Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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Although the sixteen featured artists were heralded by the Japan Society
press release as new wave, about a third of them are mid-career artists
who have worked contemporaneously with Takashi Murakami, now age
fifty, and have more or less established reputations in Japan and overseas.2
American reviews amplified this misinformation, lumping all of the artists
as Japans new breed or merely a new generation.3 Contrary to their
assumptions, paintings by Makoto Aida (b. 1965), Yamaguchi Akira
(b. 1969; he uses the Japanese order for his name) and Hisashi Tenmyouya
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earthquake in Japan on March 11, when Japan Society became one of the
first American institutions to raise funds for the relief effort, the exhibition
drew unprecedented attention from the press. It was inevitable that most
journalists reception of the show became colored through the lens of the
multiple disasters. Holland Cotter of The New York Times saw a mood
of anxiety pervading the work in the exhibition, continuing, No one,
of course, could have known that the shows images of material fragility
and decay would end up being seen in the light of real-life disaster.5
The Washington Post found a deeper portent in the aftermath of natural
disasters and ensuing unsteadiness as the world follows updates from the
Fukushima nuclear plant. The review concluded that the exhibitions rejection of Japans obsession with Pikachu and giggly Lolitas seems almost
inconsequential now.6 It is true that those disasters have already impacted
Japanese society on a fundamental level, and its art may never be the same.
In a totally unexpected manner, the superficially cheerful and cute may give
way to an era of socially committed artists, now that many are participating
in relief efforts. Still, David Elliott seems prescient when he writes that
the anxieties about the force and control of nature are matched within the
Japanese imagination by feelings of frustration, impotence, and foreboding.
In a densely urbanized, highly stratified society situated in the heart of an
earthquake zone, the fear that the worst could easily happen lies at the back
of many minds (p. 33).
Fig. 2. Makoto Aida. Ash Color
Mountains. 200910. Acrylic on canvas.
300 700 cm. Taguchi Art Collection.
Photo: Kei Miyajima, courtesy Mizuma
Art Gallery. Copyright Makoto Aida
These few issues aside, the exhibition and catalogue have done an excellent job of presenting previously lesser-known Japanese artists to an
American audience. Because it opened just one week after the catastrophic
Ash Color Mountains required of Aida the largest number of drawings ever
done in his life, and is a companion piece to Aidas controversial painting
Juicer Mixer (2001), not included in the show, which depicts numerous
naked female bodies being mixed in a gigantic blenderan homage to
the monumental 1943 painting of entwined Japanese and American dead
soldiers Final Fighting on Attu by Tsuguharu Fujita (Lonard Foujita).7 Ash
Color Mountains can be seen as a contemporary version of a war painting,
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No work in the exhibition fits a dark mood more than Aidas magnum
opus, his mural-size painting of ten by twenty-three feet, Ash Color
Mountains (fig. 2). Seen from ten or more feet away, it appears to be a
traditional landscape of elegantly sloped mountains in Yamato-e style.
Closer, those mountains are comprised of stacks of corpses of businessmen
buried with office detritus, such as computers, desks and plastic plants.
They immediately remind Japanese viewers of the so-called Dream Island,
the euphemistic nickname for an island in Tokyo Bay made of waste
landfill, and where a radioactive ship was moored in the late fifties. Aida
began the painting in Beijing in 2009, but could not complete it in time
for his 2010 solo show there, and was finally able to do so for this New York
exhibition. When touring the exhibition with the gallery director, Joe Earle,
weeks in advance of the exhibition, the artist told us he had added some
surprises for the viewer, such as Pixars Wall-E character and Waldo of the
popular childrens illustrated book, Wheres Waldo? series. They are hard to
findalmost inside jokes. Although the curator and American journalists
have assumed the men of Ash Color Mountains to be Japanese salarymen,
a close examination yields details such as blond hair and various skin colors
suggesting an issue broader than Japan.
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REINVENTIONS OF NIHONGA
Painting dominated the exhibition throughout the first two galleries. The
works of Yamaguchi Akira (b. 1969), Hisashi Tenmyouya (b. 1966) and
Manabu Ikeda (b. 1973)all stars of Tokyos Mizuma Galleryimpress
the viewer with impossibly intricate details, and are drawn in their own
contemporary reinventions of Nihonga, modern Japanese painting in a
traditional mode. None of them studied Nihonga, and they use oil and
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which the double portraits of the artist are linked by a blood vein, Shiotas
work literally creates a dialogue between the dress, the human surrogate
and the virtual body in video. Although some viewers may at first find
the reference derivative, Shiotas installation partly stems from her recent
treatment for cancer.
At the turn into the third gallery, an inset rectangle opposite the interior
garden, the atmosphere changed drastically with Dialogue with Absence by
Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972) (fig. 6), a chilling installation of a white wedding
dress, connected to pumps that squirt a red, bloodlike liquid through
surgical tubing. At the 2001 Yokohama Triennale, Shiota had presented five
giant, mud-drenched dresses hung from the ceiling, being washed-down
by a shower at the top. In Dialogue, the white dress takes on a sort of
human life. The video monitor on an adjacent wall showed an unclothed
Shiota lying on the floor, breathing with surgical tubes surrounding her,
which one may see as a comment on the fragility of human existence in
the contrast between the absent physical body in the room and the virtual
presence on the screen. Reminiscent of Frida Kahlos Two Fridas (1939), in
The eeriness in Shiotas work is intensified with the deformed Noh masks
of Motohiko Odani (b. 1972) and the stuffed deer studded with glass balls
of Kohei Nawa (b. 1975), spectacularly lit in the center of the next room
(fig. 7a,b). Both works allude to a perversion or destruction of nature using
quintessential symbols of Japanese culture, the theater mask and sacred
Shinto deer, here encased in a skin of differently sized clear glass jewels. It
is hard not to be reminded of Damien Hirsts formaldehyde animals, but
Nawas point is the ever-changing membrane and the fragility of existence
rather than shock value. Although their deformity is alarming, there was
also a breathtaking beauty in this fourth gallery, realized with Tomoko
Shioyasus (b. 1981) floor-to-ceiling Vortex, a thin plasticized paper scrim
made of intricate cut-outsa traditional art techniquelit to create mesmerizing shadow whirls on the wall and floor. Approximately fifty small,
color photographs by Rinko Kawauchi (b. 1972) that are lyrical observations
of life and death in everyday vignettes offered a quiet, contemplative space,
regrettably dominated by the adjacent screen and patterns.
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Notes
Fig. 8. Kumi Machida. Relation. 2006.
Blue and brown ink, mineral pigments
and other pigments on kumohada linen
paper. 181.5 343 cm. Courtesy BIGI
Co., Ltd.
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