We can make another future : Japanese art after 1989

29 28 WE CAN MAKE ANOTHER FUTURE: JAPANESE ART AFTER 1989 Makoto Aida / Japan b.1965 / Beautiful Flag (War Picture Returns) 1995 / Pair of two-panel sliding screens, hinges, charcoal, self-made paint from Japanese glue, acrylic / 169 x 169cm (each screen) / Photograph: Kei Miyajima / Image courtesy: Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo / © The artist CAN WE MAKE ANOTHER PAST? | SHIHOKO IIDA As the phrase ‘We can make another future’ suggests, thinking about alternative possibilities for the future is a creative act that helps us look forward as we live for tomorrow. When applied specifically to Japan, we imply that the country has lost its optimistic outlook. But when exactly did this happen? And why did Japan take on this sense of emergency, almost? Though not a pessimist by any means, no matter how objectively I look at the country, it has to be said that overblown clichés — which in the past have promoted cultural tourism and shown Japan in a dazzling light — have proved to be superficial and fruitless in 2014. 1 The artist’s act of imagining/creating a different future is essentially a radical one and, surely, in every era, is grounded in a spirit of criticism of the society and the everyday to which they bear witness. Here I shall discuss, in response to the statement ‘We can make another future’ whether, in fact, we can ‘make another past’. It is a question designed to liberate artists and their work from the art historical templates, discourses and illusions that have been constructed outside Japan around contemporary Japanese art. It is an attempt to construct another context, without descending into a romantic and naive glorification of the past, aimed at sharing an affirmative outlook for the future, and saying: ‘Yes, we can make another future’. From 2009 to 2011, I was a visiting curator at the Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art’s (QAGOMA) Australian Centre of Asia Pacific Art (ACAPA), studying the 20-year history of the Gallery’s Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) series of exhibitions, particularly the developments in its curatorial contexts. Over these two years, as well as researching the APT, I also had the opportunity to make a detailed study of the Gallery’s contemporary Asian art collection and, in particular, its works by Japanese artists. While contemporary Japanese art gradually became known internationally from the 1960s, through the activities of Fluxus, the Gutai group and Mono-ha, from the beginning, there has been a special focus on acquiring works from the late 1980s for the Gallery’s Collection, due mainly to the APT, which was initiated in 1993. APTs were presented alongside an acquisitions policy with its sights set on contemporaneity, and together they have contributed to the formation of what is now one of the world’s most significant contemporary Asian art collections. This background had a bearing on my research, as did the concept for this exhibition, which was already under development during my time at the Gallery. Thus, being asked to contribute to this publication is a great honour. During my time at QAGOMA, as I surveyed the collection, there was something constantly niggling at me and it prompted me to ask, ‘Can we make another past?’. The artistic styles of each era, or the connections with widely- recognised international artists, and the contextualising of artists revolving around these notions are registered in the Collection as the authentic history, or the norm, and thus become history. Although acknowledging that authentic histories and norms are worth constructing in their own right, it is also worth asking: these represent an authentic history or norm according to whom? Obviously, the answer is: ‘according to the Gallery’. Contextualising a different culture in one’s own country is the precise reason, and purpose, for the act of acquisition. At the same time, the Gallery is, of course, aware that the definitions touted within contemporary art discourses created by art museums are not immovable. 2 Attempting to release works from the constraints of the discourse of contemporary Japanese art, as contextualised by the Gallery in Australia, and to focus on their autonomy and individuality is, as I understand it, the curator Reuben Keehan’s precise intention with ‘We can make another future’, as he endeavours to create multiple layers of dialogue with the works in the exhibition. This also means layering history via compound perspectives and suggesting possibilities for reconfiguration. In effect, this essay presents one of those layers. Let us organise our assumptions in accordance with the three frameworks of the exhibition: 1 Mono-ha is generated in the 1960s against a backdrop of various postwar avant-garde movements, 3 along with the post‑Mono-ha artists who are the inheritors of Mono-ha. 2 The 1990s sees the rise of Neo Pop, exemplified by Kodai Nakahara, Takashi Murakami and Kenji Yanobe. In the 2000s, courtesy of Murakami’s concept of ‘Superflat’ 4 and critic Midori Matsui’s Micropop, 5 Japanese art from the postwar era to the present is placed in the context of its relationship with the West. 3 Then, from 2010, amid an increase in works addressing social and political concerns — in particular, bodily expression and performative practice by artists themselves, as if to revisit the avant-garde practice of the postwar period — artists once again take on a vital role in critiquing the shaping of Japan’s cultural identity. Focusing mainly on the ‘missing links’ falling outside this structure, let us now consider the possibility of another framework. Since my time at the Gallery, I have frequently discussed with Keehan the ‘missing links’ in the Gallery’s contemporary Japanese collection, citing artists such as Makoto Aida, Dumb Type, Kodai Nakahara and Miwa Yanagi. Kodai Nakahara, in particular, belongs to the generation following the Mono-ha artists Lee Ufan, CAN WE MAKE ANOTHER PAST? SHIHOKO IIDA