We can make another future : Japanese art after 1989

17 16 WE CAN MAKE ANOTHER FUTURE: JAPANESE ART AFTER 1989 Masami Teraoka / Japan/United States b.1936 / AIDS Series/Geisha and Ghost Cat 1989/2002 / Aquatint and sugar lift etching, with spit bite and direct gravure on Shimane Sekishu 100% kozo paper / 70 x 50.3cm / Purchased 2005. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund WE CAN MAKE ANOTHER FUTURE | REUBEN KEEHAN In April 2011, the six members of Tokyo guerilla art collective Chim↑Pom improvised a performance while volunteering in the clean-up of the town of Soma, one of dozens of communities in Japan’s Tohoku region devastated by the Great Sendai Earthquake of the previous month. Soma had been lashed by waves over seven metres high in the tsunami triggered by the 9.0 magnitude earthquake, the largest ever recorded to hit Japan. Reaching four kilometres inland, the tsunami left more than 2800 of the town’s population dead, with another 1400 missing. Along with a handful of young locals, Chim↑Pom set up a couple of cheap video cameras, then formed a huddle amid the smashed furniture and building debris scattered around a fishing trawler that had been washed into a row of apartment buildings. After stringing together 100 cheers — shouts of encouragement, anxiety, gallows humour and juvenile verve, with reference to the fallout of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant a mere 50 kilometres to the south — they piled into the back of a truck and drove off. With its peculiarly Japanese humour and sincere hope for collective renewal, the performance is quite disarming. But, arguably, what is most striking about KI-AI 100 (100 cheers) is that it could happen at all. Amid destruction of an almost unimaginable scale, a gaggle of twenty-somethings, half of whom had been directly affected by the disaster, found a way to commemorate, criticise and celebrate, demonstrating powerful resolve to overcome tragedy with hard work, community spirit and, most importantly, laughter. Literary critic Hiroki Azuma remarked a few days after the earthquake: I hear that the foreign media has been reporting with amazement the calmness and moral behavior of the Japanese faced with the disaster. But actually this was a surprise to the Japanese themselves. The Japanese were not used to feeling pride in themselves — two decades of economic stagnation and political cynicism had seen to that. Azuma also stated: But maybe the Japanese people could use the experience of this catastrophe to rebuild a society bound together with a renewed trust. How far can we extend this emotion, temporally and socially? 1 It is this important question that frames the exhibition ‘We can make another future: Japanese art after 1989’, and this publication. As Azuma’s observation implies, the post-1989 period has not been a particularly easy one for Japan. From our present perspective, 2014 marks the 25th anniversary of the accession of Japan’s Emperor Akihito, as well as the 50th anniversary of the first Tokyo Olympics in 1964, which was widely interpreted as signifying Japan’s rehabilitation in the eyes of the international community after decades of war, occupation and reconstruction. The 25 years leading to 1989 are often characterised as a period of extraordinary growth, during which time the country weathered social unrest, two oil shocks and a stock market crash to then go on to challenge even the United States for global economic supremacy. The quarter-century that followed is usually discussed in far less glowing terms, dominated by recession and the uncertainty of the ‘lost decades’, beset by social tensions and culminating in the triple disaster of earthquake–tsunami–nuclear emergency on 11 March 2011. A future that had seemed so certain was but a memory. Yet, this period, known as Heisei according to the Japanese imperial calendar, has been arguably the most culturally significant in the country’s modern history. Japan’s designers and architects are household names, its novelists are some of the world’s most respected, and its cinema continues traditions of innovation and provocation. In the popular arena, Japanese television shows have become global phenomena, and production houses have raised animated feature films to new levels of critical reception, while the exponential development of the worldwide computer gaming industry owes much to the intense competition of Japanese programmers. It was also during this period that the country’s contemporary art became internationalised. Therefore, the Japanese art of the Heisei era also offers a sophisticated reflection and interpretation of the social conditions behind its production and its attendant anxieties. As well as 25 years of Heisei, 2014 also marks 25 years of the Queensland Art Gallery’s public engagement with the contemporary art of Japan, in particular the development of a collection of Japanese art that is contemporaneous with the Heisei era. ‘We can make another future’ is structured around this collection, and the Gallery’s sustained commitment to profiling work by contemporary Japanese artists, beginning with the 1989 survey exhibition ‘Japanese Ways, Western Means: Art of the 1980s in Japan’ and continuing through the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art series of exhibitions, begun in 1993. ‘We can make another future’ is organised into three broad sections reflecting tendencies in Heisei era art, as represented within the Gallery’s specific institutional history — the legacy of Mono-ha and the emergence of an aesthetic of the digital sublime; the rich field of consumer culture and responses to dominant modes of representation; and the concurrence of critiques of national and sexual identity, which, through figuration and performance, attest to the central role of the human body in contemporary experience. WE CAN MAKE ANOTHER FUTURE REUBEN KEEHAN