We can make another future : Japanese art after 1989

103 102 WE CAN MAKE ANOTHER FUTURE: JAPANESE ART AFTER 1989 THE NATIONAL BODY | REUBEN KEEHAN THE NATIONAL BODY REUBEN KEEHAN The 1990s saw a proliferation of hitherto marginalised perspectives — queer, feminist, postcolonial — which challenged normative definitions of Japanese identity persistent throughout the period of postwar reconstruction. With the emergence of performance, installation and photography as significant forms of artistic practice, as well as the return of figuration, these discourses were frequently expressed through references to the body. Here, the body is irreducibly political, a site of negotiation of social distinctions between classes, sexes, cultures and nations. It is less a register of humanism than a cipher for horror and desire, assertions of gender and sexuality, metaphors of city and polity, shot through with pathos and humour. Such practices would continue in the 2000s as Japan endured a second decade of uncertainty, finding new relevance amid the widespread social questioning that followed the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis of March 2011. They provide both a critical lens through which to view the more difficult questions of the Heisei period, and suggest ways to resolve them. For some time, the erotic print tradition of shunga provided inspiration to senior figures as diverse as Nobuyoshi Araki, Ay-O and Masami Teraoka, who, throughout the Heisei period, recontextualised it within the photo-essay, pop imagery, satirical woodcuts and paintings. Feminist positions advanced by artists like Emiko Kasahara, Michiko Kon and Miwa Yanagi — through imagery recalling anxieties about human carnality and unfixed sexuality — had their precedents in the pioneering work and critical resurgence of Yayoi Kusama. Having presided over orgiastic ‘happenings’ that channelled personal neuroses through a ‘free love’ ethos, Kusama infused the work of her late period with suggestive organic forms, at the same time as exploring transgressive sexuality in her poetry and novels. Made possible by the supportive context of the Kansai New Wave, Kyoto-based experimental theatre troupe Dumb Type developed a scintillating hybrid of performance, media, dance and sound, through which they became prominent figures in AIDS activism, confronting social and medical questions head‑on in their major work S/N 1994. Fellow Kansai artist Yasumasa Morimura — one of the most internationally successful artists of the period — developed an expansive, absorbing oeuvre that proposed the artist’s own body as a cipher for a racial, cultural and sexual identity that was at once confused and transgressive, while identity itself was both embodied and performed. By the late 1990s, complex propositions were beginning to emerge from the Tokyo milieu that had produced the successful Neo Pop of Takashi Murakami, Masato Nakamura and Yoshitomo Nara. Makoto Aida, Tsuyoshi Ozawa and Shigeaki Iwai, among others, were as heavily influenced by pop imagery as their contemporaries, but they added a significant social dimension. Aida exaggerated national neuroses and desires in extraordinary tableaux abounding in darkly humorous sexual and violent imagery, from harakiri schoolgirls to mounds of dead salarymen. Ozawa and Iwai developed forms of ‘consultation art’, in parallel to the ‘relational aesthetics’ and ‘social practice’ of European and American artists, offering playful insights into national identity and the foibles of mistranslation. Japanese nationalism, resurgent in the wake of Hirohito’s death on 7 January 1989, was symbolically critiqued in Yukinori Yanagi’s series of visual puns on the Hinomaru flag and the imperial seal, which he extended to the flags of all nations through his iconic ant farm installations. East Asian identity was complicated in the work of Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba — his multinational heritage and education has seen him engage freely with the symbolism, narratives and entangled histories of Japan, Vietnam and the United States. History and the broader Asia Pacific region have also provided rich material for the photographic work of Tomoko Yoneda, who has inflected the critical landscape tradition developed by Tokihiro Sato, Toshio Shibata and Naoya Hatakeyama with the ghosts of Japanese imperialism. Similar preoccupations figure strongly in the performance and video work of Meiro Koizumi, and the sensitive, multidisciplinary practice of Dumb Type alumnus Tadasu Takamine. Social protest returned as a viable mode of community expression in the late 2000s, becoming a major form of public discourse amid the outrage following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In this context, the political dimension of Japanese art shifted beyond the Micropop of the personal to once again embrace the social. As the Heisei period reached its first quarter-century, artistic subjectivity had become self-aware, with artists feeling compelled to address public issues or otherwise create and present their work in the public sphere. As the elaborate woodcuts of artist–activist Sachiko Kazama and the approach of the radical Chim↑Pom show, this tendency has been accompanied by the reclamation of the history of critical art-making in Japan and a search for new ways to deploy it. Michiko Kon / Japan b.1955 / Self portrait #3 1989 / Gelatin silver photograph / 51 x 40.8cm / Purchased 1996