National Art Centre, Tokyo

The Crisis is of Collection and Presentation

Yuu Takehisa, Assistant Curator at Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito visits the recently opened National Art Centre, Tokyo and makes a critique of the inaugural show vis-à-vis the Western Modernism and Postmodernism. She also looks at the politics of funding strategies in the thriving Japanese art scene.

Yuu Takehisa

The National Art Center, Tokyo opened last month, making itself the newest in a series of museums designed by an internationally renowned Japanese architect. But, this one is far more special than its predecessors such as Chichu Museum and Aoyama Museum of Art - it stands out because of a few crucial facts. Firstly, it is funded by the state, the 5th national museum of the country with a gigantic scale of exhibition space, 14,000 m2 as a whole, one of the largest in the country. But, despite the apparently secure looking funding source and its scale, it has got no collection of arts. The spacious four-story building is rather to be hired out for an externally-organised project, particularly a yearly exhibition mounted by authoritarian associations of old-school artists such as Nitten, who pay for a space to put up their own shows. The Center also presents its self-curated shows while showing some touring exhibitions organised in partnership with other public art institutes. Also, its location is specific, built in the midst of the priciest areas in Tokyo where another symbolic building with Mori Art Museum on its top floor nearly hits the sky.

National Art Centre, Tokyo

The inaugural exhibition at the National Art Center, Tokyo,  “Living in the Material World – ‘Things’ in Art of the 20th century and beyond”, aims to explore a relationship between arts and a materialized culture in the 20th century. The curators characterises the century as an era of consumerism fuelled by continuously-developing industrial technology which as its origin derives from Industrial Revolution in the preceding century. To clarify such the intention, the exhibition starts with a still life oil painting by Paul Cezanne as an icon of a new way of observing a mundane object gained by painters at the time and then later developed into fragmented perspectives of capturing an object by Cubist artists such as Pablo Picasso and George Braque. Neither a still life painting by Cezanne nor a Cubist drawing by Picasso is fresh to eyes which have seen a permanent display at a prestigious museum in Europe.

In that sense, the very first impression of the inaugural exhibition at the National Art Center, Tokyo was nothing more than a clichéd textbook-like exhibition of modern arts. But, such an impression is to be quickly cast away at the second room showing Tsune Nakamura’s ‘Still Life’ and Ryuzaburo Umehara’s ‘Still Life’ both in 1916. No doubt the subject matter and the painting technique of these two still life oil paintings owe to French painters such as Cezanne and, for Umehara’s case, Henri Matisse. However, looking at adjacently-placed paintings of the same genre by artists of two different positions – should the French be an original author, the Japanese one being an appropriator – one can in fact argue a difficulty in judging a superiority between the two, even though the originality per se attributes to the former without doubt. In that sense, to interpret modern art today, when postmodern is becoming something of the past, is somewhat tricky, because an evaluation criteria did not remain the same throughout the century – at the end of the postmodern era now, the matter of an originality bear less significance than it did over a century ago.

In the following room, a realistic style of painting a still life is introduced with Japanese miniature paintings. The originality of ink miniature paintings made on silk by artists such as Yujiro Sugita and Sohaku Ito in the 1920’s surely belongs to Far East Asia if not specifically to Japan. It is Hitoshi Seimiya’s oil-on-canvas ‘Still Life’ 1922 that actually presents an example of graceful combination of the technique from Japanese miniature painting and that of European still life masters. In this respect, the exhibition proposes a unique perspective on a relationship between established Western modern arts, a western type of modern arts in Japan, and Japan-origined paintings at the modern time.

Subsequently, the Japanese avant-garde in the 1970s – Mono-ha – is presented along with western counterparts such as Minimalism and Land Art. Mono-ha, ”mono” meaning a thing and object, is an essential part of the exhibition exploring “things” in the last century. In ‘Oneness of Marble’ 1971, Jiro Takamatsu scraped rather brutally a pristine surface of a minimalist rectangular-shaped black marble　and left the scraped small pieces atop, which resonates well with two nearby pieces: the large stone installation by Richard Long (‘Tokyo Stone Line’, 1983) and a steel piece by Richard Serra (‘Horizontal Rectangle to the Floor’, 1981). Also, Lee Ufan’s ‘Relatum-Silence’ – an installation of a natural big stone placed to face a big panel of iron leaning against a wall – is another piece that implies a mutual essence between the epoch-making arts made independently in Japan and the U.S. 

The show is successful in a sense that it overwhelms the visitors with the excessive number of the pieces and exhausts the visitor’s legs toward the end. Yet, the unusual volume of works can metaphorically represent the volume of things flowing in an everyday life within a materialised society today. A greater achievement of the exhibition should be a fact that as an inaugural show the curators introduce a re-interpretation of Europe-oriented idea of modern and contemporary arts by naturally juxtaposing them with their Japanese counterparts. The only regret is that this exhibition is just for temporary – I do wish that at least one national museum in Japan had a collection of this range of works in the quality shown within this exhibition.

The National Art Center, Tokyo is designated to form a so-called Roppongi Art Triangle composed with two other large museums, four-year old Mori Art Museum and a new Suntory Museum of Art due to open next month along with an adjacent design research centre, 21_21 Design Site. Yet, the flowering boom of art scene in the middle of Tokyo does not necessarily assure a bright future to Japan’s contemporary art scene. In fact, under a new law enforced by the former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, a right to run a public museum is no longer sustained within a public domain, instead made open to a private organization/corporate because of Koizumi’s belief that commerce-minded strategy is needed to fix a financial management of public art museums. As a result, many museums in Japan are unable to plan its management or programmes over three year ahead. Also the budget is cut down enough to unstabilize an enrichment or maintenance of a museum collection. These facts should clarify why two of the museums/art centres founded in the pricy neighborhood of Roppongi are owned and funded by a corporate rather than the government, and that even the extravagant-looking National Art Center, Tokyo is designed to maintain itself by space-hiring, rather than by showing its own exhibitions or by establishing a collection as priceless assets for the younger generation.