Reorienting: Japan Rediscovers Asia

Art in America, Oct, 1999 by Ann Wilson Lloyd

A museum and a triennial, both inaugurated last spring, mark a new Japanese interest in the rest of Asia.

The Asian Art Museum in the Japanese city of Fukuoka opened last spring with the inauguration of an ambitious 21-country Asian Art Triennale. Japan has for some time focused its attentions and desires on modern and contemporary Western art; interest in Asia is still uncommon. This new periodic survey and this new institution--Japan's first contemporary museum to look exclusively to Asia--are consequences of philosophical forces seeking to amend that preference.

The Asian Art Museum began operations with a ready-made collection of more than 600 works accrued mostly from a series of four increasingly ambitious Asian art exhibitions which were presented at Fukuoka's fine-art museum, starting in 1979(1) These exhibitions gave birth to both the Triennale and the new museum. The curator who organized them, Ushiroshoji Masahiro (Japanese names in this article are given surname first), is now chief curator of the Asian museum.

Ushiroshoji finds himself with a rambunctious offspring and few guidelines for its future, but that was his aim all along. "We want to raise questions about museums and exhibition models in Asia, in terms of the increasing Westernization and modernization of formerly homogeneous societies," he says.(2) "The Asian Art Museum is not intended to supply answers but questions. I am hoping it will be a huge question mark, like: What is Asia? What is Asian art? When there is no museum like this, these questions are not asked."

Fukuoka is an appropriate site for the unfolding of this vision. The city is the progressive urban center of Kyushu, the southwesternmost of Japan's four main islands. Kyushu is the closest point to Korea and China and has for centuries been the gateway for foreign influence. It was here that mid-16th-century Portuguese and Dutch vessels breached Japan's isolation from Europe and set up trading outposts. Even before that, much of Japan's imported and adapted culture, such as Buddhism, writing and certain forms of architecture and garden design, had arrived through Kyushu's port cities from India, China and Korea.

Still, according to Ushiroshoji and staff curator Kuroda Raiji, the existence of an Asian art museum is paradoxical in a country that has so strongly embraced Western culture in this century. Both the museum and the Triennale are full of intentional contradictions which are reflections of modern Japan, Ushiroshoji says. Kuroda is looking for an audience "not polluted by the idea that modernist Western art [equals] contemporary." He maintains that the time has come for an Asian museum--and triennial--because many Asian countries have achieved enough prosperity and development for artists to propose their own ways of being contemporary. These ways sometimes appear similar to Western practices yet are different from them, he notes.

In preparing for the Triennale, Kuroda says, "We decided we do not have to compare Asian art with Western art, but we could still find something very positive in each country." Determined to avoid what they describe as colonialist curatorial methods whereby guest countries are visited and works chosen that reflect the host country's cultural standards, Ushiroshoji and Kuroda exhaustively collaborated with art professionals from each nation. Twenty-one coordinators and 20 cocurators are listed in the catalogue as the team responsible for choosing the Triennale's 53 artists.(3) While this ensured that no single vision held sway, Ushiroshoji reined things in with a loose theme of "Communication--Channels for Hope," triggered by concerns, relayed by Asian artists in previous exhibitions, about the rapid erosion of homogeneous communities and indigenous culture.

Given the curators' philosophy, it's not surprising that the Triennale demonstrated disconcerting shifts. On the one hand, there were savvy, internationally recognized artists from China, Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea and Japan, who have been shown in numerous Asian and Western exhibitions(4) and who complement their often high-tech works with activism and performance, and/or employ irony, a critical stance and other avant-garde strategies. On the other hand there were artists and artisans from countries such as Nepal, Lao PDR (Laos) and Bhutan, who showed illustrative, fantasy-inspired folk-style paintings and prints and traditional hand-carved artifacts. These disjunctions, mixing art works of widely differing intent, were reminders of the disparities in Asia today.

The theme of communication and hope worked about as well here as such open-ended themes do anywhere, with some works carrying hopeful messages while others were cynical, critical, funny, vague or stridently antithematic. Compared with Zai Kuning's choreographic performance during the opening [see sidebar], the rest of the exhibition unfolded sedately. Many of the works on view, however, were auxiliary to scheduled performances and audience-participatory artist residencies, some of which may have been equally dramatic. In April, Rirkrit Tiravanija (Thailand/U.S.) set up a yatai (one of the portable food stalls that unfold in downtown Fukuoka every afternoon and vanish by dawn) and served a hybrid soup of Thai tom yam mixed with local Hakata ramen.