Sunrise, Sunset? - the Japanese art scene

Art in America, April, 1999 by Janet Koplos

Japan's troubled economy has unevenly affected the Tokyo art scene; public budgets shrink as new galleries open.

Not so long ago, the Japanese economy was much praised and envied in the West. But it has recently become known as a "bubble" economy, and, like a punctured balloon, it is leaking air and following a dizzyingly erratic course. The bubble's collapse has devastated some parts of the Japanese business world but left others untouched. So the streets of Tokyo are still filled with well-dressed, busy people, one in every four of them clutching a cell phone. The unemployment rate remains relatively low, despite Japan being in the midst of what analysts East and West call its worst recession since its defeat in World War II.

The art world, likewise, still seems a lively place. There are ambitious shows, dazzling displays by young artists, new galleries opening. But other galleries are closing, and museum budgets are facing the ax. There's a kind of "too much bad news" feeling of unease that is reminiscent of New York in the early '90s. Conversations about the effects of the economy are an inevitable aspect of visiting museums and galleries; looking at art and worrying are intertwined.

Museum Travails

Maybe the biggest single loss is the Sezon Museum of Art, which closed on Feb. 15. It was the most eminent of the department-store "museums." A few years ago its parent corporation took the impressive step of moving the museum out of the Seibu Department Store in Tokyo's Ikebukuro district and into its own building nearby. Like the other department-store museums, this one didn't have a collection, but it did have professional curators who organized good-quality exhibitions, and it also brought in guest curators from other museums to do serious modern and contemporary shows. One that sticks in my mind was the "Constructivism" exhibition organized in the late '80s by Tadayasu Sakai, then a curator at the Kamakura Museum of Modern Art and now its director. It was a strong exhibition with exceptional support documentation that any museum would have been proud of. Sezon's closing is explained as part of corporate restructuring, a routine adjustment, perhaps, but its loss will hurt.

The impending closing cast no shadow, however, on a retrospective of the designer Sori Yanagi (b. 1915), which was on view last May. Yanagi may be best known for his simple and graceful two-piece butterfly stool (1954), which was featured in the Philadelphia Museum's exhibition of Japanese design a few years ago and was the only Japanese work in the Pompidou/Guggenheim "Rendezvous" exhibition in New York recently. But he has also designed for a huge range of human needs: dishes and faucets, highway toll plazas, symbolic objects for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, as well as posters and publications for the Japan Folk Crafts Museum, which his father founded and which he directs in addition to continuing his design work. His work has a modernist clarity typically realized in forms that are graceful and lightweight, and often seem lighthearted as well.

Other museums are facing unsettling changes, though not closure. The seven prestigious national museums, now administered under the Ministry of Education's cultural affairs department, are to be cut loose as part of the government's effort to streamline (cutting its 22 ministries to 12 is the target). The museums will be provided with an endowment, but they are expected to begin generating their own operating funds. This is a terrifying prospect because Japanese museums do not have specialized staff positions to deal with public relations or development. Curators usually do their own P.R. Some of the national museums are giving serious thought to different ways to build audiences or--shocking thought--to generate funds by renting museum space for corporate functions, etc. But it's hard to make specific plans as prime ministers come and go and economic pressures keep escalating.

Although not national museums, the Tokyo pre-fectural government's Museum of Contemporary Art (MOT), photography museum and other art institutions are facing the same sorts of problems and l0 percent annual budget cuts. Japanese curators know very well how American museums operate, and with that model in mind MOT has proposed hiring specialists for development tasks. But the government does not look with favor on spending for new positions, of whatever kind. Curators face the possibility of having to build their own fund-raising skills, even though generating money is especially difficult in Japan because there are no tax deductions or other financial incentives for cultural donations. (Tax deductions for cultural philanthropy have been discussed, however, and the Ministry of Finance has made some efforts to gather expert opinion; some insiders are now saying that such a provision is an actual possibility rather than a pipe dream.)

Financial pressures apply to privately funded museums as well. Toshio Hara, director of the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, points out that interest income is down for foundations, curtailing the money available for grants. Other factors that limit giving include the fact that interest on bank accounts is minuscule in Japan, 0.5 percent or lower, while the tax rate on private income goes up to 65 percent, and corporate income taxes are l0 percent higher than in most Western countries, Hara says. The large number of private museums in Japan is explained by the fact that the costs of such museums are deductible as corporate business expenses. Money shapes the cultural landscape in Japan, as elsewhere.