[ photography, installation , video, sculpture, painting ]
--- Curator: Maria Brewinska
Exhibition opening 6.10. 2000 (Friday), 6 p.m.
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| Nobuyoshi
Araki, DUMB TYPE, Goro Hirata, Emiko Kasahara, Tatsuo Miyajima, Mariko Mori,
Yasumasa Morimura, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Yoshihiro Suda, Hiroshi
Sugimoto, Hiroshi Sugito, Miwa Yanagi, Kenji Yanobe [ photography, installation , video, sculpture, painting ] --- Curator: Maria Brewinska Exhibition opening 6.10. 2000 (Friday), 6 p.m. |
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| The Gendai: Japanese Contemporary Art - Between the Body and Space is the first presentation to Poland and to this part of Europe as a whole of such wide a spectre of contemporary Japanese art. The exhibition was prepared by the Centre for Contemporary Art of Warsaw - the Ujazdowski Castle, and, the Japan Foundation, Tokyo. A majority of works displayed date to the nineties. The works have been borrowed for the purpose from the artists or come from the world's best galleries, museums, or private collections. | |
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| Japan may be deemed a context of a strong national culture and a context of alien influence in one; a context of tradition and modernity, a context of co-existence; Japan is images of the world which have not perished entirely. When in 1854, that necklace made of emerald beads - as the country's island chain was named by Feliks Manggha Jasienski - was torn apart and Japan entered into contacts with the world, the country became liable to influences of alien culture, one of the Western Europe and the United States of America then entering the age of modernity. The system which had isolated Japan from the rest of the world, collapsed only under the pressure of outward forces: namely, of a flotilla led by Captain Matthew Perry who had been made responsible by the U.S. Government for breaking the country's isolation lasting until then for over two centuries. In 1853, four ships entered the Uraga Bay and it then became obvious that facing the force, Japan had to open its gate to international trade and enter into political contacts with the remainder of the world. | |
 Yasumasa Morimura |
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| For more than twenty years the world artistic activity has been dominated heavily by the context of the human body, which has increased to become an obsession for some of the artists. In the 20th century our knowledge about the human body and its relations to the world has grown to an unimaginable degree. This is also the most important issue for theoreticians and art critics whose papers are focused on the discourse about, e.g, psychological, physical, feminist and philosophical aspects of the body in the arts, or just a vision of the body in its today's context as well as in the past. The artists of Gendai - Between the Body and Space explore the issues penetrating to the body from different viewpoints. 'The body', as an important issue for contemporary art at the end of 20th century, is strongly featured in their works. | |
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| The
opening of Japan's borders triggered a modernisation trend almost promptly.
Probably in no other country did a transformation process take such a radical
and dynamic turn. It should be borne in mind, however, that the object of
transformation was a country with a rich history and with a contemporary
quality of its own, one where foreign patterns overlapped with the nation's
own tradition. Let us remember that the Japanese had a language and a culture
of their own, a culture about which they have not ceased to boast themselves,
despite any such rapid changes and taking over of elements appearing odd
to their own thinking or customs. The Meiji period (1868-1912) saw an emerging adaptation of Western state administration structural models, and of models of Western social life institutions, technology, science and culture; an adaptation of anything that preconditioned any further changes and rendered Japan even closer, structurally, to the other countries. A period of following Western models has thus opened, a tendency which reached its peak after World War I. The Meiji period commenced therefore the inevitable modernisation of Japan in terms of all domains of the state's functioning. As to the domain of art, this had to do also with assimilating Western models: painting styles and sculpting techniques worked out in Europe, to which the Japanese did not have an access whether in the form of literature or direct experience. (Western-originated art paved its way toward Japan for the first time ever in the 16th century, specifically, to Kyushu island, thanks to a group of Catholic missionaries, who taught the Japanese, among other things, European painting techniques. Persecution of Christians taking place in the 17th century obstructed these first contacts with Western art. Within the period in question, two types of painting emerged as distinct: yoga (Japanese 'Western' art) - a style imitating Western painting, and, nihonga - (Japanese 'Japanese' art), experimenting, at times, with Western 'counterpart' models. Both have become subjects of academic research, though the yoga style has not found common acceptance. In 1876, in Tokyo, the first arts school opened, so-called 'Industrial Art School' (Kobu Bijutsi Gakko), the lecturers being Italian artists. Giovanni Capelletini taught sculpture, Vincenzo Ragusa - architecture, whereas Antonio Fontanezi taught the basics of yoga. The latter has not been granted, however, the status of art. It was appreciated rather in terms of being a mirror ideally reflecting the surrounding reality. The source for aesthetic pleasure was traditional Japanese painting. In 1882, the 'industrial' school was closed off. In 1888 in turn, the Tokyo Academy of Art (Tokyo Bujitsu Gakko) was opened, where yoga painting was introduced as a subject only in 1896. Despite an enthusiasm for Western culture, yoga and other elements proving alien to Japanese culture met with reluctance, if not hostility (as symptoms of culture deemed 'barbaric'). As opposed to imitating the West, Teynsin Okakure and Ernest Fenollosa, an American, advocated continuation and development of traditional Japanese motifs and techniques, fearing that they may vanish entirely. |
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| Following Western institutions, Japan saw the appearance of museums and display salons, giving birth to a constructing wave of museum architecture, to emerge only later. In 1882, the National Museum opened in Tokyo; in 1895, another such in Nara; two years later, also in Kyoto. In 1907, Bunten started its activity, a Japanese salon created after the Paris Salon, a milieu gathering ardent advocates of academism. A response to such an attitude was the activity developed by Nikakai, a sort of Salon of Independent (and rebelling) Artists, set remote, however, from the extravagances of European avant-garde. When Europe has already seen a decline of realism, whereas art took to self-investigation or to the Artist as a medium, in Japan, experiments with realism were ongoing. Until the World War II, the art there developed within a context determined by tradition and yoga painting, which to a considerable extent set limits to artistic quest. A new experience with realism (the easel, frame, canvas and set of colour paints - a completely new technique to the Japanese artists), well-established in Europe as a tradition dating back to several hundreds of years ago, required a longer assimilation period. Experiences connected with avant-garde were pursued, in Japan, past the 'actual' avant-garde period. It was only after the war that the country saw an emergence of artistic groups referring to pre-war tendencies in art, chiefly those targeted at, or against, the art as such. In parallel, Japanese art of the period interfered to an extent with the informel, conceptualism, pop-art, op-art, minimalism, and kineticism. The most recent Japanese art commences with experiences of art groups emerging in the 1950s and 1960s: Gutai, Kyushu-ha, Neo-Dada Organizers, Hi Red Center, and Monoha. | ||
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| Within the recent twenty years, contemporary Japanese art attracted the world's attention due to group exhibitions organised by Western museums, in collaboration with, inter alia, The Japan Foundation. It has also gained a growing importance in its own country. Japan's economic boom of 1980s found a positive reflection not only in economy, but exerted an impact also on a fast development of cultural infrastructure. It was during the recent two decades that in Japan, several museums and galleries of modern and contemporary art emerged (designed by outstanding Japanese artists), aimed at recognising and promoting the native country's output as well as works coming from the Western area of artistic practice. However, Japanese 20th-century art has by today found two paths of occurrence - contemporary achievements, which are decisive about a uniqueness of this art, being not exclusives within the context of the nation's cultural revolution. On the one hand, Japanese art continues artistic tradition commenced in the past ages, whilst on the other, it is getting materialised through a contemporary artistic experience ensuing from the Japanese here-and-now, as well as from the ongoing international cultural transformation. Today, the number of places in Japan where contemporary as well as traditional art is displayed, is enormous compared to other countries of the world. | ||
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| Gendai: Contemporary Japanese Art - Between the Body and Space is an attempt at expressing, in one of the possible perspectives, a most up-to-date image of contemporary Japanese art. The works on display, by thirteen individual artists and one artistic group, prove quite diversified: reflective and conceptual, ascetic and contemplative, humorous and infantile, erotic and sensual, more or less Japanese. They show various aspects of not only Japanese art, but also co-produce an image of Japanese society, touching upon the issues of sense of identity, contemporaneousness, and in the first place, carnality, an aspect so much highlighted in international culture of today.. | |
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| Gendai:
Contemporary Japanese Art - Between the Body and Space presents thus
a dozen-or-so artistic attitudes from Japan, whilst acting as but one of
several possible selections. The selection as to just these artists and
not anyone else has resulted from a series of reasons: Firstly, invited for the purpose have been some Japanese artists whose work should have long ago been presented in this country. Among them are Nobuyoshi Araki (otherwise displayed in Poland beforehand), the Dumb Type Group, Tatsuo Miyajima, Yasumasa Morimura and Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose careers started in 1980s, only to get reinforced in the following decade. Along with these celebrities, selected have been some younger-generation artists whose careers started only in the 1990s: Goro Hirata, Emiko Kasahara, Mariko Mori, Takashi Murakami, Yoshimoto Nara, Yoshihiro Suda, Hiroshi Sugito, Miwa Yanagi, and Kanji Yanobe. As may then be seen, the artists' age is no 'evenly distributed' at all, the younger generation prevailing in terms of quantity. But it was not age that proved the decisive factor behind my selections: each of the artists presented has contributed to the contemporary Japanese art and to its most current image, both in Japan and beyond its borders. Secondly, the display concept is to introduce the Polish viewers into the issue of Japanese arts' 'quality of being contemporary', as rendered by the Japanese term of gendai (meaning 'our contemporary'). Although it might seem that Japan is the art's symbol, or even might be identified with it, it turns out that evoking this very notion, particularly within the context of art, triggers among Japanese critics a great deal of discussion on the roots and tradition of modernity in Japan, as well as on what namely is 'contemporary' and 'Japanese' in today's Japan. This is why the exhibition organisers have attempted at introducing Polish viewers into this unique theoretical problem and cultural phenomenon. The issue is best presented in Gendai: A View from Japan, an essay by Junichi Shioda, curator with the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as in Japan as the Contemporary of Fine Art, a short essay by Sawaragi Noi. The exhibition presents also Japanese artists who appear not to have any problems with 'being contemporary', being self-conscious artists and Japanese people, whereas their strong identities allow them for transcending any division and anxiety to be found among the arts critics' milieus. |
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| Thirdly, in the context of the urgent issue of carnality, chiefly through its appearance in the arts, advertising and the mass-media, an important content-related category behind my selecting the works for the exhibition was 'the body in space'. In an era of 'somatic society', the issues of the body have come to the fore of theoretical consideration. It therefore seems that a view on Japanese art, of its actual representation in the form of 'current' works, gives one an opportunity to look at this art from the view-point of an equally 'current' theoretical issue, the one of body, which does not exist, after all, apart from a space. | |
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The exhibition attempts at making visible the differences in the concept's representations in Japanese art, whereas the accompanying essay by Jean-Luc Nancy, the eminent French philosopher, written exclusively for the exhibition's catalogue, identifies the differences both between the carnality concept in Japan and Europe, as well as their reconciled concurrence - their co-existence, one beside the other. Furthermore, the exhibition has covered a wide array of contemporary Japanese photographic art. Photography is a dominating medium in Japan's artistic practice, thanks to artists of the rank of Nobuyoshi Araki, Yasumasa Morimura, Hiroshi Sugimoto, or Miwa Yanagi. Nobuyoshi Araki is known as a 'photographer of Tokyo', documenting in the massive quantities of pictures what is 'utterly Japanese' about Tokyo, a town expanding like fractals. And so, the town-planning chaos, the dwellers' everyday life, areas of sex-business, sophisticated and/or perverse carnality and eroticism are all portrayed. In his famous series Self-Portrait as Art History and Actresses, on display at CCA, Yasumasa Morimura shows his photographic copies of some best-known works of Western art, in which the author himself impersonates this art's figures/symbols (Mona Lisa, Olympia), or renders them similar to contemporary mass-culture symbols - Western movie stars (Marilyn Monroe, Lisa Minelli, Jodie Foster). Hiroshi Sugimoto, one of highest appreciated Japanese photographic artists, creates works which 'freeze' the phenomena appearing to be timeless on their own. Miwa Yanagi, in turn, represents at CCA a younger generation of Japanese photographic artists. In her output, as is the case with that of Mr. Sugimoto, the dimension of Time gets 'hanged' amidst icy spaces of and fleshes of young women postured like mannequins, inspired by the peculiar behaviour of Japanese department-store assistants. Apart
from photography, Gendai presents several leading installation
artists. Tatsuo Miyajima who represented Japan at the 1999 Venice
Biennial, prepared specially for the CCA event his most recent project
entitled Floating Time, whose concept, as has been the case with
all his works, is based on the spectator's time getting synchronised with
the 'instalment time', as symbolised by the moving digits. Yoshihiro
Suda, the youngest artist displayed, gaining increasing recognition
in Japan and in the West alike, has displayed his small, fragile wooden
sculptures, installed in some 'non-standard' areas of the gallery. Goro
Hirata has made the wax installation. A muffled space of his works
represents, in its flawlessness, an ideal state of the mind and the body.
Mariko Mori is another one to present for the first time her video
and video-installation works (the Venice Biennial of 1997). Similarly
as Takashi Murakami and Yoshimoto Nara, Mori ranks among the young generation
of artists, brought-up among electronic toys and comics and gaining its
maturity during Japan's economic boom period and popular culture expansion,
inspired simultaneously by violent cultural and civilisation changes.
She has won international publicity with her photographic works and films,
in which she has confronted modern technologies and design with traditional
Japanese culture and its symbols. Takashi Murakami, Yoshimoto Nara and
Kenji Yanobe, growing up in a similar, 'technologicised' reality, transform
contemporary pop-culture icons and images of the body created by these
icons. Maria Brewinska The exhibition is complemented by an essay by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and a series of essays by Japanese critics and gallery curators: Junichi Shiody, art critic and curator with the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art; Sawaragi Noi, freelance critic and curator; Midori Matsui, freelance critic; Akiko Kasuya, curator with the National Gallery, Osaka; Taro Amano, curator with the Yokohama Art Museum, and, Yuko Hasegawa, curator with Contemporary Art Museum of Kanazawa (under construction). The texts, all included in the catalogue, concern a variety of contemporary fine arts issues. |
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