The art weed flourishes: while the art world has suffered during Japan's protracted recession, the Tokyo scene remains lively in both galleries and museums - Report From Tokyo

Art in America, Feb, 2002 by Janet Koplos

Those who remember the pain of the early '90s in New York's art world should multiply those bad years times four to get a feel for the long, gloomy decade Japanese artists, dealers and curators have experienced, with four official recessions and not much better in between. Unemployment is now at a postwar high, manufacturing sales and profits have collapsed, and the economy is actually shrinking. Not surprisingly, the art world has taken a lot of hits, including drastic cuts in government financial support for art institutions.

But art must be a weed that can flourish under the worst of conditions: adversity seems to invigorate the Tokyo art scene. A recent visit turned up a rash of interesting shows, from modest to elaborate, familiar to far-out. Tokyo's art fair, NICAF, was in full swing in Rafael Vinoly's dramatic, boat-shaped Tokyo Forum, and some exhibitions may have been targeted for that audience, just as many New York galleries show their most successful artists during the November and May auctions. The fair, an Asian-dominated gathering that included a few prominent Western galleries, was a lively place of networking. But the best shows were in the regular venues, which seemed propelled by sheer determination, despite the economic climate.

Hope

One of the more interesting approaches to the difficult times was a show mounted by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOT). "The Gift of Hope" seemed to catch qualities I saw repeatedly on this trip: an engagement with the real (whether people, objects or substances), a frank admission of present difficulties, and a pervasive intensity of focus and energy that indeed gives hope.

This major exhibition of 12 Japanese and foreign (mostly Asian) artists occupied all of MOT's temporary-exhibition galleries. It included many large installations and stressed both the entertaining and participatory aspects of art. It was another valiant effort by the curators to attract audiences to the unfavorable location in which the Tokyo prefectural government built the museum, far from other museums and galleries and a long, unpleasant trek from the nearest subway station.

Thematic shows in Japan, from a Western perspective, tend to be almost weirdly broad and disparate. This one felt relatively coherent, with most of the works having to do with people and problems, and the show as a whole conveying a world of teeming populations and energetic labors.

Beat Streuli offered slides in his familiar street-portrait style, eight projectors splashing slides of Western scenes on three screens while, nearby, six projectors focused on another two screens with exclusively Japanese shots. These seemed to be dispassionate observations that depend for their appeal on people's instinctive attraction to faces.

This soft, agreeable exhibition opener was immediately topped by Kenji Yanobe's Atom Suit Project: Antenna Installation (2000). Occupying a huge gallery were hundreds of toy-size men in diving suits, arranged around one life-size figure, a self-portrait of the artist in a similar suit with the helmet off. He stood on a map of Chernobyl and held a trident that incorporated two lenses (for seeing the future?) as he exhaled a row of little men in protective suits. This is a recapitulation of a famous 13th-century portrait sculpture of a Buddhist priest whose exhalation of tiny images of Amida Buddha was a way of visualizing prayer.

The platform on which the Yanobe figure stood was rimmed with color photos of the artist posing in Chernobyl with children, older women in babushkas, soldiers, or in a church or an abandoned house. Some of the toy figures on the floor were wired to batteries and emitted faint beeps and chirps every few minutes--canaries in a mine? Chernobyl, which has been one of Yanobe's ongoing subjects for a decade, was probably more deeply alarming to the Japanese than to Americans because the predominance of nuclear reactors in Japan, an earthquake-prone country, makes safety a constant concern.

Next in order, and probably the high point of the show, was the painting installation of Oscar Satio Oiwa (b. 1965), a Brazilian artist. His big paintings are fun-house rides of shifting scale, subject and viewpoint. A wall painting, Arca de Noe 2, is a portrait of a city (it could be Japanese) that centers on a big canal lock in which a trash barge floats. At the far end, the lock resembles a bathtub. At one side, an apartment building is the same size as a garden gate. From moment to moment the viewer feels like Alice in Wonderland, too large or too small. Arca de Noe 3 also involves scale shifts: on a beach are the skeletal remains of a rowboat full of gallon cans, hoses and other junk. But nearer the water are tiny umbrellas and beach towels. The message seems pretty clear, that we are dallying, heedless of looming disaster.

Asian Dragon depicts a refinery on the waterfront with two-story shacks, a row of railroad hopper cars and a skyline of factory windows, along with rivulets of acid rain that dissolve parts of the image into pale greens and blues and watery brown and black. There are no signs of life. And as if the next step of a progression, in a floor painting at the center of the room, we looked down at an edge of a desert island with a rudimentary shelter and a pot of food cooking on a campfire, with one plate and one spoon at the ready. Oiwa's vision is grim, yet the details, effects and an underlying sly wit, ending with this suggestion of a castaway discovering his own resourcefulness, made so compelling a narrative that it was hard to leave this room.