The Japan Times sat down with the artistic director of the Aichi Triennale, the architecture critic and historian Taro Igarashi.
The theme of the triennale is "Awakening — Where are we standing? — Earth, Memory and Resurrection." Why?
I was conscious that the triennale is not a festival for Aichi Prefecture alone, but a festival for the world, so we needed to be conscious of how people from around the world would view it. The disasters of March 2011, are still obviously on everyone's minds, and this is actually the first major international art exhibition planned for an urban venue since those disasters. So it was an obvious choice. We have 76 or so contemporary artists in total and about 20 percent have made works related directly to the disasters.