Century City: Conversations with the Curators - Interview

Kaplan: What does modernism mean in this Japanese context?

Tomii: Modernism in the simplest terms would be modernization of our life or of society. Building a new building, retooling a factory--that is modernization in a visible and tangible form. And that is what was going on after the war, especially in the 1960s. That is what brought the country prosperity. But this modernization brought about destruction as well. We had pollution, overpopulation in large cities, especially the nation's capital, Tokyo, and political oppression of the student and antiwar movements. The duality of construction and destruction is exemplified by the 1967 news photograph, which shows Tokyo's first-ever skyscraper under construction in a misty sea of smog.

The construction-destruction duality can be also found elsewhere. For example, in 1967, the landmark Imperial Hotel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the early twentieth century was destroyed in order to make a space for new, modernized hotel facilities, which turned out to be typically modernist, functional boxes. In 1969, a series of massive antiwar folk-song gatherings took place at a plaza outside the Shinjuku Station. The police exploited the traffic law by redefining the plaza as a "passageway," in order to suppress this spontaneously emerging public sphere. In 1970 the first "pedestrian paradises" were realized in Shinjuku and other shopping districts, where hundreds of thousands of pedestrians walked on streets from which all the cars were shut out.

Another modernism constructed in the West, can be seen in the book The Dismantling of Architecture by the architect-theorist Isozaki Arata, who began to question the modern Western-based architectural principles to which Japanese architects subscribed. [2] He talked about ambiguity, the ironic, the ad hoc, and all these concepts we now know as postmodernism's characteristics.

In purely artistic terms, Lee Ufan and the Mono-ha movement are very important to under stand as countermodernism. Lee, a Korean-born philosophy student and painter active in Japan, critiqued Western philosophy in the late 1960s. He wrote that human supremacy had been validated by the power of representation--of making things. But as machines took over that function, as things make things, humans are no longer superior. To deal with that, he said, we must learn to see things as they are, without the objectification of human-imposed representation. The artist's act becomes a conceptual one of "not making."

Kaplan: Is that why the Tokyo section of the exhibition begins with a statement about death?

Tamii: Yes. In addition, Matsuzawa Yutaka's conceptual work My Own Death is a statement against materialism and the civilization brought about by modernization. Also, our space is next to the bookstore, so we needed a cleansing zone.

Geeta Kapur: There are all kinds of recognizable signs of the metropolis in the exhibition "Bombay/Mumbai 1992-2001." [3] Bombay has a very complex cosmopolitan culture. It has had a long industrial history, but is now being deindustrialized, like many metropolises in the world. Therefore, there is a working class that is turning into daily wage labor. There is a large underworld, as in other cities, which is linking up with globalization--primarily through smuggling and real estate. Globalization has allowed an escalated entry of multinational companies with a corresponding growth of the market and middle-class consumerism.