We can make another future : Japanese art after 1989

23 22 WE CAN MAKE ANOTHER FUTURE: JAPANESE ART AFTER 1989 Tsuyoshi Ozawa / Japan b.1965 / Seafood hotpot/Beijing (from ‘Vegetable weapon’ series) 2002 / Type C photograph, unique edition / 157 x 114.1cm / Purchased 2005 with funds from John Potter and Roz MacAllan through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation A NEW ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE On 19 March 1995, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT), opened in Kiba Park in the city’s east as the largest space for the display of contemporary art in Japan. Operated by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, MOT was intended as a ‘comprehensive art centre’ modelled on the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and drew its collection from the excellent holdings of post-1945 art developed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, located in Ueno. Its inaugural exhibition was the survey ‘Art in Japan Today: 1985– 1995’, featuring substantial contributions by 18 leading artists. The very next day, cult Aum Shinrikyo perpetrated simultaneous sarin gas attacks across Tokyo’s subway networks during morning rush hour, leaving 13 people dead and 50 with critical — and lifelong — injuries. Coming as it did two months after the 6.8 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Kobe that had killed 6434, left 300 000 homeless and caused US$100 billion in damage, the attack compounded a growing sense of unease in Japanese society. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of museums in Japan jumped from 534 to 827, the vast majority planned and designed at the peak of the ‘bubble’. 13 In the same period, combined operating budgets were halved; in some cases, museums were using programming money just to keep the lights on. MOT was not immune from this austerity; at the beginning of the 2000–01 fiscal year, its parent organisation, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, froze the museum’s acquisition budget and required it to finance its exhibitions through ticket revenue. 14 A direct consequence of this climate was the deliberate decision on the part of artists to leverage Japanese art’s growing international appeal to make their practices sustainable, a tendency led by Takashi Murakami. Already curious about the possibilities created by mistranslation, in the second half of the 1990s, Murakami set about both creating a transnational retail and production base and exploiting errors in interpretation and fetishisms of the exotic at the very level of content — by embracing the figure of the otaku , at once socially marginal and commercially significant 15 — ultimately achieving significant commercial autonomy. Alternative but complementary strategies were explored by Masato Nakamura’s command N collective, the overlapping Group 1965, and the Kyoto-based Dumb Type, all of whom experimented with collaborative organisation, community engagement and strategies for sustainability outside established venues. Created to recognise the role of volunteer groups in filling the void left by an inadequate government response to the Kobe earthquake, the ‘NPO Law’, differentiating non-profit organisations from government bodies and commercial enterprises, saw the growth of small-to-medium arts entities. Many non-profits opened during this period, typically combining exhibitions with artist residencies and educational and publishing activities, making the most of limited budgets. At this time, positive signs also emerged from the corporate sector with the opening of significant private museums. Models were shifting — with the closure of the Isetan Museum in 2002, the heyday of the Japanese department store COSMOPOLITANISM, THE MARKET AND GINBURART A major breakthrough occurred when curator Fumio Nanjo was invited onto the jury for the ‘Aperto’ exhibition at the 43rd Venice Biennale in 1988. Also responsible for selecting artists from Australia, South Korea and the west coast of the United States, Nanjo included five Japanese artists in the exhibition, which made overnight stars of Tatsuo Miyajima and Yasumasa Morimura. 8 Capitalising on this success, the Japan Foundation, flush with ‘bubble-era’ funding, organised or otherwise supported numerous international exhibitions of Japanese contemporary art, touring to major institutions in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand from 1989 to 1993. 9 With the financial ‘bubble’ at its outrageous peak, tough tax laws saw investors turning to the international art market to park their liquidity, bidding extravagant sums on important works of European and American Modernism and making international headlines in the process. 10 The market for contemporary art was more restrained, but nevertheless buoyant, as a number of foreign galleries sought to capitalise on the proliferation of museums throughout Japan, resulting in the creation of the Nippon International Contemporary Art Fair (NICAF) in 1992, the first major event of its type in Asia. Also in 1992, non-profit Sagacho Exhibit Space began to share the former rice store it had occupied in downtown Tokyo since 1983 with a series of commercial galleries in a cotenancy arrangement that would become a familiar strategy for Tokyo’s dispersed urban geography and capricious real estate market. 11 Despite these developments, young artists felt increasingly frustrated by a lack of exhibition opportunities. With the notable exception of Sagacho Exhibit Space and a handful of receptive dealers, there were few options outside the rental system, which tended to be prohibitively expensive and appealed to an extremely limited audience. On 4 April 1993, a group of recent graduates led by Masato Nakamura staged a series of actions in Tokyo’s Ginza district, home to the city’s largest concentration of rental galleries. The project, entitled ‘Ginburart’, a play on the newly-coined ginbura , meaning ‘to wander in Ginza’, included contributions by future luminaries Makoto Aida, Takashi Murakami, Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Shigeaki Iwai, Parco Kinoshita, Ujino Muneteru, Min Nishihara, Myeong Eun Shin and others. Inspired by the work of 1960s avant-gardists Hi Red Center and the 1980s Kansai New Wave, ‘Ginburart’ and similar events signalled the arrival of a new generation possessed of both art historical awareness and entrepreneurial spirit. 12 This eagerness to take control of the systems of exhibiting and marketing art would prove vital as the recession began to take hold. WE CAN MAKE ANOTHER FUTURE | REUBEN KEEHAN