We can make another future : Japanese art after 1989

149 CHRONOLOGY | REUBEN KEEHAN 148 WE CAN MAKE ANOTHER FUTURE: JAPANESE ART AFTER 1989 1990 10 MARCH Focusing on preoccupations with nature in Mono-ha and post-Mono-ha art, ‘A Primal Spirit: Ten Contemporary Japanese Sculptors’ opens at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, ahead of a North American tour. 22 MARCH Art Tower Mito in Ibaraki Prefecture opens its doors with the survey exhibition ‘The Game of Manners: Japanese Art in 1990’. 27 MAY Toshikatsu Endo and Saburo Muraoka represent Japan at the 44th Venice Biennale. 1 JUNE Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography is established in Meguro-ku. SEPTEMBER The privately-run, Mario Botta-designed Watari Museum of Contemporary Art (Watari-um) opens its doors in Tokyo’s fashionable Aoyama district. 1 OCTOBER Over ten months, the Japanese stock market sheds almost half its value, nearly US$2 trillion. 24 NOVEMBER ‘Japan Art Today’, a 12-artist survey exhibition organised by the Sezon Museum of Modern Art, opens at the Kulturhuset (Cultural Centre of Stockholm), and tours to three more Scandinavian venues. 1991 18 MAY A preview of ‘Zones of Love: Contemporary Art from Japan’, organised by Australian curator Judy Annear for the newly-established Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (MCA), opens at Touko Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Featuring the work of ten artists and the Dumb Type collective, the exhibition tours to four venues in Australia and New Zealand, before opening at the MCA on 15 July 1992. 4 AUGUST Touko Museum of Contemporary Art closes; intended as a temporary institution, since 1988 it had offered an innovative program, featuring art, cinema, fashion and architecture. NOVEMBER Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA) is established on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands. 1992 14 MARCH The first Nippon International Contemporary Art Fair (NICAF) opens in Yokohama’s new Pacifico Convention Center, with strong participation from high-profile overseas galleries attempting to access the swathe of new Japanese museums in the process of collection-building. 13 JUNE ‘Documenta IX’ opens in Kassel, Germany, featuring Japanese artists Yuji Takeoka, Katsura Funakoshi, Kazuo Katase, Tadashi Kawamata and Hidetoshi Nagasawa. JULY Benesse House, a museum and hotel complex established by philanthropist Soichiro Fukutake and designed by Tadao Ando, opens on the island of Naoshima in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, under the name Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum. 23 OCTOBER Emperor Akihito becomes the first Japanese monarch to visit China; he conveys his deep sorrow at the treatment of the Chinese people during the war and during Japan’s occupation of parts of the country between 1937 and 1945. 1993 4 APRIL Frustrated by a lack of exhibition opportunities, young artists stage ‘Ginburart’, a series of public interventions in Tokyo’s Ginza district, centre of the city’s rental gallery system. 13 JUNE At the 45th Venice Biennale, Yayoi Kusama becomes the first artist to hold a solo exhibition in the Japanese Pavilion, while curator Jeffrey Deitch selects Yukinori Yanagi, Noboru Tsubaki and Kodai Nakahara for ‘Aperto ‘93’. 17 SEPTEMBER The ‘First Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ opens at QAG. Japan is represented by seven artists: Shinro Ohtake, Shigeo Toya, Miho Akioka, Miran Fukuda, Hotaro Koyama, Tokihiro Sato and Tsuguo Yanai. Toya’s contribution, the sculptural installation Woods III 1991–92, enters the Gallery’s Collection, while Yanai gifts two works on paper. 1989 7 JANUARY Emperor Hirohito dies at the age of 87, bringing the Showa era to an end. His fifth child and eldest son, Akihito, receives the succession and the Heisei era begins the following day. 9 FEBRUARY Osamu Tezuka, creator of classics Astro Boy 1951 and Kimba the White Lion 1950, dies at the age of 60. 3 MAY Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art opens its doors; it is the first public museum in the country to focus exclusively on contemporary art. 18 MAY Tatsuo Miyajima and Tatsuo Kawaguchi are among those included in the landmark exhibition ‘Magiciens de la Terre’, at the Centre Pompidou and the Grande Halle Parc de la Villette in Paris. 15 JUNE ‘Against Nature: Japanese Art in the Eighties’ opens at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); the exhibition tours to six venues across the United States over the next two years. 20 SEPTEMBER ‘Japanese Ways, Western Means: Art of the 1980s in Japan’, adapted by the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, from their ‘Art Exciting 89’ project, opens at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG). The exhibition presents a panorama of contemporary Japanese art practices through the work of 42 artists, including Ay-O, Katsura Funakoshi, Tatsuo Kawaguchi, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Ufan, Yasumasa Morimura, Kishio Suga, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Shigeo Toya, Kimio Tsuchiya and Mika Yoshizawa. Works by Morimura, Yoshizawa, Seiko Kawachi and Tadayoshi Nakabayashi are acquired for QAG’s Collection. 27 SEPTEMBER ‘Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective’ opens at the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York, and marks the beginning of a reappraisal in the West — after two decades of near obscurity — of Kusama’s contributions to the international Avant-garde from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. OCTOBER Seibu Art Museum relocates from the twelfth to the ground floor of the Seibu department store in north-west Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district, changing its name to the Sezon Museum of Art. 3 NOVEMBER Yokohama Museum of Art opens to the public as part of a portside redevelopment. 29 DECEMBER The Tokyo Stock Exchange Nikkei index hits an all-time high. CHRONOLOGY Installation view of 20 metre rainbow 1986 by Ay-O and Forest 1986 by Shigeo Toya in ‘Japanese Ways, Western Means: Art of the 1980s in Japan’, Watermall, QAG, 1989 Installation view of Stern with holes 1990 by Shinro Ohtake (foreground), with works by Miho Akioka and Hotaro Koyama, in the ‘First Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’, QAG, 1993 Japanese Ways, Western Means exhibition catalogue, QAG, 1989