20th century AD

Art in America, July, 1993 by Janet Koplos

The Japanese contemporary art scene seemed surprisingly vital last fall, despite dealers' laments that the collapse of Japan's "bubble economy" was hurting everyone. Most galleries remain in business. The explanation, probably, is not that the art economy is so great but that it never was. Tokyo didn't have as far to fall as New York and the impact didn't hurt as much.

It seemed apparent, though, that money was coming into the art world from somewhere: in public and private venues, artists--even very young artists--were showing elaborately fabricated and large-scale works. A few years ago no one would have had a sufficiently large studio, to say nothing of an adequate income, to produce this kind of work, and gallery stipends were unknown. But circumstances were clearly different for the four-artist show at Rontgen Kunst Institut in Tokyo's Omori neighborhood. Despite the official-sounding title, this venue is no relation to the Goethe Institute. It is subtitled "von Katsuya Ikeuchi Galerie AG" and is in fact a commercial gallery. Director Tsutomu Ikeuchi, son of the owner, explains that Tokyo has too many places with English names, so he decided to use German.

The surprises began with the gallery's front door: at the top of an unusual diamond-shaped set of steps, a fluted metal accordion-fold automatic door popped open. That set a tone of sauciness that also came across in a group exhibition, titled "Anomaly" (yes, in English) and curated by a hot young critic, Noi Sawaragi. Kodai Nakahara, 32, renowned for his impudence and for a sculpture he made of 40,000 Lego blocks, here showed a spherical, white-painted metal "isolation tank" about 10 feet tall. The joke going around was that it was a self-portrait by the very successful young artist: smooth on the outside, dark on the inside, and inflated. Nakahara also showed some of the gear from an earlier performance in which he walked around outdoors wearing over his shoulders a harness and aluminum frame on which were mounted multiple cameras that gave him high-tech compound eyes but blocked his forward vision.

In the Rontgen show Takashi Murakami showed a cryptic installation titled Sea Breeze Project. He painted one gallery wall pink and another chartreuse, then pulled in a big trailer fitted with motorized rolling shades which lifted to reveal two rings of floodlights that intensified those wall colors. For the opening, he hired disco dancers to perform with hula hoops on a tiered platform.

On the gallery's second floor, Kenji Yanobe showed Grand House Go! Go! Go!, an astonishing almost-life-size pseudo-locomotive on continuous treads (like an earthmoving machine), that contained in its front "bay" a three-eyed rocket that looked ready to blast off. Gabin Ito's works included My First Chainsaw (For Boys), in which the blade emerged from an oversize rubber ducky, and a similar tool for girls that was shaped like a miniature tunnel-of-love swan boat embellished with a big red heart. His most spectacular piece, however, was a self-portrait, a Frankensteinish figure 7 or 8 feet tall, made of hundreds of clumps of dehydrated Chinese noodles--the quantity he estimates that he ate in a 10-year period.

The feeling that boyish energy was barely being held within constructive channels was similar in "Art Scene of the 1990s" at a train-station-shopping-center exhibition space in Osaka called City Hall, but the works there were more often complex installations than single big objects as at Rontgen. The senior citizen of the City Hall exhibition was Hajime Ikegaya, 37, who for most of the last decade made installations of tangled cables and lights and Y-shaped electrical "pigtails" (like jumper cables) that he titled "Ant Hill" and meant as a metaphor for human social organization. Ikegaya's installation here--a spotlighted shack and potted plant--seemed fairly restrained compared with exuberant and provocative arrangements produced by younger artists.

At one extreme was the low-tech installation of a group called Refirendomu. Consisting of wooden freight pallets, Apple computer boxes, sleeping bags, whiskey bottles, color crayons, shoes and socks, popcorn, coins, tea, apples and lots of text mounted on the wall, it seemed intended to be socially relevant, to suggest guerrilla outposts or the makeshift shelters of the homeless. But a certain naivete made it suggest instead a college dorm room. Some other installations, likewise, were engaging in detail without quite making a point. Hitoshi Kanamura, on the other hand, presented two slickly mysterious and impressively large boxes. One was a glass vitrine with wheels on the top and bottom. The other, absurdly titled Running Refrigerator, consisted of three huge white lacquered boxes linked by flexible red vinyl expansion joints, set on a length of railroad track that ran across the gallery floor on a bed of wood and gravel.

The scale of these two was not quite matched by the offering of the most famous among the artists at City Hall, Yukinori Yanagi. He showed his corner piece that, by means of an arrangement of red and silver toy robots and mirrors, creates the image of Japan's "Rising Sun" wartime flag [see A.i.A., Sept. '91]. But Yanagi is certainly a leader of the expensive-and-expansive direction among the young artists. That fact was better illustrated by his solo show at the blue-chip Fuji Television Gallery in Tokyo.