Reorienting: Japan Rediscovers Asia

Art in America, Oct, 1999 by Ann Wilson Lloyd

Museum and Mall

The spacious and airy Asian Art Museum, designed by the Nikken Sekkei architectural firm (which also did the new Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts in the city of Nagoya), occupies the top two floors of an elegant new riverside shopping, hotel and theater complex called the Hakata Riverain. This flow-through mix of consumerism and high culture was lively on the opening weekend. The museum was thronged with visitors, many carrying shopping bags from boutiques below. An ali-Asian art museum being underpinned by a shopping center full of mostly Western boutiques is a contradiction embraced by the museum curators, who believe it makes the art experience more memorable.

The museum's spaces are wide open but warm and welcoming. Chief architect Murata Takuma used a mellow Indian sandstone for the entrance walls and a dark, teaklike wood flooring from Australia for the lobby and connecting public-sculpture lounge, where a cafe and multimedia art library are tucked into opposite corners. These public areas are accessible without admission fees. Together with the galleries, artists' studios, auditorium and offices, they add up to a museum of about 105,000 square feet.

At the Riverain's quayside street level, a sparkling new Shinto shrine is flanked by a replicated Parisian sidewalk cafe. Inside, the first six floors contain Super Brand City, a mall of high-end designer shops; next are two floors of restaurants serving Asian and European cuisine. Linking this multicultural consumer paradise to the museum is a soaring five-story, riverside atrium that includes a performance stage.

Sited throughout Riverain are 15 works of public art by artists from Japan, Korea, China, India, Taiwan and the Philippines. Selected by Tokyo-based curator Nanjo Fumio, the pieces are not part of the museum's collection. Dragon Boat by Cai Guo Qiang, a large, carved wooden dragon dangling festive red lanterns, is tucked up under the two-story portico of the Hakata Theater and is strikingly visible from the street. Other works--an inlaid floor tile, a bundle of fake columns, a bright blue spiral sculpture perched atop a building corner--relate to the architecture or resemble corporate logos, and disappear into an already busy visual environment. Seven of the works are located in the spectacular atrium garden, the most interesting of which is a small mound carpeted with real grass and studded with low, flat, marble markers. Titled Asian's Garden-Forum, it is the work of Mei Dean-E of Taiwan. The markers are engraved with nature-related words in 10 Asian languages. A large tree at the top of the mound, fake but very believable-looking, acts as an ironic foil, though it's unclear if the tree is landscaping or part of the art. During the opening festivities, which included a Scottish bagpipe player and a Japanese swing band, people used the markers as convenient stadium-type seating.

The museum's opening events were pan-Asian. A thrilling music and dance performance called Ombak Hitam (a Malay term for the Kuroshio, or Japan Current) was led by Saito Tetsu of Japan, with participants from Japan, Korea and Singapore. A throbbing, mesmerizing mixture of sound was played on European contrabass, Japanese koto and traditional Korean percussion, and interpreted by weird and wonderful avant-garde shaman- and Sufi-inspired dancers choreographed by Singapore artist and performer Zai Kuning. One wonders what the shopping-bag-toting art-innocents who wandered into this performance thought about the earthy gestures of nearly naked dancers prancing across a stage floor bristling with upright daikon (giant radishes); the raw, plucked chickens being flung about and dangled from dancers' teeth; and the frenzied finale during which performers attacked chicken carcasses and heaps of cabbage leaves with cleavers. Too bad Rirkrit Tiravanija was not scheduled to arrive until later; he could have swept it all up into a giant wok and served a genuine dish of fusion cuisine.