One of the highlights of the Golden Week holiday this year is the Philip Morris Art Award 2000 Exhibition, on display April 24-May 7 at Yebisu Garden Place. The show presents a refreshingly diverse grouping of 100 contemporary works of art including paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures and installations, as well as video art, computer graphics and media art.

This year's competition screened the works of 1,072 entrants to select 100 finalists. The seven prize winners, to be announced April 26, will each receive a 2 million yen cash award along with the opportunity to debut at New York University's Grey Gallery in February 2001, in the exhibit "The First Steps: Emerging Artists from Japan."

"After the bubble economy in Japan burst," says Kazuhiko Hachiya, winner of the award in 1998, "the Japanese contemporary-art market became inactive, and museums provided fewer and fewer forums for contemporary artists to show their artwork."

In such an environment, this competition provides crucial support for contemporary art in Japan. The Philip Morris Art Award provides exposure for its finalists through exhibitions, press conferences and symposiums. It also provides financial support and opportunities for young contemporary artists to debut their work.

For Hachiya, the opportunity to display his work was particularly advantageous. His installation "Seeing Is Believing" was shown at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University in 1999. At a symposium of NYU's Department for Art and Art Professions, he introduced his Post Pet e-mail software, the first graphic e-mail program in Japan to use artificially created cartoon characters to deliver and retrieve messages. The Post Pet characters, which "live" in the computer, do not return when e-mail is sent out until the respondent writes back.

Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Gallery in New York, points out that the Philip Morris Art Award provides a showcase for young, new and talented artists in Japan. Entries are limited to artists residing in Japan who are between the ages of 20 and 40, without any restrictions on the type of visual art submitted. Applicants come from diverse backgrounds, and include students, amateur artists, professionals and art teachers. The screening and selection of finalists is conducted by panels of art professionals from around the world, including Japan, the United States, Germany, Italy, South Korea and Singapore.

A notable feature of this year's competition is the number of entrants whose work combines traditional Japanese art with a contemporary edge. Taro Yamamoto exemplifies this "neo-Japanese" approach. Born in 1974 and currently studying in the Japanese painting division at Kyoto University of Art and Design, his work parodies traditional Japanese painting by the inclusion of American commercial logos.

Yamamoto's entry, titled "K-Pine Tree with Old Man" and painted with traditional Japanese mineral pigments, is a four-panel gold-leaf folding screen displaying a classic Yamato-e pine tree; behind the tree is Kentucky Fried Chicken icon Colonel Sanders, enclosed in a giant red "rising sun" circle.

The most interesting aspect of this painting is the integration of symbols of mass consumption into an otherwise traditionally composed Japanese folding-screen motif. Such juxtaposition has a very different effect from Pop Art, which used commercial goods as its medium.

"I want to show the humorous nature of contemporary Japanese society through my paintings," Yamamoto comments. "This work is to help reaffirm my identity, and reestablish my connection with traditional culture. I live in Kyoto, a traditional city where Japanese culture has been condensed. Yet at the same time we lead a very urban lifestyle. Just as in cities in other countries, we drive cars and buy groceries at supermarkets."

Clearly enamored of the melding of East and West in contemporary culture, the artist provokes us to consider the meaning of traditional motifs in today's world.

Yuji Nakamoto's photographs revisit Japanese notions of content in emptiness and voids. Nakamoto, a 31-year-old graduate of the Art College of Hiroshima, remembers the strong impression formed by his elementary school trip to Kyoto. His "Take Off Series: Three Temples" photos present three blank silhouettes, side by side, of the Kinkakuji (Golden Pavilion) in Kyoto.

The empty silhouette is startling, and, in the artist's words, serves to "heighten the aura and our perception of the landscape surrounding the famous structure." The absence of the pavilion intensifies our awareness of what Nakamoto terms the "decaying existence" of the structure as a mutable entity. By enclosing the photos in a wood frame and "keeping the image from flowing out," the artist explains, he has "attached reality to the blank space within." The result is both haunting and powerful.

Yebisu Garden Place's 1,960-sq.-meter exhibition space allows for the display of large installations, including the mesmerizing work titled"Utsusemi" by Motoi Yamamoto, a crumbling brick staircase or wall made of 3 tons of salt bricks.

Yamamoto, who was born in 1977 and studied painting at Kanazawa College of Art, has been using salt as a medium for artistic expression for the last three years because he likes its texture and plasticity. The use of salt is also an important means of purification in traditional Japanese rites.

Yamamoto, who considers each grain of salt to be a fragment of life, forms his bricks in a microwave oven. The stairs represent the historical process that envelops our lives and is repeated through the cycle of birth and death. Commenting on the installation, Yamamoto writes "I would like to express my belief in the cosmic nature of art, which represents the transience and ephemeral nature of our lives. In realizing this ephemerality, we learn that life is a process of approaching death."

The installation title "Utsusemi" literally means "the land of the living," a term with deep, Buddhist-tinged echoes of the transitory, meaningless world in which we live.

The incredible breadth of the Philip Morris Art Award exhibition and the opportunity to observe the latest works of Japanese contemporary artists make this a show not to be missed. The visitor will come away with a renewed sense of the vitality of Japanese art today.