We can make another future : Japanese art after 1989

21 20 WE CAN MAKE ANOTHER FUTURE: JAPANESE ART AFTER 1989 Lee Ufan / South Korea/Japan b.1936 / Correspondance 2001 / Oil on canvas / 182 x 227cm / Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2002 To some degree, this process had been a long time coming, given Japan’s celebrated propensity for adopting and domesticating foreign culture. The very notion of art most influential in Japan was a product of the country’s encounter with the West during the Meiji restoration of the 1860s and 1870s. The term for fine art — bijutsu — was coined to facilitate Japan’s participation in the beaux-arts category of the 1873 Vienna Exposition, while art education and the major categories of painting — nihonga (Japanese-style painting) and yoga (Western-style painting) — were significantly influenced by the work of American educator Ernest Fenollosa, who helped to found the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and the Tokyo Imperial Museum in the 1880s. In the 1920s, the scene was enlivened by the radical Mavo group, who introduced the concept of zen’ei (the Avant-garde) alongside their new ways of working, while Surrealism became a major thread in Japanese art both before and after World War Two. In the 1950s and 1960s, art journals and newspapers kept Japanese artists up to date with major art developments internationally, particularly in the United States, which was then in its critical ascendency. During this period, the Kansai-based artists of the Gutai group came under the patronage of the French critic Michel Tapié, who introduced them into the broader international tendency of Art Informel, while a number of Japanese artists sought their fortunes in Europe and the United States, among them Shusaku Arakawa, On Kawara, Yayoi Kusama, Tadaaki Kuwayama, Ay-O, Yoko Ono and Mieko Shiomi. Domestically, an inventive, irreverent Avant-garde flourished, albeit more often outside art institutions than within them. In 1972, the Japan Foundation was created as an arm of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a mission to promote Japanese culture overseas. By the mid 1980s, the organisation was in a position to lend substantial support to the burgeoning field of research into Japanese Modernism, resulting in the landmark exhibitions ‘Reconstructions: Avant-Garde Art in Japan 1945–1965’ at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, in 1985, and the immense ‘Japon des Avant-Gardes: 1910–1970’ at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 1986. Apart from establishing a genealogy of Japanese avant-gardism that persists to this day, the two exhibitions were remarkable for their distinct curatorial approaches. The curator of ‘Reconstructions’, Kazu Kaido, placed the art firmly within a sociohistorical context, describing artistic developments as part of a broader process of postwar reconstruction. In contrast, the Centre Pompidou exhibition, though more interdisciplinary in approach, was criticised as culturally colonialist, portraying the Japanese Avant-garde as a succession of nihilistic variants on European innovations. 5 In fact, in theory and practice, Japanese contemporary art had already been through a process of deconstructing its own underlying assumptions during a prodigiously inventive period in the 1960s and 1970s. This had resulted in the emergence of a new term, gendai bijutsu (contemporary art), defined in partisan terms by the critic Miyakawa Atsushi as that which ‘reflects the urgency of today’. 6 In Mono-ha (the school of things), and in the groups Bikyoto (Artists Joint Struggle) and Provoke — successors to the anarchic collectives of the 1960s — gendai bijutsu had philosophically rigorous exemplars that explicitly rejected the trappings of Western Modernism. This was part of a broader anti-Americanism that had emerged from the Japanese Left in the wake of postwar occupation and during the Cold War. Despite their often pronounced differences, these groups and others collectively formulated critiques of artistic subjectivity and aesthetic autonomy, as well as concepts of authorship, originality and objective truth that paralleled — but did not depend on — the achievements of minimal, conceptual and performance art elsewhere. Mono-ha was particularly influential, embodying a definitive break with identifiably Western models of art-making in favour of the pursuit of artistic ‘Asian-ness’. Predominantly operating between 1968 and 1973, Mono-ha centred on a Tokyo-based group made up of artist–theorists Lee Ufan and Kishio Suga, veteran avant‑gardist Jiro Takamatsu, his former assistant Nobuo Sekine — whose cylindrical excavation of dirt Phase – Mother Earth 1968 Lee credited with giving birth to the movement — and other artists including Koji Enokura, Katsuhiko Narita and Katsuro Yoshida. The Mono-ha artists drew on critiques of European philosophy’s elevation of the self to question the very possibility of creation, shifting their emphasis away from transforming objects to orchestrating relationships between them. The group therefore eschewed ideas of abstraction and representation in favour of questions of presence and encounter. Because of a tendency to work in open space with raw materials, Mono-ha came to embody a turn to the natural world that was framed as indigenously Japanese, embracing the country’s agrarian heritage and discarding the artifice of industrial culture and modernity, which had been historically imposed by the West. Mono-ha created possibilities for Japanese practitioners that crucially did not depend on external paradigms for legitimacy. Its authority was such that expansions and critiques of Mono‑ha positions, collectively known as post-Mono-ha, became the dominant tendency in Japanese art until the early 1990s, inflecting the work of Tadashi Kawamata, Shigeo Toya and Kimio Tsuchiya, and with a discernible legacy in experiments with space and time by Tatsuo Miyajima, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Rei Naito. Meanwhile, the privileging of process and site over medium specificity enabled experiments in installation and the use of cultural objects as raw materials in 1980s Kansai New Wave 7 and 1990s Tokyo Neo Pop. The more sympathetic critical environment enabled by the Mono-ha artists and their peers was complemented by growing receptiveness among domestic institutions that had been historically hostile to contemporary art. This situation was assisted by the multitude of exhibition spaces, both public and private, that opened throughout the 1970s. By 1980, the number of galleries in Tokyo had increased dramatically, the majority of them rental spaces accommodating booming numbers of art graduates, but also appealing to leading contemporary artists in search of curatorial independence. WE CAN MAKE ANOTHER FUTURE | REUBEN KEEHAN