We can make another future : Japanese art after 1989

31 30 WE CAN MAKE ANOTHER FUTURE: JAPANESE ART AFTER 1989 Dumb Type / Japan est. 1984 / Installation view of Voyages 2002 / Photograph: Kazuo Fukunaga / Image courtesy: Dumb Type / © The artists challenging the established presumptions of the concept of art as well as its institutionalisation’. 11 In recent years, Ozawa has joined Chen Shaoxiong and Gimhongsok to form Xijing Men, an artist group from the fictional city-state of Xijing that uses humour to intervene in matters of state and history. If we were to view history as the vertical axis, what currently motivates artists of this type is not only the vertical axis, but the geopolitical relationships along the horizontal axis. Indeed, most of the artists forming the third framework of this exhibition, such as Yasumasa Morimura, Yukinori Yanagi, Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Tomoko Yoneda, Tadasu Takamine and Meiro Koizumi, view Japan’s modern and contemporary eras through the lens of the country’s relations with its Asian neighbours. The debt that Japan has put off paying since World War Two lends the work of today’s artists an acute sense of urgency. Okinawan Yuken Teruya is an artist grounded in an awareness of issues arising out of the postwar relationship between Okinawa, Japan and the United States, and can also be included in this third framework. Moreover, the performance-based works of Morimura, Takamine and Koizumi frequently re-read situations peculiar to a particular period and — by allowing characters to expound on an ideology or repeat/escalate an action — generate psychological conflicts and contradictions between model and performer (or within the characters themselves) to shake the viewer emotionally. Tetsumi Kudo is one postwar avant-garde artist who quite early on was giving critical expression to the political nature of matters of national and personal identity. In terms of the post- 1980 framework, multimedia performance group Dumb Type cannot be omitted, as a kind of parental presence fostering the political sensibilities of contemporary artists like Tadasu Takamine. Paintings by Makoto Aida, as well as Miwa Yanagi’s drama projects of recent years, which are set in the Taisho (1912–26) and Showa (1926–89) eras, also count among the aforementioned missing links. Taking war paintings as motifs or appropriating nihonga painting created during the course of Japan’s modernisation, Aida offers an ironic look at the divisions and ambiguities of Japanese art since the Meiji era (1868–1912). Aida is one artist still not sufficiently collected or contextualised in art institutions outside Japan, but he is an important artist, as consciously provocative as Murakami, who grasps intrinsically that, for maximum critical effect, the impetus must come from within. In the 1990s, Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara dominated the domestic and overseas art markets, but if we add Aida to the third framework as a single, overextending branch, it brings us to the next generation of up-and-coming artists, like Chim↑Pom. By continuing to send out multiple branches like those described here — without losing sight of international frameworks — we acquire different critical viewpoints of the past. We can see ‘contemporary Japanese art within the modern and contemporary history of the Asia Pacific region’, from which we can then perhaps imagine and create another future. Nobuo Sekine, Kishio Suga, Susumu Koshimizu and Shigeo Toya, and is viewed as a significant artist bridging these Mono-ha exponents and Neo Pop. This is the Nakahara who took part in the sculpture exhibition ‘20th Middelheim Biennale – Japan’ 6 (Antwerp, 1989), curated by Toshiaki Minemura, fully conscious of his connection to the Mono‑ha legacy. Despite also garnering attention for his inclusion in the ‘Aperto’ of the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, for some time now he has been viewed as having largely disappeared from the art scene’s centrestage. In recent years, he has spoken of the shock of seeing ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1989), curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, and ‘Open Mind (Closed Circuits)’ (Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent, 1989), curated by Jan Hoet: ‘All that responsibility I had taken on myself with regard to context, suddenly I thought no, I don’t need any of that’. 7 ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ reflected the ideology of multiculturalism and was a benchmark international exhibition that put into practice the decentralising later advocated by curator Okwui Enwezor, among others. 8 At the same time, it exposed the degree to which contemporary art has received patronage within a system concentrated firmly in the West. Nakahara’s attitude nullifies any attempt to classify and map artistic practice by measuring how divorced artists are from the Western-focused value criteria of contemporary art. Even if his attitude was unselfconscious, in terms of outcome it turned out to be decentralisation of a radical sort. The reappraisal of such practitioners may also be seen in the recent interest in Shinro Ohtake. Indications that Takashi Murakami chose the path of contemporary art after seeing a solo show of Ohtake’s in 1987, during his doctoral studies at the Tokyo University of the Arts, also suggest that the auxiliary line leading to Murakami is drawn not only from Nakahara, but Ohtake too. 9 One may also observe the rhythmic, compilation-like technique of Ohtake’s distinctive collages and assemblage works, and his deconstruction and creation of value systems by collecting and rearranging rubbish and found objects, in young artists who emphasise equivalence and relationality and the abstraction of things, such as Koki Tanaka, Taro Izumi and Teppei Kaneuji. In recent years, Tanaka has earned significant international acclaim for video installations that suggest multiple possibilities from a single phenomenon, while Kaneuji’s works, while retaining a pop aspect, at their foundation actualise a concept of the void with its origins in Mono-ha. Then again, despite being profoundly impressed by Ohtake and having identified in his work the influence of Nakahara’s early efforts using figurines, 10 Murakami set off in the opposite direction, strategically seeking success in the West; that is, he chose the path of a classical, orthodox artist in the Western context. Nakahara’s influence can also be divined, indirectly, in the core cohort of artists emblematic of the 1990s, such as Shimabuku. The work of artists with notable international careers, such as Shimabuku and Tsuyoshi Ozawa, is dominated by the concepts of sharing with others and the creation of community. As curator Hou Hanru points out, like Rirkrit Tiravanija, Surasi Kusolwong, Michael Lin and Cai Guo-Qiang, ‘This tendency is radically CAN WE MAKE ANOTHER PAST? | SHIHOKO IIDA