finalizes in the exhibition catalogue:
I must say that I don’t think it’s a bad thing if increasing exposure to the term ‘art’ prompts people to begin, little by little, to question what exactly this thing called art is.
True enough, but first we would have to hope they are put in a position where they are able to take it seriously. If not, well, wakaranai.
 
— 
 
1 Sato, N. (2007) Crossings as the Source of the Value of Art, in Roppongi Crossing 2007: Future Beats in Japanese Contemporary Art, Exhibition Catalogue, p33 
2 Cited in Eubank, D. (2007) Design Meets Art at ‘Roppongi Crossing’ Japan Times, [Internet] http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fa20071018r1.html [accessed 27th October 2007] 
3 Flusser, V. (1995) On the Word Design: An Etymological Essay, Design Issues: Vol.11, No.3 Autumn 1995, p50. 
4 Cited in Eubank, D. (2007) Design Meets Art at ‘Roppongi Crossing’ Japan Times, [Internet] http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fa20071018r1.html [accessed 27th October 2007] 
5 Cited in Collins, H and Roberts, T. (2003) David Blaine: ‘I’d like to go as far as I can’, CNN [Internet] http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/08/30/cnna.david.blaine/index.html [accessed 27th October 2007]

article_907

Crossings on the 52nd Floor

It may be a ludicrous subtitle but I did admire it in passing on the subway, as I have recently asked similar questions. My own casual investigations were very much shot down but balancing on its fifty-two storey pedestal means the Mori Art Museum’s latest installment of “Roppongi Crossings” has a long way to fall. In truth, I made a similar comment about the last installment of this triennial exhibition. Yet, what is a little different this time is that it has been trimmed from thirty-six to twenty participants and the curators have chosen to focus on artists that express issues in their work relating to five central themes: “Reference to society,” “Creativity of Genre-Crossing,” “Significance of Collaboration,” “Expressions of the Streets,” and “Aesthetics of the New Generation”. I prefer to pay less attention to such themes because of the way they are generated but in short the exhibition does aim to pick up where <a href="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/2007/11/crossings-on-the-52nd-floor.html">“Roppongi Crossings 2007” </a>left off.
The question “Can there be art?” is attributed in this show to the late Teiji Furuhashi, a founder member of the artist collective Dumb Type, who wrote in a letter to close friends in 1993: “Perhaps I am no more than a commentator on the world”. According to Kenji Kubota, one of the curators of the show, “just as Furuhashi said that he did not need to be called an artist, neither did he want to shut himself away in a castle called art.”1 The first instinct would be to criticise the question but Kubota makes an interesting point later in his catalogue essay when he says:
<blockquote>“The more important question concerning the potential for art today is how to transcend the genre called art and achieve cooperation with people who are tackling real-world social issues of politics, economics, technology, the environment, war and poverty.”2</blockquote>
Art in Kubota’s mind is a genre, although I suspect a large majority of people would disagree with his idea. However, I can see what he is getting at and perhaps the mistake is calling it art at all. To understand this a little more we need to look at what is generally considered to be its travel companion: design. Etymologically speaking, the popular use of this word today relates closely to the French interpretation of dessein, meaning ‘plan’, yet there is another interpretation, said to have died out, which relates more closely to the Latin désigner, meaning ‘point out’ or ‘denote’.3
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/mori-roppongi-crossing-2010-exhibition.jpg" alt="'Roppongi Crossing 2010: Can There Be Art?' Installation view: Mori Art Museum (20 March – 4 July, 2010)" title="Photo: Kioku Keizo. Photo Courtesy: Mori Art Museum" width="518" height="345" class="imgcaption" />
If we consider some of the artists work on display with this interpretation, then we arrive at my understanding of Kubota’s point. What art has come to be in the public sphere is what has been puppeted by processes of design in the French interpretation. What this Crossings exhibition succeeds in doing is actually presenting us with some rare examples of the Latin interpretation. These artists make works, which denote an issue in society while engaging with it, and this is not easy to do. The temptation of course is to plan an artwork from idea to execution and this often leads to wretched ‘spectacle’ ridden pieces that aim to force their message down visitor’s throats. However, if considered as a seed, which needs encouragement and nourishment, an idea, through accumulation can build layers and layers of meanings that speak to visitors on a variety of levels. Each part of this process denotes a step for the practitioner to recognize and learn from. This artistic practice echoes a scientist in a laboratory and the results can be profound.
Take for example, Yuken Teruya, whose “Notice–Forest” series (1999-), fast food and designer bags with intricately cut out trees situated within them, are wonderful and can be appreciated not only for their ecological message but also for the time it must have taken to cut them out. Teruya’s other works aren’t quite as time consuming, but his practice is as much on display as the works themselves.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/roppongi-crossing-teruya-yuken.jpg" alt="Teruya Yuken, 'Notice-Forest' (2005) Paper bag, glue. 18 x 8 x 28 cm" title="Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York" width="518" height="389" class="imgcaption" />
With Yosuke Amemiya’s performance, hidden in a small corner of the museum, the artist’s practice is almost the display itself. Upon opening the door, you enter a dark room through a filing cabinet and essentially become a ‘piece’ of Amemiya’s space and therefore his world. Projected on a far wall is a video of him in a mirrored version of the same space and in the video Amemiya is, for lack of better words, ‘potting around’ in his space with multiple red apples, multiple pairs of the same shoes, multiple buckets of water and some bags. The Amemiya present in the space watches himself on the video from time to time, mimicking his own activities, be it, taking his shirt off by lying on the floor; rolling apples around the room; or dripping water on the floor in lines, occasionally marking out connections between visitors watching around him. Every now and then, he disappears in another filing cabinet in the room, leaving the visitors in the room breathless with curiosity. In reality, the filing cabinet he disappeared into is connected to another exit out of the room for comfort breaks, but that illusion is never broken (unless you see him outside!).
The work of Tsubasa Kato is also of note. Sadly, the most interesting part of his work cannot be experienced (at least in this exhibition) in the gallery itself, but the no-frills video documentation very much communicates a point, which is that the artist’s role is more to coordinate than provoke. Displaying the power of collective effort, the videos document teams of people trying to pull a large wooden construction, either right over or on its side. Each video is outside and carried out in all weather conditions, making each collective haul a unique experience. Moreover, Kato’s practice is clearly evolving in its own right, when you begin to notice that the large wooden constructions are different shapes, sizes so as to present different challenges. Very quickly, you get the impression that every event builds on the last and still conveys a message of collective efforts. Whether the colour of the wood is intended to echo that of stones comprising the Pyramids in Egypt is merely icing on the communal cake.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/roppongi-crossing-amemiya-yosuke.jpg" alt="'Roppongi Crossing 2010: Can There Be Art?' Installation view: Mori Art Museum (20 March – 4 July, 2010)
Amemiya Yosuke, 'We 19 March, 2010 - 4 July, 2010' (2010)" title="Photo: Kioku Keizo. Photo Courtesy: Mori Art Museum" width="518" height="345" class="imgcaption" />
Certainly, not all of the works on display convey the Latin interpretation of the word ‘design’. Morimura’s “A Requiem: Laugh at the Dictator, Schizophrenic” (2008) is loud and attention seeking but I was always told that shouting won’t get you anywhere. Morimura’s intentions may well be to question what art is, but in terms of connecting with an audience, Kato, Amemiya and Teruya are hard to emulate and tough to follow, even for an icon such as Morimura.
Many would also note that there wasn’t any painting present in the show. Followers of the Turner Prize are familiar with such ‘scandals’ but to not represent even one painter out of twenty is to make a strong, and perhaps even deliberate, statement. From my own experience, painting can complicate definitions of what art is, but I don’t believe for a minute that <a href="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/2010/05/paintings-now-are-garbage.html">painting is garbage</a>. Some of the most recognized scientists and philosophers in history were well acquainted with the practice of painting and I have no doubts that it is still alive and well.
Perhaps ‘art’ is the wrong word and perhaps ‘design’, in its popular use today, is also the wrong word. But what I can say, is that on its third attempt, the Crossings exhibition has finally unearthed, albeit a few, ‘creative practitioners’ that better represent the aim of the word “Crossing”.
<div class="footnote">
1 Kubota, K. (2010) Art as Possibility, in Roppongi Crossing 2010: Can there be art? Exhibition Catalogue, p19. 
2Ibid. p21. 
3‘design’ 2006, in Word Origins, A&C Black, London, United Kingdom, viewed 01 May 2010, [from <a href="http://www.credoreference.com/entry/acbwordorig/design"> source</a>]</div>

article_7392

Can there be art?

Taking a hybrid camera with an 1878 British lens and Japanese digital camera, I photographed English teachers at various points around Japan in search of the privilege of being an expat.
I have here ‘re-created’ the ancient stations of the Tokaido, the most famous road in the country. The original journey started in Nihonbashi and ended in Kyoto, but today it continues further along in its modern counterpart, the Shinkansen. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/privilege1-nihombashi.jpg" alt="Nihonbashi, Edo" title="© Gary McLeod" width="257" height="332" class="imgcaptionfloatl" /><img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/privilege2-shinagawa.jpg" alt="Shinagawa, Edo" title="© Gary McLeod" width="257" height="332" class="imgcaption floatl" /> 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/privilege3-mishima.jpg" alt="Mishima, Shizuoka" title="© Gary McLeod" width="257" height="332" class="imgcaption floatl" /><img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/privilege4-shizuoka.jpg" alt="Shizuoka" title="© Gary McLeod" width="257" height="332" class="imgcaption floatl" /> 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/privilege5-toyohashi.jpg" alt="Toyohashi, Aichi" title="© Gary McLeod" width="257" height="332" class="imgcaption floatl" /><img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/privilege6-toyota.jpg" alt="Toyota, Aichi" title="© Gary McLeod" width="257" height="332" class="imgcaption floatl" /> 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/privilege7-nagoya.jpg" alt="Nagoya, Aichi" title="© Gary McLeod" width="257" height="332" class="imgcaption floatl" /><img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/privilege8-kuwana.jpg" alt="Kuwana, Mie" title="© Gary McLeod" width="257" height="332" class="imgcaption floatl" /> 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/privilege9-yokkaichi.jpg" alt="Yokkaichi, Mie" title="© Gary McLeod" width="257" height="332" class="imgcaption floatl" /><img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/privilege10-kyoto.jpg" alt="Kyoto" title="© Gary McLeod" width="257" height="332" class="imgcaption floatl" /> 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/privilege11-osaka.jpg" alt="Osaka" title="© Gary McLeod" width="257" height="332" class="imgcaption floatl" /><img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/privilege12-kobe.jpg" alt="Kobe" title="© Gary McLeod" width="257" height="332" class="imgcaption floatl" /> 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/privilege13-himeji.jpg" alt="Himeji" title="© Gary McLeod" width="257" height="332" class="imgcaption floatl" /><img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/privilege14-okayama.jpg" alt="Okayama" title="© Gary McLeod" width="257" height="332" class="imgcaption floatl" /> 
The images are part of series on display in <a href="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/event/2009/0299">“PRIVILEGE” at Zuishoji Art Projects</a> from September 17 to September 23.

Foreign Faces

For those who come to Japan from afar, a trip to Beijing may seem a simple short hop away, but let us not forget that travelling is still a luxury for most and more often than not, hindered by a lack of funds. Such a scenario has changed little since the dawn of sightseeing, so it’s no surprise that with the inception of photography in the 19th century and now the Internet and programs such as Google Earth, these once distant lands can be viewed and even experienced with little or no budget. Therefore, we need to look at this exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography as exactly what it is: a window onto something that some of us may never see in person. If we look at it like this, we can begin to see many smaller windows within that window and from this point, the exhibition has us.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/ogawa1.jpg" alt=" " class="imgcaption" width="518" />
The first significant ‘window’ offers a comparative view. Brought to us by the photographs of Hou Yuanchao, these pictures document the ‘Forbidden City’ as it is now, but instead of taking the same views as probably countless numbers of tourists, he has chosen a guided path, replicating the views in the work of Japanese photographer Kazumasa Ogawa, which are shown alongside. During his visit to the city in 1900, Ogawa documented the city and its palace with impeccable clarity at a time when it was off-limits to common people. His mission was not one of inspiration sparked by a particular location but a quest for information, and he would also place people in his images so as to demonstrate a sense of scale. These were technical images in their purest form and their inclusion in the exhibition forms the second ‘window’ onto the famous city.
The third significant ‘window’ is arguably the most educational but its inclusion perhaps the most disappointing. Computer-generated video is generally considered to be the most visual and enlightening way of modelling the past, but in comparison to the other two “windows” which display evidence of their physicality (the age of the prints) and conception (the direct comparison to original compositions), it feels rather shallow, showing only its final form and nothing of its process.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/ogawa2.jpg" alt=" " class="imgcaption" width="688" />
As unrewarding an addition the video is, however, Hou’s photographs are also, at times, equally concerning. The comparative view is useful in that it documents a change in cultural values, and the hoards of tourists roaming the recent pictures illustrate this. However Hou’s decision to photograph the city from the same points of view as Ogawa also presents a struggle against artistic licence. In Ogawa’s picture of one of The Four Main Pillars in the T’ai-hê Hall, a tour guide is trying to extend his arms around the pillar to demonstrate its thickness; and in Hou’s photograph from the same position, someone is likewise hugging the pillar. Why recreate that act? Is he suggesting that we need to make sure that this is still the same building, albeit at least in scale? Why then, in other retaken pictures, has he chosen to ignore Ogawa’s composition? For example, in Ogawa’s picture of the The Mirror in the Ch’ien-ch’ing Hall, one of the mirrors was photographed from an angle, presumably to avoid taking his reflection. Yet Hou has turned the camera to face the mirror directly, showing not only the camera but also an infinite reflection, which begs the question why.
So, whereas Hou’s pictures seem to ask as many questions as they answer (perhaps the answers exist in the oddly unavailable English information), the most informative ‘window’ into this Forbidden City is by far the oldest one presented and this will ensure that it receives its fair share of visitors. In fact, Ogawa’s prints alone are worth a visit to the exhibition and should win any comparisons with online experiences hands-down. Google Earth may bring us close to the Forbidden Palace, but Ogawa’s pictures bring us closer. Despite attempts, they are not easily replicated and the experiences embedded into the physical surface of these old prints certainly cannot either.

article_1475

Revealing what the Internet cannot

When the legendry apple fell on Newton’s head, was there a moment where he pondered what colour it was? Was it a green one, a red one, or even a greenish-red one? When one imagines it, perhaps the colour isn’t as relevant as the act itself—why then, should we pay attention to colours? Cue a temporary exhibition at the Sai-No-Kuni Visual Plaza in Saitama precariously inviting us to “Dance with Colors!” 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/skipcity1.jpg" alt="Tsutomu Mutoh, 'Optical Tone'" width="518" height="344" class="imgcaption" />
Entering a large dimmed space, I was received as if I had just entered a corporate showroom. Two museum staff instructed me in Japanese, motioning me towards a large screen with three translucent plastic air-filled bags (reminiscent of bean bags) sitting in front of it. As I watched, the two museum staff jubilantly bounced up and down on the seats- each bounce changing the colour of the bags. I joined in the fun and it was then that I noticed the large screen was mimicking our bouncing in three different patterns. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/skipcity2.jpg" alt="MONGOOSE STUDIO, 'fuwapica lite'" width="257" height="386" class="imgcaption floatl" /><img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/skipcity3.jpg" alt="MONGOOSE STUDIO, 'RGBy'" width="257" height="386" class="imgcaption floatl" /> 
Produced by the design studio “Mongoose”, and aptly called “Fuwapica” (a hybrid of the Japanese words for “soft” [fuwa-fuwa] and “flashily” [pika-pika]) these bags or “communication stools” react to a change in air pressure when someone sits on them, changing the colour of the indirect light that they emit. “Fuwapica” connects a person’s sense of colour with their sense of touch, but isn’t little more than a few minutes of harmless fun? If I am honest, it wasn’t long before I got up from my seat.
Yet, if the “Fuwapica” can be forgiven for “show-ponying”, the Sony BRAVIA M1 and X7000 Series LCD television sets cannot. Like Apple’s attempts to make the first i-Macs aesthetically different, the televisions show a range of ghastly bright colours seemed to point towards a luxurious world with an unlimited range of choice and equally lots of money. They were impressively thin televisions (only 3mm thick) but inevitably, their inclusion felt like a promotion stand inside Yodobashi Camera. This was clearly design but was it celebrating the design or subconsciously selling it? 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/skipcity4.jpg" alt="Pantone (Products from Pantone Universe / by Design)" width="257" height="386" class="imgcaption floatl" />
Pantone’s inclusion also speaks volumes of this exhibition’s industrial overtones. As the world’s most renowned authority for reproducing, coordinating, and categorizing colours accurately, their “official” colours have adorned consumer products from diaries to cell-phones. We can now choose a cell phone from their range of millions of colors. I could, for instance, have a cell phone in today’s colour of the day: “Lilly Green,” or the more formal “Pantone 13-0317”. However, whilst Sir Isaac Newton made great attempts to show that white light was heterogeneous, made up of different colours, Pantone take that a step further, not only isolating each colour but also labeling and classifying each subtle change in gradation. Knowing that the company maintains intellectual rights of these labeled colours, we are essentially seeing colours becoming the products of a brand. 
Of all the corporations present, Shiseido’s “Real Time Makeup Simulator” was by far the most practical. Standing in front of a camera with your own image on an LCD screen, the simulator offered the opportunity to literally ‘try before you buy’. It allows you to see yourself as either “Cute”, “Fresh”, “Natural” or “Feminine” with various amounts of digital makeup applied to your cheeks, lips and eyes. None of them really suited me, despite the staff’s incessant “kawaii” gags, but it will no doubt serve a purpose on the first floor of department stores.
All in all, I was confused by this exhibition’s intent. The title suggested that these were works we could “play” with but in reality we had to be informed and instructed on how to use them and I felt little desire to hang around and play to my hearts content. It was an exhibit of occasionally clever but novelty-ridden examples of product design, which seemed to belong only in a world where such choices would be a luxury. Leaving the exhibition and walking out in view of a bright blue sunny sky, I recalled a teacher once telling me that if we mix too many pigments together, all we are likely to get is a colour that resembles mud. Perhaps, there is such a thing as too many colours and too much choice? Was Newton’s apple 18-1660 (a “red”) or 16-6340 TPX (a “green”)? An interesting question but perhaps one that Sir Isaac would have probably overlooked.

article_1813

18-1660 or 16-6340 TPX?

If I threaten to shine a light into your eye, would you look? NTT ICC’s exhibition on the perception of light prompts such a question by initially issuing a warning to those people who may well be sensitive to strobe lighting or suffer from epilepsy. This warning (in addition to being a serious one) helps to play on our curiosity and push us through the door of an exhibition, which arguably needs us more than we need it. 
Works such as ‘Printed Eye (Light)’ (1987-2008) by Yukio Fujimoto rely upon us as instigators of our own demise. Here, through the pressing of a button, we are ‘invited’ to expose our eyes to a ‘weak’ strobe light, which causes the residual image of the word “light” to appear on our retinas and stay there until it dissipates. Imagine looking at the sun very briefly through a telescope and you can probably predict the intensity of the experience.
Another work, ‘Thought Projector’ (2007) by the collective Alien Productions, asks us more directly to be involved. Whereas ‘Printed Eye’ played on our personal temptations to push buttons to see what they do, ‘Thought Projector’ asks for our consent. Through the process of taking photographic images of the surface and rear of your eye, streaming them online and juxtaposing them against images from an archive and live comments from internet viewers, we give ourselves over to the technology in order to see the result. Inspired by an unrealized camera that could photograph thoughts, there is a morbid sense of curiosity here akin to looking at oneself through an endoscope. Yet, in this work and ‘Printed Eye’, our participation is necessary. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/light-insight1.jpg" alt="Alien Productions, 'Thought Projector' (2007)" title="Photo: FARBRAUM.cc" width="518" height="346" class="imgcaption" /> 
Ingo Günther’s ‘Thank You-Instrument’ (1995) is another example of participation although it doesn’t ask anything specific of us. Using a strobe light (though this time the work doesn’t involve flashing the light directly into your eye), which etches the visitor’s silhouette temporarily on the gallery wall, viewers are privileged to see their own shadow frozen in real time while they are free to walk around it and play with it. As playful as it is though, this work intentionally encourages thoughts of the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima in 1945, where the flash of the explosion etched victims’ shadows on walls. Spectacular this installation may be (the shouts of sugoi are not to be underestimated here), but this severing from our own shadow – a theme that also underpins Haruki Murakami’s novel (Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World’ – hints at the show’s dependence on us.
A significant handicap of the show is that a majority of the works on display here are arguably more science experiments than works of art, although it does present an interesting opportunity in which to view ourselves and how much we ‘trust’. To experience some of these works properly requires a devoted faith to the sanctuary of the art museum; a ‘safe’ place where an unspoken mutual respect exists between the works and the visitor. No one would expect an artwork to directly harm them despite warnings suggesting otherwise. And some works here even play on that expectation – before flashing a light directly into your eye. However, more often than not, the novelty soon wears off and when it does, thankfully, there are other works here that don’t depend on someone volunteering. A good example would be Jochem Hendrick’s drawings in the middle of the show that do well to literally present the artist’s sight. Drawn by the eye without the use of the artist’s hands, these works allow us to share the artist’s vision without requiring an invitation or instruction. In this way, these drawings achieve what the other works cannot – an enduring experience rather than a novelty. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/light-insight2.jpeg" alt="Ingo Günther, 'Thank You-Instrument' (1995)" title="Photo: Kunio Oshima" width="518" height="316" class="imgcaption" /> 
If Hendrick’s drawings expose the participatory works as frivolous, then the works book-ending the show could be said to poke fun at them. Nam June Paik’s ‘Candle TV’ (1980) and Joseph Beuys’ ‘Capri Battery’ (1985) are intended to hint at the darker aspects of light and our deception by it, but they appear here more as puns. Beuys in particular – suggesting that you can get energy from a lemon due to the light absorbed in making it – would have us think that the rest of the works take themselves a little too seriously. Both Beuys’ and June-Paik’s works are very basic in their construction yet they also achieve what the participatory ones cannot: that any interaction between a work and the visitor should add another layer, rather than merely justify it. Both Beuys and June-Paik are setting a benchmark for artistic integrity. Both knew of something beyond technological frivolity and both knew that when the novelty passes, something more is needed. 
Still want to look into the light?

article_2356

Shine a Light

Walking through this exhibition feels like flipping through the pages of a glossy magazine. The show begins with an eye-catching cover: the image on the exhibition poster — a gloriously pink flower — is taken from the opening room, adorned with Acid Bloom (2003), a series of large photographs of vibrantly coloured close-ups of flowers interspersed with other pictures that resemble the view from the flowers. Indeed, the first-time viewer of Ninagawa’s work will realise before even arriving at the gallery that her photography is not exactly defined by subtlety or self-restraint.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/mikaninagawa1.jpg" alt="Mika Ninagawa, 'Earthly Flowers, Heavenly Colors' 
Installation view at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery 2008" title=""© Mika Ninagawa; Photo: Keizo Kioku" width="518" height="345" class="imgcaption" />
As the accompanying handout mentioned: “Melting outlines, quickly fading boundaries. Am I a flower, or is the flower me?” the impression one has is that the artist and the flowers share a similar perspective: one of looking whilst being looked at. However, little was I aware that the boundaries between these works and my mind were also beginning to melt. 
The show segued into what would be a magazine’s editorial section: a room full of her early works from time spent on Isla Mujeres, an island in the Gulf of Mexico in the late 1990s, but it was the feature pages, as it were — video footage of goldfish, celebrity portraits, still lives of artificial flowers and portraits of animals — that subsequently caught my attention, not to mention what would be the Ninagawa equivalents of adverts and listings — a wall of purikura sticker style portraits of women posing cutely for the camera. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/mikaninagawa2.jpg" alt="Mika Ninagawa, 'Earthly Flowers, Heavenly Colors' 
Installation view at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery 2008" title="© Mika Ninagawa; Photo: Keizo Kioku" width="518" height="328" class="imgcaption" />
Liquid Dreams (2008), a wall-sized video projection of goldfish swimming around a tank, is perhaps poor in terms of technical quality, but ultimately it is its banal treatment of subject matter that lets it down: this video of fish is simply a video of fish and has little further depth to it. The scale of the fish however harked back to the equally large flowers seen earlier — a scale which seemed intent on overpowering me. The smaller works in the “editorial section” had allowed me to begin to engage with her work on an intellectual level but I was dropped back into a world where flowers and fish were as big as I was. Again, I felt insignificant.
It was then that I noticed the fly. Titled Floating Yesterday (2004-05), the fourth room presented an installation of various photographs, with one particular image depicting brightly coloured round objects with a small fly resting on them. For all the persistent use of bright colours, I didn’t notice the insect at first but once I had, I not only felt sympathy for the fly’s situation but I realized that we might both be trapped in this uncertain world of bright colours and exaggerated scales. Walter Benjamin once spoke of consciousness providing “not a means of making sense of sensory stimulation, but a shield against it”. My shield had been officially breached and I needed to get out. However, I was only half way through.
Ninagawa’s celebrity portraits, Ninagawa Land (2004-08), featured in a room with a disco-like chequered floor, were yet another indulgence of bright and lurid imagery, albeit informed by Japanese popular culture, and it only exacerbated the sensory overload. It seems the curators have tried to offer viewers some respite by then plunging them temporarily into darkness in the following room: Everlasting Flowers (2005) where pictures of artificial flowers have been displayed under spotlights. I was told that these artificial flowers could only have been made in Mexico because of their brightness and high quality but at this point I may well have ceased caring. A room such as this perhaps came a little too late and in this case it was the exhibition design that let down the work rather than the other way around.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/mikaninagawa3.jpg" alt="Mika Ninagawa, 'Earthly Flowers, Heavenly Colors' 
Installation view at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery 2008" title=""© Mika Ninagawa; Photo: Keizo Kioku" width="518" height="345" class="imgcaption" />
Thereafter, with the exit beckoning, a larger room: Noir (2007-08) with a Wolfgang Tillmans-esque display of varyingly sized prints pinned or taped to the wall held my attention, but frustrated me. The larger works here in particular, being printed on four separate pieces and then hung on the wall as if taped together may well have been a conscious allusion to the fold-out pages of magazines, but the apparent contradiction between the domestic subject matter and the ad-hoc appearance of their display seemed contradictory or even lazy.
The show concludes with a long wall of yet more celebrity portraits displayed as though they were large purikura stickers, and it induced my first ever physical shudder in an art gallery as I made my way to the safety of the exit. While it may not have suited my taste, there is of course a market for this kind of work and Ninagawa plays to it successfully. Many sources will confirm her status as a successful and popular photographer in Japan and perhaps this is justifiably so. Yet, in the context of the art gallery and as a practitioner of ‘fine art’, I found her work to be conceptually and philosophically flimsy whilst preying too much on the senses. 
I at least got out but the poor fly remained, forever trapped by Ninagawa’s lens. Whether or not any visitor to this exhibition feels stuck like the fly or something more positive depends on whether they can endure the gauntlet of saccharine imagery that Ninagawa has laid out for them. In all honesty, perhaps the show should come with a warning label.

The Fly in the Technicolour Ointment…

Having had the luxury of visiting London and seeing John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851-52) on so many occasions, it is difficult for me to imagine what it is like to experience the artist’s most famous piece for the first time. On show in this exhibition, it is arguably the one painting that people have come to see and in reading a review of the Royal Academy’s summer show in 1852 (the year Ophelia was completed), it isn’t hard to appreciate the attraction:
Standing at a few paces from it we saw nothing but perfect harmony, the most luminous beauty, and a miraculous finish. […] How rich and real is the lush-leavy greenery of spring and those flowers! Who ever saw such in painting? Yet, amid all that flush of gorgeous hues, the warm flesh is as living in its tints as nature.1
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/millais1.jpg" alt="John Everett Millais', 'Ophelia' (1851-52) Oil on canvas" title="© Collection of the Tate" width="518" height="353" class="imgcaption" />
What else is there for me to say? With Millais’ signature piece at the heart of this show and the likely effect that will have on visitor numbers, this retrospective risks being a one-trick pony. Thankfully, however, Millais’ greater body of work and the organizers’ treatment of it in this exhibition means that there is more to see than this illustration of the tragic heroine of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
From the moment of being confronted by a flawless drawing of a Grecian bust made when the artist was just nine years old, I found myself wondering how Millais viewed his talents. He was regarded as a precocious child, yet having been accepted into the Royal Academy schools in 1840 at the age of eleven he must have felt a burden: the burden of being too good for his age. The Woodman’s Daughter (1850-51) is a vivid painting in its unnatural greens and yet I couldn’t help wonder why the boy’s right arm appeared shorter in length than his left, seemingly wooden and twisted as if it weren’t his own. Millais’ decision to leave this boy’s arm in such an awkward and unnatural pose could have perhaps been in accordance with Pre-Raphaelite principles (naïve compositions often being one of the requirements) but is it not possible for such a young man to have simply suffered moments of idleness and be at odds with his ability? 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/millais2.jpg" alt="John Everett Millais', 'My First Sermon' (1863) Oil on canvas" title="© Collection of City of London Guildhall Art Gallery" width="257" height="334" class="imgcaption floatr" />Born into a prominent family in Jersey in 1829, it was a curious decision of Millais’ to then focus on ordinary people trapped in situations of conflict such as in the paintings The Rescue (1855) and The Order of Release (1853). [I don’t understand the jump from his year/place of birth to the works of his early twenties…] Millais seemed determined to reach beyond the entertainment values of Shakespeare’s plays and strike a chord that would resonate in people’s hearts. The exhibition almost labels this change in direction as heroic yet Millais was not a man of the lower classes and so there must have been another reason for this new direction. His reputation at that point in time was very much in its ascendancy, so perhaps he simply felt a need to be grounded? This was also a time when Millais fell in love with the wife of John Ruskin — his patron — and so one can perhaps sense that the struggles between heart and mind might have led him towards a more humble choice of subject matter.
Millais’ character continued to hold my attention throughout the remaining works in the exhibition, which reveal a man more at ease with his own talents and pressures. A very wicked sense of irony creeps into paintings such as My First Sermon (1863) and later My Second Sermon (1863-4) — shown together here, they are sure to make most people giggle in the hushed silence of the museum. Likewise Duckling (1869) is titled after the ducks located at the bottom of the picture and yet the focal point of the picture is a young girl, pretty in her own way and yet perhaps not pretty enough for some. The allusion to the story of the ugly ducking may sound cruel but there is a dark side to Millais’ wit that recurs throughout his work. Although the stories and legends that inspired him have receded into the depths of cultural consciousness, his sense of humour still transcends the barriers of class and nationality. 
Many of the visitors to this exhibition will enjoy his work in the same way as those who visited the Royal Academy in 1852, as one writer wrote:
We are not connoisseurs of pictures; we are simply lovers of them, and, like every true lover, we think the object of our affection the loveliest and best. […] There are more roads to the appreciative faculties than by critical analysis.2
Therefore, it is simply enough to fall in love first and then laugh along with such paintings. This exhibition features enough of them to let you do just that.
—
1 A Visit to the Royal Academy (1852) The Star of Freedom Newspaper, Leeds, England. Saturday May 29, 1852, Issue 4. 
2 Ibid.

article_2043

I Can’t Help Falling in…

A girl with bobbed hair lies back in a dark and uncertain pool. One look at the hands feeling their way around her forehead suggests that she succumbed to this state some time ago. Her head is tilted ever-so-slightly to one side and we can all understand the feeling of someone caressing her neck. Likewise, we are with this mysterious girl as she gradually lets go. However, something is nibbling away at her thigh. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/akinokondoh1.jpg" alt="Akino Kondoh, 'Flesh' (2008) Oil on canvas, 112 x 162cm" title="Photo: Kei Miyajima. Courtesy the artist and Mizuma Art Gallery." width="518" height="357" class="imgcaption" />
The girl’s name is Eiko, a character that Akino Kondoh has drawn and painted since she was eighteen. Taking centre stage in her acclaimed animations, Eiko has all the hallmarks of a child, a heroine, or an adventurer (in the mould of Alice in Wonderland) Yet, for all the fantastical imagery that one may associate with her animations, Kondoh’s shift towards painting places Eiko in a world that is far darker, a world that alludes to 18th and 19th century romanticists. 
The basic structure of an animation is simply a sequence of one drawing after another in which the depth of each image remains the same. Each moment replaces the previous one in the mind of the viewer leaving little in the way of traces. Therefore, having admitted that animation lacked presence, Kondoh turned to oil painting in an attempt to show something that the animations could not. This more malleable medium offered the opportunity to show many moments at one time, presenting a previously unseen depth to her chosen world, where the layers are fused and not substituted. The result is a darker and more intriguing place. In the animations, there was a sense that the girl (as did Alice in the animated version of Alice in Wonderland) would never come to actual harm. Yet in these paintings- based upon the relationship between humans and plants- Eiko is vulnerable and we not only see this but we share it. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/akinokondokanro.jpg" alt="Akino Kondoh, 'KANRO' (2008) Oil on gesso, mounted on canvas, diameter 90cm" title="Photo: Kei Miyajima. Courtesy the artist and Mizuma Art Gallery" width="518" height="518" class="imgcaption" />
The exhibition features eight paintings of various sizes and in all but two we are part of an audience watching a play. For example, in Flesh and Kanro, Eiko is theatrically placed at the centre of the canvas, her smoky surroundings forming limbs, hands, and heads that engulf her. Kondoh’s animations would have placed the emphasis on such movement, whereas these paintings merely suggest it — drawn in by Kondoh’s sensitive handling of the medium, I found myself fixed to the spot. Something was persuading me to stay and watch but in doing so, I could almost feel the gnawing teeth of those smoky beings on my own skin. 
These paintings, through their theatrical compositions, confirmed my role as a member of its audience; a witness to a tragic play, but the two remaining paintings made me feel differently. These two large paintings, titled Fruit and Seed, decentralize Eiko; her image is presented in reflection across a vertical axis running through the centre of the paintings. In this state of reflection and confusion that goes against the centralized compositions of the others, I was brought crashing down from the prestigious position of witness and left to contemplate both my relationship to the painting and Eiko’s relationship with herself and her surroundings. The drama of the other paintings stop here and we really begin to relate to Eiko’s (or the artist’s) state of mind.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/akinokondoh3.jpg" alt="Akino Kondoh, 'Fruit' (2008) Oil on canvas, 162 x 194cm" title="Photo: Kei Miyajima. Courtesy the artist and Mizuma Art Gallery." width="518" height="432" class="imgcaption" />
The artist has acknowledged an interest in Rorschach tests and symmetry found in nature, and their influence on these particular compositions stand out significantly. They reminded me of something Hegel taught, and what Jacques Rancière reminds us of in his book The Future of the Image that: “Its [art’s] presence is always in two places at once.” In Kondoh’s paintings, what she seeks lies not just in the layers of oil paint applied over time but also implicates the viewer; the audience is involved in a way that they could perhaps never be in her animations. It is not surprising that Kondoh remains inspired by John Everett Millais’ Ophelia, which so successfully mastered the art of telling a story in just one picture. Those who appreciate Kondoh’s works the most will most likely be romanticists themselves, lovers of stories and narrative.
For now, Kondoh is turning her back on animation, a medium grounded in spectacle, and embracing instead oil painting, a medium of duration, trapping Eiko in a world of Blake-esque shadows and Turneresque hazes. However, given that Kondoh has spoken of inspiration for a new animation, it may not be long before Eiko leaves this eerie world. If she does, I for one, feel that it could well be a shame. She does after all, despite being gnawed at, look very much at home.
—
1 Rancière, J., trans. Elliot, G (2007) The Future of the Image, Verso. p.89.

article_1777

At Home in an Uncertain Pool

My first experience of the Turner Prize was at the Southampton City Art Gallery in the UK in 1996. The work of the four nominated artists was being showcased around the country, and I found myself glued to a Channel 4 documentary that explained the works, together with interviews with the artists that elicited justification for what they do. Watching Douglas Gordon shaving the hair off one of his arms in his video A Divided Self1, (1996) and listening to Simon Patterson justifying his version of the London tube map The Great Bear2, (1992) was intriguing. However, with work of this kind being nominated for the country’s most public art award it was always going to be contentious. In its defence, Janet Street-Porter wrote: “The Turner Prize and Becks Futures [another significant award] both entice thousands of young people into art galleries for the first time every year”3 and I for one am inclined to agree with her. At the age of seventeen it was inspiring and motivating to see these works.
<img class="imgcaption" title="Osaka City Museum of Modern Art" src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/turnerprizetokyo2.jpg" alt="Gilbert & George, 'Death after Life' (1984) 482 x 1105cm, color on photograph" width="518" />
Nonetheless, the beef that filled that Channel 4 feature of 1996, and every other documentary about the yearly competition since then, is actually the biggest absence at the Mori Art Museum’s latest survey show “History in the Making: A Retrospective of the Turner Prize”. Having been organized by the Tate and previously exhibited at Tate Britain in 2007, indeed, this is the first time that all of the award winners have been put together in one show. However, this exhibition is not a faithful representation of what the Turner Prize itself consists of. Where is the context in which the prize is set: the controversy it elicits among the British public? Where are the protests and demonstrations of the “Stuckists”4 or the outraged headlines of the tabloid newspapers demanding to know “Is this art?” Annoying as these bi-products of the Turner Prize are, an exhibition without them seems eerily quiet as though there are no more Davids to fight this Goliath.
<img class="imgcaption" title="Astrup Fearnley Museum Oslo" src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/turner_01_l.jpg" alt="Damien Hirst, 'Mother and Child, Divided' (1993) 208.6 x 332.5 x 109cm (x2), 113.6 x 169 x 62cm (x2); steel, GRP composites, glass, silicone, cow, calf, formaldehyde solution" width="518" />
There will inevitably be those who dispute each year’s eventual winner no matter what. In fact, in recent years, the Tate has made great efforts to gather people’s opinions at the end of every exhibition and obtain feedback on the judges’ decisions, a measure taken in response to criticisms of elitism and there being little effort made to involve the public. Nevertheless, the impact of that feedback has yet to be seen. If anything, it has only kept the public brawl alive, which is more than likely what the organizers wanted.5 As noted in some reviews of its London unveiling last year, this “retrospective” lacked bite and felt more like shrouding oneself in a warm blanket of familiarity. Although it was pleasant to see Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child Divided (1993) again, the kind of agitation that was expressed toward it at the Royal Academy’s “Sensation” exhibition in 1997 is long gone. To the British public, I would imagine this show had a certain “I told you so” after-taste to it, but bringing it here, to a country less familiar with the Turner Prize, frames the show more as an introductory course to British contemporary art — one that will no doubt raise Japanese interest in the participating artists. The director of the Mori Art Museum, Fumio Nanjo, who was also on the judging panel of the 1998 prize, has created a rather golden opportunity for the likes of Tomma Abts’ appropriately Japanese-apartment-sized abstract paintings with German first names, or Grayson Perry’s “technically accomplished” pottery, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see their names pop up a little more often in Tokyo from now on.
<img class="imgcaption floatr" title="The Saatchi Gallery, London" src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/turner_03_l.jpg" alt="Grayson Perry, 'Golden Ghosts' (2001) 67 x φ35.5cm, earthenware" width="257" />There were of course some highlights: I personally welcomed seeing Mark Wallinger’s Sleeper, (2004-5), a documentary video of the artist wandering around an empty art museum in Berlin while wearing a bear suit. Over ten nights, people gathered outside the glass walls to see the artist “behave” in this temporary confinement. The performance itself was very much about espionage yet it also spoke of the responsibility that comes with looking. The obvious parallel drawn with zoos and watching animals in cages was further emphasized by the whispers of “kawaii” (cute) and “kawaiso” (aww, poor thing) of Japanese visitors. Martin Creed’s The Lights Going On and Off (2001), which as the title suggests, consists of an “empty” room in which the lights switch on and off at five-second intervals, was also a joy to behold. It was interesting to watch people trying to work out its mechanism: one couple in particular seemed convinced that a sensor was involved somewhere, turning the light on and off in response to the movement of visitors. This moment of misunderstanding highlighted what little trickery there is in any of these works, which was refreshing to see given how often Japanese exhibitions of the past few years have made a point of showcasing interactive art.
While I don’t tend to care a great deal about who eventually walks away with the Turner Prize, its greatest success is in its ability to provoke a reaction and generate an opinion. The works picked every year may not be pretty or easily acceptable at times but the show as a whole does cast a light — albeit a very specifically directed one, given the actual breadth of the British art world — on a level of British Art that could be achievable by anyone. It is thus ironic that this exhibition at the Mori is quite ruthless in whom it excludes. Although some glimpses of the other nominees can be seen on monitors around the exhibition spaces, it might have been more interesting had this show actually included work by some of the arguably more interesting artists who didn’t win, such as Tacita Dean, Tomoko Takahashi, Simon Patterson, Darren Almond and even Tracey Emin. Without them, this exhibition affirms the sense that the winner takes all, far more than is actually the case, thus reinforcing the elitist air of which the prize has been so often accused in the past.
All in all, this exhibition stands as a rather oblique overview of the infamous prize and as a highly “filtered” survey of British art of the last twenty years. To a Japanese audience however, it is a worthwhile introduction nonetheless and one can only hope that it will inspire and motivate this audience to dig a little deeper as this writer did twelve years ago.
—
1 Not exhibited in this show. 
2 Not exhibited in this show. 
3 Street Porter, J.(2006) “Paul is better off without Heather”, The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/janet-street-porter/janet-streetporter-paul-is-better-off-without-heather-478626.html [Accessed 4th May 2008] 
4 The Stuckists have been responsible for demonstrations outside and in the Tate Gallery since 2000. For further information see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuckist_demonstrations [Accessed 4th May, 2008] 
5 As comments were encouraged, Kim Howells, the then-Culture Minister, left a comment describing the works as “cold, mechanical conceptual bullshit”. Nonetheless, this reached the front page of the newspapers. Tate (2007) Turner Prize: A Retrospective 1984-2006, Tate Exhibition Guide, http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/turnerprizeretrospective/exhibitionguide/02-05.shtm [Accessed 4th May 2008]

article_1526

Winning is Everything?

This discussion paper proposes that the medium of digital photography inherently displays qualities of Japanese aesthetics. Against a history of appropriation, first I identify the aspects of digital photography in question. Then, informed by the writings of Donald Keene and Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, I identify two key qualities in Japanese aesthetics and argue their presence within the medium. The paper concludes that not only have Japanese aesthetics found their way into a global medium but that the medium also might serve as educational in the way of the Japanese.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/garymcleod1-5.jpg" alt="Nijubashi, Tokio' (from the series Challenger +)" class="imgcaption" title="© Gary McLeod" width="518" />
Japanese Aesthetics
Many attempts have been made by hundreds, if not thousands of Western philosophers and thinkers to understand Japanese culture. Ever since the country’s opening to the west in the mid 19th century, it has been the centre of many enquiries. Almost all lead to the conclusion that the Japanese aesthetic is as contradictory as it is complicated. Indeed, “aesthetics” was not a word used by the Japanese until increased exposure to Westerners. Therefore, I wish to draw attention to a comment made by a longstanding observer of Japanese culture, Donald Keene, who in 1971 wrote:
[…] it seems safe to say that the aesthetic ideals which have formed Japanese taste over the centuries will find their outlet in media yet undiscovered and maintain their distinctive existence (Keene. 1971: p25).
Through my explorations of the Japanese landscape with digital photography, it became necessary to ask if there was perhaps a more direct relationship between the aesthetics of Japan and the medium of digital photography. It is with this paper that I propose that digital photography is inherently Japanese.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/garymcleod2.jpg" alt="'Kichichoji' (from the series Challenger +)" class="imgcaption floatr" title="© Gary McLeod" width="257" />The Appropriation of Photography
For developments of the digital image to be distinctively Japanese, the traditional medium of photography would have to have been appropriated at some point in time. Indeed, during the 1930s, it was. At the time fledging companies such as Canon, Sony and Nikon were looking to the West for ideas to develop. In the case of Canon, Goro Yoshida and his brother-in-law set about making their own camera but as the company’s corporate website describes:
He [Yoshida] faced many significant obstacles, because not only making exact replicas of Leica and Contax cameras, two major brands on the market at the time, which was difficult with the technique at the time, he strove to incorporate original ideas into the mechanical workings of cameras. (Canon Inc. 2007, Internet accessed)
Yoshida’s passion was to go one better than the famous European brands but he wasn’t the only one. Notable also was Sony’s acquiring of CCD (Charge Coupled Device) technology from the AT&T Bell labs later in the 70s and then mass-producing them by the 80s. True enough, acts of appropriation such as Canon’s and Sony’s are typical of Japanese culture as far back as the appropriation of rice as a Japanese symbol in the 7th century, yet this isn’t quite enough to fully justify my claim.
The Digital Image
It is therefore important to define what I mean by “digital photography”. For a definition of this, I shall refer to Vilém Flusser’s description of what he considered to be the “electromagnetic image”:
(1) It is practically eternal; it is not subject to entropy, to the second principle of thermodynamics. (2) It can move and sound. (3) It can be changed by its receiver. This is true of every electromagnetized information (e.g. video or computer synthetizing), but in the photo one can see how information abandons its material basis. (Flusser. 1986: p331)
Flusser believed that the traditional medium of photography presented us with a visualization of a scene rather than an abstraction of it and he believed the “electromagnetic image” (what we would now refer to as the digital image) to share the same properties (Flusser. 1983). However, given that he would later speak of the information abandoning its material basis in 1986, it could be safe to assume that he was aware of digital photography being of different stock to the traditional form. The CCD that would attempt to replace the chemical film may seem to visualize rather than abstract, but in its translation of a scene, it is undeniably abstracting it. To refer to Kodak’s CCD primer of 2001:
Images are optically projected onto the parallel array that acts as the image plane. The device takes the scene information and partitions the image into discrete elements that are defined by the number of pixels thus “quantizing” the scene. The resulting rows of scene information are then shifted in a parallel fashion to the serial register that subsequently shifts the row of information to the output as a serial stream of data. The process repeats until all rows are transferred off chip. The image is then reconstructed as dictated by the system. (Kodak CCD Primer. 2001: p3)
This process of quantization essentially renders the created image as a “loosely based” one and when transferred directly to a screen clearly proves the information as having abandoned its material support. So how does this make it Japanese?
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/garymcleod3.jpg" alt="'Sensoji, Asakusa' (from the series Challenger +)" class="imgcaption" title="© Gary McLeod" width="518" />
The Ambiguity in the Spaces
Japanese aesthetics could be best represented by two specific qualities, which are both rather difficult to define in English. The first is yûgen (yuu-gen), which as the monk Shôtetsu wrote in the 15th century:
[…] can be apprehended by the mind, but it cannot be expressed in words. Its quality may be suggested by the sight of a thin cloud veiling the moon or by autumn mist swathing the scarlet leaves on a mountainside. If one is asked where in these sights lies the yûgen, one cannot say, and it is not surprising that a man who fails to understand this truth is likely to prefer the sight of a perfectly clear, cloudless sky (cited in Keene. 1971: p16)
In summary, yûgen is that which exists between the spaces of things and which, must not necessarily be described. Yûgen should therefore be understood as the power of ambiguity and suggestion, which as Keene reminds us “depends on a willingness to admit that meanings exist beyond what can be seen or described” (Keene. 1971: p17).
To this way, it could be said that the Japanese commit themselves wholeheartedly. As the artist George Rittner, who stayed in Japan in 1904, wrote:
An artist will sometimes watch a bird or a goldfish for days, studying some particular bend of the head or curve of the tail; after each day he will have noticed one thing and have retained every line in his memory, and when he gets home in the evening will draw what he remembers. Day after day he will go to the same spot untiringly and watch, until at length the whole of what he wanted to reproduce is impressed on his mind, and that he draws. (Rittner. 1904: p31)
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/garymcleod4.jpg" alt="'Blossom, Ueno' (from the series Challenger +)" class="imgcaption" title="© Gary McLeod" width="518" />
The Appreciation of Perishability
The other distinct quality is aware (ah-wa-re) meaning pathos. This is the acceptance that all things will perish and is chiefly exemplified by one of Japan’s other national symbols: the cherry blossom. Yet this perishability is not baseless as the anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney writes:
Symbols ought never to be understood as floating in the mind of social agents alone. They are always grounded in the day-to-day lives of those who use them. The notion of aware and its symbolic representations developed precisely because the aristocrats were enjoying the grandeur of life and yet sensing that it would not last forever. […] In this context, we appreciate that the emphasis on pathos over the impermanence of life developed precisely because of the grandeur of life. Pathos over evanescence does not take on a significance unless it is predicated upon the grandeur of life, expressed as power, wealth, or the height of love. Only when one loses them [cherry blossoms] does one begin to appreciate their ephemeral nature and feel pathos over the loss. (Ohnuki-Tierney. 2002: p43)
This appreciation explains why many Japanese will traditionally turn out in their thousands to view the cherry blossom in full bloom over a period of a couple of weeks before they pass and the summer officially begins. These blossoms are appreciated all the more because of their inevitable passing.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/garymcleod5.jpg" alt="'Ueno Park' (from the series Challenger +)" class="imgcaption" title="© Gary McLeod" width="518" />
A ‘Japanese’ CCD
Our understanding of yûgen and aware can help us to consider an image generated by the CCD in a Japanese way. Let us return to the CCD’s process of quantizing and use the example of trying to recreate a perfect curve with straight lines. A set of horizontal and vertical lines can only begin to appear as a curve if enough distance is placed between it and the viewer. Therefore we have to accept that a natural curve cannot be recreated no matter how much we try. This shape can never be depicted in the same way as it might develop naturally in the leaf of a flower or the curvature of the earth in the distance between London and Tokyo. The same applies to the colours and shapes of a scene that transpire through the lens and which are interpreted by the CCD. The information is converted into numbers and so something is always lost in the process of reproducing that scene. Yet from the view of Japanese aesthetics, it should perhaps be appreciated because it cannot be reproduced so precisely. Much is therefore owed to the ambiguity that exists between the points of that curve and the spaces between the numbers used to represent the scene as information.
Yûgen alone though, is not enough to substantiate my claim without the perishability of aware. To return to Flusser’s understanding that the digital image is in no way entropic, one would think that aware does not exist within the digital photograph. Yet, through an understanding of the urbanist Paul Virilio’s theory of “the integral accident” , we can begin to see that the digital image may not be entropic but it is certainly susceptible to an accident. Despite the paradox that some of the oldest buildings in the world still exist in Japan (Keene. 1971), every moment contains the possibility of the end by a natural disaster. It is this temporality within living that one need appreciate when thinking of aware and as anyone whose computer hard drive has died can testify, digital information such as writings, plans, and photographs may not be entropic but they can certainly disappear. Within the digital photograph exists the possibility of its immediate loss.
Can We Learn from it/them?
The traditional medium of photography was appropriated much in the same way as Japanese beliefs, architecture, social systems, technology and even language, yet this was never simply a process of borrowing and making something their own. Arguably, it was about adapting things to suit an environment and society, which rests dangerously atop four tectonic plates. I don’t believe there to be any malice behind the appropriation of photography and CCDs, nor any deviousness behind their developments of them. Yet for all the West’s admiration for things Japanese, a fascination that has existed ever since the Portuguese and Dutch arrived in the late 16th century and was pursued even more by the Victorians, the West still knows so little about Japanese ways. As Keene suggested, the Japanese aesthetic will find new ways to maintain its existence for future study. Perhaps it would be wise to consider these typically Japanese qualities that arguably belie the medium of digital photography as a route to understanding the Japanese way. Then, perhaps we can also realize something about the medium itself.
—
Abbreviated Bibliography
Flusser, V. (1983) Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Reacktion Books.
Flusser, V. (1986) The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object: An Essay on the Ontological Standing of Photographs. Leonardo, Vol 19, No.4. The MIT Press.
Flusser, V., ed. Strohl, A. (2004) Villem Flusser: Writings. University of Minesota Press.
Keene, D. (1971) Appreciations of Japanese Culture. Kodansha International Ltd.
Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (1987) The Monkey as Mirror. Princeton University Press.
Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (1993) Rice as Self. Princeton University Press.
Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press.
Rittner, Geo. H. (1904) Impressions of Japan. John Murray, Albemarle Street, London.

article_1340

Made in Japan?

There is a common mistake when studying English that sees students using the verb “watch” with the noun “painting”. Any caretaker of the English language will promptly correct them to use “see” or “look” but perhaps there is some truth in that misuse. Can we watch paintings? It is not that often that you have the opportunity to see a painting and the full extent of its audience but that’s exactly what the Taikan Yokoyama retrospective on National Foundation Day was. Of course, this meant some queuing to enter the exhibition and penguin shuffling around it; and for 30 minutes, this writer did his best to wait patiently in line like everyone else. Yet inevitably the pull of seats proved too strong. Sitting there, I found myself doing that which fascinates photographers Martin Parr and Thomas Struth so emphatically: watching.
So what was I watching? Let’s start by considering the background of the scene: the paintings of Taikan Yokoyama. Once thought of as a “dangerous devil”1 he was among the first graduating year of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (now Tokyo University of Arts), a position one could say validated his practice in some circles. He matured in a period of time where contradictions raged between feudal and modern attitudes, which created tensions within the practice of art itself. His works then were the embodiment of Tenshin Okakura’s teachings, in which the discipline of Oriental techniques underpinned a new Japanese style of art that could compete with the dominant Western style. This new style, however, was almost reliant on Western painting, as Yokoyama himself suggested in a letter whilst travelling, believing that Japanese artists needed to “discipline themselves in Oriental thought” in order to “compare this with Western thought”.2 His works were traditional in that they reacted against a Western influence.
With this background set, let us look at the foreground: Yokoyama’s audience. Yokoyama maintained that Japanese painting was superior to that of the West and his nationalistic tendencies were no secret. Perhaps then, a number of people queuing on this occasion were visiting the exhibition out of respect, paying homage to an icon. Given this possibility, the sheer volume and variety of visitors allowed one to see an unusual contextual twist to Yokoyama’s works. Yokoyama himself was always seen in traditional kimono, and seeing the odd visitor dressed equally so gave the scene an air of honour and respect. Yet seeing the majority of his visitors clad in the common variety of global Western brands and designs, the presence of this majority seemed intrusively ironic. The Lois Vutton bags, sharp suits, baggy jeans, oversize logos and all the other familiar hallmarks of Western influences may be found everywhere throughout Japan but here in this retrospective, this ‘modern’ foreground was almost cruelly contradicting Yokoyama’s traditional background. Or was it?
Tenshin Okakura believed Japan to be a “repository of the trust of Asiatic thought and culture” , an indication of the nation’s ability to appropriate. However, about a hundred and forty years have passed and one could argue that the nation’s continuing ability to appropriate has led to Japan being a repository of the trust of “global” thought and culture. Many have spoken of the West’s intrusion in Japanese matters since the day Yokoyama was born, but few see Japan as actually consciously adding to the repository that consisted previously only of Asian culture. Our foreground then shows not a contradiction to our background, but a continuation of it. Okakura’s and Yokoyama’s spirit is still very much alive.
“Watching” paintings may well be naturally incorrect yet in watching this retrospective of Taikan Yokoyama on National Foundation Day, one was privy to a view of the past and its relative present. Perhaps this was the only day on which this could happen. Maybe so, but the fact remains that “watching” a painting can show more than merely looking at it. If only there were more seats and less queuing in these museums.
—
1 Yoshizawa, C. (1962) Taikan: Modern Master of Oriental-style Painting, 1868-1958. Kodansha, Publishers, Tokyo. p9. 
2 ibid., p15.

article_1286

“Watching” Yokoyama

Modern art museums have a tendency to actually favour contemporary art these days, opting almost always for multi-purpose spaces that allow for maximum flexibility in exhibition design. Contemporary art displays well in the white boxes and black boxes that are so often constructed out of multi-purpose spaces. However, curators are faced with a problem when they try to show works that were never made for a black or a white box, so it is interesting to see how museums choose to display works that now over 100 years old. Tate Britain is distinctively separated into white walls on the right hand side of the main hall and traditional crimson, navy or grey colours on the left hand side, showing contemporary and traditional works respectively. Of course Tate Britain also has some multi-purpose spaces at its disposal, yet the traditional paintings are hung on fixed walls as though admitting that sometimes works need to succumb to the established conditions of the space. So, what do curators do if they plan to show old works and all they have to work with is a multi-purpose space?
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/toulouselautrec1.jpg" alt="Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, 'In the Salon: The Sofa' (c.1893)" class="imgcaption" title="© MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, Brazil" width="518" />
The current exhibition of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s work at the Suntory Museum of Art is an example of the half-measures that can arise in these circumstances. From the outset, one wonders how a space designed with an urban living room in mind could show paintings, sketches and prints of an artist who died 107 years ago and who had no idea of what an urban living room is. The Suntory Museum’s curators have responded by setting up partition walls, painting them various ‘traditional’ colours and hanging Lautrec’s works according to particular subjects he was drawn to: the Moulin Rouge, dancers, the circus and ‘Japonica’. The exhibition is intended as an ‘introduction’ to Toulouse-Lautrec’s work, and a straightforward and logical approach such as this one does allow for visitors to absorb the basic details of who Lautrec was and what inspired him. All of the works collectively portray the subjects he would regularly interact with. They portray the way “he drew them, charged his memory with them, and [even when] dying, reproduced them” . They portray the way he stripped “the pictorial image of its superfluous references to the object, transforming the object into a simple, abbreviated, concentrated, evocative symbol.” In short, he worked from his collection of symbols as much as he did from his models. With none of us having experienced his world or even one like it, his portrayal of that world is all we can engage with, yet these works are all compromised by the one thing that frames them for the public: the context.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/toulouselautrec2.jpg" alt="Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, 'The Toilette' (1889)" class="imgcaption floatl" title="© Photo RMN-Hervé Lewandowski" width="257" /><img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/toulouselautrec3.jpg" alt="Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, 'Woman with black boa' (1892)" class="imgcaption floatl" title="© Photo RMN-Hervé Lewandowski" width="257" /> 
The works may be historically and socially informative; they may be spiritedly executed, but the use of coloured walls to try to replicate the environment of a traditional art gallery does little but signify the kind of walls that these works could once have been hanging on. In this way, one could say that the exhibition itself has stripped the works of superfluous references, transforming each of them into simple, abbreviated, concentrated and evocative symbols. In short, the exhibition is a symbol of Toulouse-Lautrec’s work, which in turn signifies the world which he enjoyed and depicted. Hung on walls that have their own presence and aura, his works might well have begun a past dialogue of which we could tap into. However, hung on imitation walls, his works become tight-lipped surfaces, images that cannot speak for themselves.

article_1239

Old Walls for Old Works

It has been 105 years since Thomas Edison filmed his experimental electrocution of Topsy the elephant, and yet we still seem content to display science as art. Topsy was the perfect vessel for Edison to showcase his amazing invention and although his silent film masks the pain felt by the animal, the image does not. Today, it’s available <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=RkBU3aYsf0Q">to watch</a> on youtube but why on earth would you want to? Surely we cannot derive interest from experimenting on a living creature and justify it by putting it in a gallery space?
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/silentdialogue1.jpg" alt="Yuji Dogane, 'AirMoss Plantron' (1998)" class="imgcaption floatl" title="Image courtesy of NTT ICC" width="257" />
The same curiosity that might encourage you to watch Topsy’s demise might also prompt you to visit NTT ICC’s exhibition, aptly titled “Silent Dialogue”. There are no animals being tortured here. Instead, the organizers and participating artists have focused on the environment and turned their scientific eyes toward the invisible communication between animals, plant life and vegetation. So what can we expect from such a show? Expect sensors, monitors, computers, headphones, and the usual paraphernalia that tends to accompany these kind of interactive exhibitions. Also, expect to see signs for things you can and can’t touch as well as the inevitable system crashes and program failures that tend to embarrass and plague interactive works such as these (one work had to be reset whilst I was there). If you have any questions about the works (and no doubt you will) expect the gallery staff to explain away all the secrets of how the works actually interact with viewers. This is perhaps the exhibition’s most interesting point in that the works themselves are reacting to you within the given environment rather than you interacting with them. There is a sense of insignificance placed on the viewer through this reversal of roles yet such a submission would never last long in this society. Step back and the space takes on the feel of a high school science experiment with no teachers to supervise proceedings. In other words, its becomes less educational and rather more sadistic.
Although there are works by 8 artists and collaborations on display, the works produced by the botanist Yuji Dogane’s collaborations chiefly symbolize this sadism. His piece titled Paphio in my life (2007) produced in collaboration with the composer Mamoru Fujieda, confronts us with four tables, each filled with various household plants and flowers. Attached to particular plants are wires leading to a program, which translates the plants’ ‘feelings’ into a linear graph on a monitor on the far wall. These visualizations are said to embody the inaudible conversations taking place between the various plant-life. As viewers walk around the tables, the flowers are said to communicate more. The problem for me here is the obviousness of this work’s claim. I can understand the justification in using this technology to remind us that plants and animals communicate as much as we do but isn’t it a little insulting to the viewer’s natural instincts? The exhibition preface states that “Plants and animals form closed systems” but does that mean we are above that system looking into theirs or are we a part of their system and should respect it accordingly? If we accept the fact that plants talk, then we can only assume that they had a lot to talk about what with all the visitors walking around them. Then again, if a group of foreign visitors were placed on a table in a dimmed white gallery space, would we keep quiet about it?
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/silentdialogue2.jpg" alt="Michael Prime, 'Ha, Ha! Your Mushrooms Have Gone?' (2005)" class="imgcaption floatr" title="Image courtesy of NTT ICC" width="257" />
My point is that the exhibition fulfills a brief in that it visualizes voices that we cannot hear as well as reminds us of our tendencies to ignore the feelings of their closed system. This is practical and informative but is it art? Being placed in the one space with little soundproofing between works, one could say that the works were cross fertilizing each other, adding extra elements and taking others away and thus creating their own closed system. However, one could also say that the various hums, shrills, clicks and tweaks rang through the space like that of a torture chamber. This exhibition unfortunately felt like a laboratory first and a gallery second, with neither environment being natural to the subjects held captive inside it. No wonder then, that the plants were so vocal.
For Topsy the elephant, her scream will remain forever silenced by the spectacle of film. For these plants and flowers cooped-up and evidently dying in this space, their cries are masked by the hybrid quasi-scientific pseudo artistic visualizations of these artists. The venue is fitting for such a collaboration between science and art and the show promises to ask such profound questions as ‘What do we know?’ and ‘What can we learn?’ Sadly, it only questions the frequently visited border between art and science, leaving us questioning the necessity for art in the first place.

article_1194

Silent Dialogue or Silent Cries?

It is difficult at times to imagine Japan dwelling on its past. Extravagant and ambitious pieces of architecture would have us all believe that history is literally a thing of the past. Yet in all of the museums and exhibitions I have ever stepped into, none have astounded me as much as Tokyo National Museum’s exhibition of artefacts from the Tokugawa Dynasty. What was forseen as a peaceful Sunday morning in a half empty museum turned out to be a morass of visitors pushing and shoving their way through the galleries. So, what were they trying to get a gander at?
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/tokugawa1.jpg" alt="Emaki picture scroll of 'The Tale of Genji'" class="imgcaption" title="Image courtesy of the Tokyo National Museum" width="518" />
The accompanying information lists 308 pieces in total, ranging from Tissue pouches to medicine jars to Katana swords, all of which were directly used, worn, owned or linked to the Tokugawa shoguns. This impressive collection was divided into three sections: “The Shoguns’ Authority”, “Beauty and Status” and “Elegance of the Princesses”. The first section appeared to present the initial face of the Tokugawa regime: strength and craft in its tactics, armoury and weaponry. Here was the suit of armour worn by Ieyasu Tokugawa himself at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 as well as other fine examples of armoury, some still bearing bullet marks where the metal was likely tested for strength. Equally of interest were the matchlock pistols bearing the Tokugawa seal. Matchlocks had been introduced by the Portuguese some 50 years earlier and these particular examples, so elegantly crafted by Noda Kiyotaka, put to shame their European equivalents.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/tokugawa2.jpg" alt="Tokugawa Ieyasu's 'Shida no Gusoku' or 'fern' armour" class="imgcaption floatl" title="Image courtesy of the Tokyo National Museum" width="257" />
Foreign influences resonate strongly in the first and second sections, hinting at Ieyasu’s curiosity towards the outside world. A couple of suits of armour clearly showed a European influence, one sporting a pigeon-breasted chest plate and another a pointed cone helmet. Various gifts given to the Shoguns from Europe were also displayed prominently, including a clock that the King of Spain presented to Ieyasu in 1611 as a reward for a sea rescue by the Japanese. Other items of note were a telescope, a compass and a pencil, as well as a Dutch outfit (presumably undergarments) and European stockings (the exact country wasn’t specified). The Christian presence of which Ieyasu was so weary was evident in an early Japanese translation of the Ten Commandments as well as a European statue of Christ. If there was anything disappointing here, it was the absence of anything related to William Adams who was well known to be close to Ieyasu as an advisor and navigator, although perhaps this had been overlooked in the translations, which in this exhibition are sparse and reserved only for the more significant parts of the displays. The second section, “Beauty and Status” showed many painted scrolls and exemplary pieces of calligraphy, including also chapters from the illustrated Tale of Genji, dated back to the 12th Century. A Chinese influence was also notable amongst the tea utensils and calligraphy hinting at the profound respect for the cultural skills of its largest neighbor.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/tokugawa3.jpg" alt="Fern-shaped ornament that was tied to the helmet of Tokugawa Ieyasu's armour" class="imgcaption floatr" title="Image courtesy of the Tokyo National Museum" width="257" />
The third section focused on the women of the dynasty. It was eventually customary for the Shogun to marry women of high nobility in Kyoto including the imperial family, which meant that the Tokugawa could maintain a genetic footing above ambitious Daimyo. These ladies lived their lives in cocooned beauty and luxury and many of their possessions will undoubtedly interest the ladies of the audience and perhaps even the gentlemen too.
Other items that can be viewed are several kimonos, Noh masks, banners and important documents including a document pertaining to the resignation of Tokugawa Yoshinobu in 1867. It is however unfortunate that in order to see these precious items, some of which are designated as “important cultural property”, one has to shuffle like a penguin anti-clockwise around the room, allowing you only a few moments to read the accompanying texts or admire the artefacts themselves before being pushed on around the course. As amazing as it is to see so many Japanese people come to this museum to appreciate their own history, it is perhaps a too painful a reminder of the rush hour trains in the morning. One clever visitor had clearly had this experience before and came prepared: equipped with a pair of binoculars, he was able to read the texts from afar without having to be shuffled along.
With all the contemporary art museums in Tokyo, and indeed the rest of the world, trying to promote culture, it is hugely heart-warming to see hundreds of normal people come to a museum simply to bear witness to artefacts of their own history. No pretentiousness, no concepts, no trickery, simply the past of what makes Japan what it really is today: deeply-rooted in its history but never doing anything more than paying respect to it.

What a Legacy to Leave

<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/panther01.jpg" alt="Tomoaki Marubashi, 'On Hand' (2004), Lambda Print on transparency film mounted on light box. 827 x 1240 x 167mm" width="518" class="imgcaption" title="Photo courtesy of Weissfeld Roentgenwerke AG" />
According to Craig Owens in his essay of 1983 ‘The Discourse of Others’: “if one of the most salient aspects of our post-modern culture is the presence of an insistent feminist voice, theories of postmodernism have tended either to neglect or to repress that voice.” So if something strikes you as quite odd about the seemingly feminist works on display in this exhibition, then you would be right. Titled “Visage”, this all-male artist exhibition groups together works that could be misinterpreted as merely carrying the torch of male subjectivity. However, each of these artists could well be understood as holding their hands up, almost in defeat, and here’s why:
Tomoaki Marubashi would appear fully aware of the fine line he is treading. His photographs usually draw attention to the symbolism of women and his images here depict women playing out scenes in the woods. In one image, women are locked in hand-to-hand combat with other women, each of them prepared to meet their end if necessary. In the other, several women attend to an old gent who is luxuriously sitting and lapping up their attention. My mother used to say that women are better at multi-tasking and these two images would appear to reinforce that belief. Since the advocation of equal rights, women have had to go to war and cook the meals, and to be frank; women are probably better at it. So what is Marubashi saying? Look to the left of the picture of the female entertainers and you will see a woman taking a cigar-break behind a tree while her colleagues keep up appearances. Clearly taking time out from her ‘role’, Maruhashi would appear to employ this image to champion women and admit defeat gracefully, but is he also making a sly caution? 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/panther02.jpg" alt="Hideki Sato, 'Untitled' (2007), Pencil and acrylic on canvas mounted on board 535 x 360mm" width="518" class="imgcaption" title="Photo courtesy of Weissfeld Roentgenwerke AG"/>
If Marubashi can be said to straddle the fine line then Hideki Sato brings that line to a point and is clear to literally make that line the focal point of his drawings. Japanese women’s hair is said to be the finest in the world, equivalent to that of silk in terms of quality. Sato draws our attention to anonymous heads of hair, meticulously drawn so as to celebrate the beauty of each individual strand. Drawn in pencil on painted acrylic canvases, the effect is almost one of a daguerreotype, such is the amount of lead on the surface, ensuring that one has to be careful where you stand so as to see the drawing at its best. Such attention paid to the angle from which one is to view the works may or may not have been intentional but it certainly reinforces the necessity of looking and admiring, both the examples of hair and the artist’s attention to detail.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/panther03.jpg" alt="Hideyuki Sawayanagi 'Extatic' (2006), Aluminium, gesso, 565 x 440 x 2mm" width="257" class="imgcaption floatr" title="Photo courtesy of Weissfeld Roentgenwerke AG" />Hideyuki Sawayanagi’s works also require that you stand in a particular place. Appearing to float off the walls, these flat sculptures (that are in fact hanging from the ceiling) present women from blown-up photocopies of pictures found in newspapers. Only their faces are reproduced in pressed aluminium, whereby the punched holes and the spacing of them define their expressions. They could be anybody but when we learn that they were taken from the infamous tabloid newspaper The Sun, its not easy to dissociate that tabloid’s reputation from the expressions of ecstasy and shock in the works. For me, his works are a little muddled. Whereas Marubashi and Sato are allowing their viewers some leeway, Sawayanagi’s works force the viewer to conform to a single “correct” point from which to view the expression of women who are perhaps faking their enjoyment. These works then are showing only one way to look at these women, but is this an attempt to encourage the viewer to consider other ways to view women, thus turning our attentions away from the stereotype? Such a question leaves me asking an even bigger question of the whole exhibition: whose side are they on?
Cultural theorists such as Michelle Henning would suggest that we are entering a matriarchal era and that the projects of modernism and post-modernism were patriarchal projects of the pre-digital past. From one point of view, what could be said of all the artists is that they are glorifying the male subjective view of women, playing on ‘prefabricated’ symbolism, therefore conveying a cynical and even fearful view of contemporary society. Yet, they simultaneously display sympathy and to some extent (as in Marubashi’s case) solidarity with a feminist view. The title of the exhibition could be interpreted as “face” or “mask” and thus brings our attention to an age-old argument that still has implications for the future. With this in mind, collectively this exhibition appears to be sitting on the fence, leaving just enough clues to fuel either view.
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1. Owens, C. cited in Foster, H. ed. (1998) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture, The New Press, New York. pp.65-92 
2. Henning, M. cited in Lister, M. ed. (1995) The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, London: Routledge, pp.217-235

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