We can make another future : Japanese art after 1989

35 34 WE CAN MAKE ANOTHER FUTURE: JAPANESE ART AFTER 1989 Lee Ufan / South Korea/Japan b.1936 / With Winds 1990 / Oil on canvas / 227.5 x 182cm / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 1998 with funds from Michael Sidney Myer through and with the assistance of the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation SHADOWS OF THE SUN | REUBEN KEEHAN SHADOWS OF THE SUN REUBEN KEEHAN Shadows of the Sun explores the legacy of Mono-ha and its influence on the art of Heisei Japan. 1 At the outset of the period, space, time and encounter, along with the poetry of materials and the role of humans in the natural world, were central tenets in Japanese art. Their resonances with themes in Asian philosophy fuelled their popularity with Japanese and international audiences alike. The dramatic installations and performances of the post-Mono‑ha tendency operated in dialogue with spatial and architectonic preoccupations in Japanese photography and printmaking, while new discourses emerged in dialogue with evolving cityscapes, rapid advancements in technology and attendant threats of ecological crisis. The Heisei period also saw the rise to global prominence of two senior artists, Lee Ufan and Yayoi Kusama, whose practices elaborated on notions of encounter and infinity in distinctive yet complementary ways. Post-Mono-ha took the achievements of the original group as a starting point, challenging some of its positions and elaborating others. Toshikatsu Endo’s addition of fire to the elemental materials of earth, wood and stone is one example of this development, as is Shigeo Toya’s radical restoration of authorship by chainsawing elaborate carvings into blocks of wood. Kimio Tsuchiya employed residual materials, such as driftwood and ash, adding an existentially symbolic dimension to his minimal assemblages, while Tadashi Kawamata expanded raw media into dramatic architectural interventions, often in urban settings. Tatsuo Miyajima, meanwhile, extended the philosophical and performative aspects of Mono-ha, experimenting with the power of certain disorienting acts — sudden screams in public places, holes knocked through walls and floors — before settling on his trademark LED installations, whose arrangement and conceptual framework belied a clear Mono-ha sensibility. In photography, Tokihiro Sato’s large-scale ‘Breath-graph’ series used long exposures to record the traces of human performance — registered as points of light — without depicting the body of the performer. Similarly, Naoya Hatakeyama became widely known for his photographs of powerful mining blasts, which proposed the genre of landscape as arresting moments of dynamic transformation and of the earth in states of movement, rather than simply representing static topographies. Further human intervention was recorded by Toshio Shibata’s cool depictions of the incongruous building constructions that had more or less covered the Japanese countryside by the 1990s. 2 In a complementary manner, printmaker Tsuguo Yanai became fascinated with the material properties of paper and its origins in plant life, teasing individual fibres into elaborate prints and installations. Artists such as Hiroshi Sugimoto, Rei Naito and Chiharu Shiota paralleled Miyajima’s cool aesthetic in exploring the interplay of artwork and setting. In works which were, in turn, elemental and fragile, they invoked architecture and lighting as perceptual apparatuses and devices for staging experience. Nuanced and poised, such work was sympathetic to the unitary sense of natural and spiritual order expressed by Zen and Shinto philosophies and the meditative aesthetic agenda of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s classic 1933 text In Praise of Shadows . 3 It was equally informed by architectural Modernism and an attention to strategies of display — Sugimoto began his career photographing museum dioramas, ageing picture theatres and empty drive-ins, while Naito would collaborate with architect Ryue Nishizawa to produce the extraordinarily ambient space of the Teshima Art Museum. 4 Indeed, Miyajima’s mesmerising cascades of electronic numerals evoked an emerging, digital sublime, the human experience of technological development, and its powerful rhetoric of transcendence and exponential change. With the threat of climate change looming and the aftermath of the Great Sendai Earthquake of 2011 embedding the terrifying prospect of nuclear Armageddon in daily Japanese life, this digital sublime took on new, more tangible proportions, especially among younger artists. In contrast to Miyajima’s spiritual invocations, the electronic road signs monitoring wind speed in Yoko Asakai’s landscape photographs of Aoyama Prefecture — a region exposed to both extreme weather conditions and, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, nuclear fallout — seem hopelessly ill-equipped to handle emerging realities. If the potential of technology finds its limits in ecological catastrophe, the power of the natural world to inspire awe remains undiminished. That Yayoi Kusama and Lee Ufan’s mature reflections on the infinite currently enjoy global attention suggests that this sensibility extends well beyond Japan to constitute a shared contemporary condition. ENDNOTES 1 For a brief discussion of Mono-ha, see p.20 of this publication. 2 A contemporaneous, albeit vividly partisan, depiction of the environmental effects of the Japanese ‘construction state’, in which stimulus funding is channelled into public works of questionable necessity, is found in Alex Kerr’s passionate Lost Japan , Lonely Planet, Melbourne, 1996; originally published in Japanese as Utsukushiki Nihon no Zanzo ( Last Glimpse of Beautiful Japan ), Shinchosha, Tokyo, 1993. 3 Tanizaki’s study, which argued for the subtlety, nuance and atmosphere of classical oriental aesthetics in the face of an encroaching European modernity, which the author characterised by the glare of electric light, was translated into English in 1977; a recent paperback edition was published by Vintage, London, in 2001. In 1998, with characteristic transcultural insight, Sugimoto took the essay’s title as the name of a series of photographs based on Gerhard Richter’s candle paintings. 4 A project of Benesse Art Site Naoshima, the museum is located on the island of Teshima in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, and is notable for unifying art and architecture into a single installation.