The first week of April, shortly after we sent "ART iT" No. 19 (out April 17) off to the printer, rang in what will be a crazy "month of the arts" in Tokyo. "New Tokyo Contemporaries", "101 TOKYO Contemporary Art Fair", "The Goto Memorial Prize", "Art Award Tokyo", "Art Fair Tokyo (AFT)" … In addition to sets of related events and parties each of these fairs comes with, a number of galleries in Kiyosumi celebrated their opening in a collective party on the weekend. Later this month, there will be exhibitions of Tsubaki-kai (Shiota Chiharu, Hakamata Kyotaro, Maruyama Naofumi and Yanagi Miwa at Shiseido Gallery), Wolfgang Tillmans (at Wako Works of Art), Konoike Tomoko (at Mizuma Art Gallery) and others, followed by the "History in the Making：A Retrospective of the Turner Prize" show at Mori Art Museum. Events outside Tokyo include the Ron Mueck exhibition at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, the "Inujima Project: Industrial Remains Preservation Site", and the opening of the Arts Towada museum. Following March with a variety of performing arts-related events, for the realm of art, April is, as T.S. Eliot wrote as early as 1922, "the cruellest month".
In terms of both visitors and turnover, last year AFT showed an explosive development, and while the turnover this year remained with approximately 1,000 million yen at the same level, with a total of 43,000 people the number of visitors outstripped last year’s 32,000 significantly (figures according to the organizers). Personally, I found the solo exhibitions at Mizuma Art Gallery (Konoike Tomoko) and Yamamoto Gendai (Yanobe Kenji) the most exciting, as both featured large-scale, so-called "museum piece" kinds of works. While that’s certainly also due to the recent art boom, such exhibitions reflect well the AFT’s maturing. I don't know details, but I heard that there were in fact inquiries from museums. "Maturing" can of course be the first stage of "aging", so I'd like to add that a "boom" is not necessarily only a positive phenomenon.
101 was held for the first time, and formed a nice contrast with the already established AFT. It was limited to contemporary art, presented by mostly young galleries (28 in total), about half of which were based outside Japan. There even was a prize for artists. Various, almost daily related events and parties, together with the large number of overseas galleries, gave the event a bit of the glamorous feel of art fairs in Europe and America. Without a doubt, this is primarily an achievement of one of the Principal Advisors, Johnnie Walker. There has been various talk and gossip about this original of the Tokyo art scene, but be that as it may, in my view his eagerness and braveness has to be honored. Nonetheless, what definitely needs improvement is the management, including PR work and communication. As someone who was involved in the selection of galleries and award nominees, I suggest you work on this for future events, Johnnie!
Another thing that I liked about 101 was the point that, even though it was a commercial fair, it included joint public displays of art archives and artworks by the non-profit organizations "PILOT LONDON" and "Art Autonomy Network (AAN)". PILOT is a UK-based group that supports artists by collecting and sometimes exhibiting portfolios of artists that are not affiliated with commercial galleries. Curators from different countries suggest artists of their choice, whose portfolios are then publicly shown at events like the Venice Biennale or Frieze Art Fair. This time the organization joined forces with Kato Emiko from the Yokohama-based AAN, who provided a number of young Japanese artists' portfolios and works to be displayed at 101. Among the most remarkable pieces included were Mizukawa Chiharu’s efforts discussing the relationship between artworks, art fairs and the art market.
Mizukawa keeps producing artworks using her own, used bath water. This time she presented two-dimensional works drawn with invisible paint materials, and several "jewelry" like objects cut out of solidified jelly. Displayed in glass showcases, these beautifully glittering objects looked like real jewels, but after a certain period of time, they melted and ultimately vanished due to temperature and humidity. This is an aspect they share with the naphthalene works of Miyanaga Aiko, which I previously wrote about in "Out of Tokyo 167". As these works do in fact disappear after a while, they probably don't qualify as sellable pieces of art, but it was interesting to see such works exhibited next to other (sellable) works at an art fair.
It surely is a sign of the monstrosity and greediness of the genre called contemporary art that these kinds of artworks can actually appear on the market. When asking the panelists of a symposium on "The Social Life of Art Works " that happened to be staged at the same venue for their opinions, Sumitomo Fumihiko, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, suggested that, "as long as there’s footage of an artwork or something with the artist’s signature on it, it will surely sell. Contemporary art is a business that’s not to be trifled with." So I guess people will even buy Mizukawa’s works if only they get a receipt or other evidence of the purchase…
I don't think that "sellability" was a factor for the organizers of 101 when asking Mizukawa to participate, but the fact that they asked PILOT to join suggests that they possibly believed the organization to be helpful for "selling" those pieces indirectly. Considering such politically calculating aspects, this business surely isn't one to be trifled with. "If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't be alive. If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive." This statement from Philip Marlowe certainly goes for the art world as well. It must be hard, yet at once it would in my view not deserve to live if it wasn't gentle to artists and those supporting them.
Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO