We can make another future : Japanese art after 1989

25 24 WE CAN MAKE ANOTHER FUTURE: JAPANESE ART AFTER 1989 museum, a ‘bubble-era’ mainstay, had come to an end. MOT had managed to establish a regular domestic survey in the form of its ‘MOT Annual’ series in 1999, which the new private Mori Art Museum complemented with its triennial ‘Roppongi Crossing’ exhibitions from 2003. At this time, the Japanese art world effectively internalised the process of internationalisation, shifting its focus from traditional centres to its relationship with Asia and providing diversified exhibition platforms for artists. The emergence of specialist bilingual publications and online platforms made the Japanese art world more accessible, while three large-scale events operating on distinctive models — the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial (established in 1999), the Echigo–Tsumari Art Triennial (2000) and the Yokohama Triennale (2001) — enabled concentrated, domestic opportunities for Japanese artists to work alongside their international peers. Meanwhile, the Japan Foundation shifted its attention to the immediate geographic region, initiating a series of exchange‑based curatorial projects and focused exhibitions in Australia, China, Indonesia, India, Thailand and South Korea. These factors combined to ensure a diversified, if not yet entirely stable, infrastructure for Japanese contemporary art. Internationally, Japanese art and artists were circulating more widely and more freely than ever before. Yayoi Kusama, whose contribution to the New York Avant-garde between 1957 and 1972 became a subject of historical fascination in the 1990s, emerged as one of the best-known figures of contemporary art’s increasing public acceptance in the twenty-first century. The sleek, digital sublime of the likes of Tatsuo Miyajima and Hiroshi Sugimoto became a fixture of the global museum circuit, while the notion of Japan as the quintessential postmodern society fuelled the popularity of the Neo Pop of Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara and ‘futuristic fashion plate’ Mariko Mori. 16 With their fortunes tied to fiscal policy, domestic institutions fared less positively. MOT’s acquisition budget was restored to modest levels in 2005. In 2007, the National Art Center opened in a spectacular building on the site of the US military base in Roppongi in Tokyo. With no collection, its vast exhibition space would host touring exhibitions, projects produced by the corporate sector, and exhibitions by Japan’s powerful amateur art associations. The global financial crisis and change of government at the 2009 elections further diminished the modest gains of the previous decade, with the new cabinet flagging massive cuts to the Japan Foundation and the Agency for Cultural Affairs. Naturally, art and culture attracted diminished funding once again following the profound human and economic toll of the events of March 2011. AFTER THE QUAKE Artists were among the first to respond to the devastation of 3/11, organising fundraisers, assisting with relief efforts and developing programs to provide some sense of purpose to ravaged communities. They also featured prominently in protest movements that arose as the scope of the Fukushima nuclear crisis came to light, and actively questioned the widespread use of nuclear power in a seismically-active country like Japan. As demonstrations grew in number and scale, Japanese society became more overtly politicised than it had since the messy dissolution of the New Left in the 1970s. 17 Hiroki Azuma commented: ‘I have never seen Japanese people thinking about and discussing “the public” this much’. 18 In this context, Japanese art underwent a significant shift, becoming directly engaged with the public sphere. The modest economic revival of the early 2000s and the steady work undertaken by dealers, during what one gallerist has called ‘the patient years’, 19 had resulted in the development of a market‑friendly brand of art, unassuming in scale and tone. Characterised as the era was by the erosion of Japan’s proud and longstanding social contract, such work conveyed a sense of deeper personal malaise — critic Midori Matsui would point to Yoshitomo Nara, with his cartoonish drawings of cute, delinquent children, as a key precursor. Following the earthquake and tsunami disaster, this frustration began to be manifested outwardly, exceeding the personal to embrace the social. Chim↑Pom’s KI‑AI 100 2011 is emblematic of this shift. With increasingly socially-engaged artists — Yoko Asakai, Sachiko Kazama, Meiro Koizumi, Hiroharu Mori, Yoshinori Niwa and Motoyuki Shitamichi — more visible at an institutional and commercial level than ever before, it is possible to identify a sociopolitical shift in Japanese art. Certainly, with the selection of Koki Tanaka’s affable, quotidian Conceptualism to represent Japan at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), there has been a shift away from the exotic visual epitomised by Takashi Murakami and younger practitioners such as Tabaimo, whose 54th Venice Biennale (2011) presentation preceded Tanaka’s. Yet, these strands of art operate contemporaneously. Murakami’s Neo Pop innovations of the 1990s were as critical of the prevailing culture as Yukinori Yanagi’s deconstructions of the Japanese flag, while Sachiko Kazama’s apocalyptic woodblock prints, Kohei Nawa’s glass-bead encrusted deer and Teppei Kaneuji’s pop-formalist assemblages are all attempts to process the confusing, and occasionally terrifying, textures of the information age. The recent political and social turn in Japanese art is a lens through which we may view the various tendencies in the contemporary practice of the Heisei period, expressed here by three key groupings within the Gallery’s Collection over the last 25 years. The context for this art production has been the challenge of working with a public infrastructure developed with more lavish resources in mind, and the development of commercial and alternative sectors as a result of innovation and entrepreneurship. These practices are evidence of the deep well of critical thought and creativity Japanese culture has demonstrated in the period of its greatest engagement with the world and, most pertinently, its neighbours. Collectively, these artists present a vision of the future altogether different to — and arguably more sustainable than — that from which Japan emerged at the dawn of a new era in 1989. WE CAN MAKE ANOTHER FUTURE | REUBEN KEEHAN Tsuyoshi Ozawa / Japan b.1965 / Soy sauce print: Altamira Cave + Marcel Duchamp (from ‘Soy sauce print’ series) 2006 / Screen print (printed with soy sauce), ed. 10/10 / 140 x 33.5cm / Gift of Mr Hidenori Ota through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2007