The Toyota Municipal Museum has become the first institution in Japan to invite Georges Adeagbo, an award-winning West African artist, to create a site-specific installation, which is open to the public now until Sept. 2.

Born in 1942 in Cotonou, Benin, Adeagbo developed his aesthetic grammar far from the art world. He never met artists nor visited exhibitions while studying law and business administration in France in the late 1960s. Upon his return to Cotonou, he refused to accept the traditional role as family head after his father's death, a decision for which he was ostracized. When his family turned a deaf ear to his philosophical insights, Adeagbo started leaving constellations of found objects and written texts in their courtyard as his only remaining means of self-expression.

For over 23 years he lived unrecognized. Then, in 1994, he was "discovered" as an artist. Influenced neither by art school nor the fine arts environment, Adeagbo's language evolved naturally and his installations contributed fresh blood to the contemporary art clan, which had begun to experience the adverse effects of cultural incest.

Since then, he has participated in more than 15 exhibitions, including ones at the Palais of the United Nations, Geneva; the Serpentine Gallery in London; the Round Tower in Copenhagen; as well as biennales in Johannesburg, Sa~o Paolo, Venice, and, most recently, by invitation of Harald Szeemann at "ForwArt -- Six Curators, Six Artists" in Brussels.

(The catalog of the show in Belgium is a good introduction to Adeagbo's philosophy; it contains a CD-ROM with interviews and scenes from his studio in Benin and can be ordered by fax: +32 (2) 547-3800.)

Adeagbo chose Japan's invitation over many others. On an earlier trip here in the summer of 1999, Adeagbo discovered many common denominators in culture and religion between Africa and Japan. He felt drawn to do more research, collect evidence to prove his intuitive perception, and present the results of his artistic inquiry to the Japanese public.

In his installation, Adeagbo will create, from the perspective of an African, a portrait of Japan and the history of the Toyoda family in particular, and introduce the essence of African spirituality through antique sculptures, masks and ceremonial costumes serving to communicate with the nether world, a parallel to the Bon Festival in Japan. "Le kimono d'Afrique et le kimono du Japon" is one of the themes of his search for analogies between these two originally non-Christian cultures, which still today find their roots in animistic beliefs.

Adeagbo will bring a set of rare Benin bronzes, wooden sculptures, ritual dance costumes and terra cotta figures from Africa -- a museum for a museum -- to match them with elements he will acquire this coming June in Japan. He sees this installation as a spiritual reunification between brothers and sisters who appear in different forms. The artist will map out his theories with French texts, interspersed in the installation, in the form of handwritten manuscripts or templates on glass. A selection of the key phrases will be translated into Japanese and English.

While traveling to major cultural sites in Nara, Kyoto and Tokyo, Adeagbo says he found, again and again, that "the Japanese are very religious in spite of their high-tech coating. Among the many gods, they have recognized their god and focus with determination on worshiping this one source."

In addition to antique objects from both worlds, Adeagbo has studied the history of the Toyoda family, who started out with automatic loom production and built the Toyota Motor car empire. From material of the Toyoda family memorial center, sights of Toyota City and books on Japanese history, Adeagbo had a set of 22 illustrations painted by a local artist to intertwine with his installation. In this fashion, his site-specific installation will create irreversible links between his native Benin and the host Japan, represented by the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art.

Before coming to Japan this June, Adeagbo contributed to "Voila Le Monde dans la Te^te" at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris and "Le Jardin" at Villa Medici Rome. For the first venue he composed a work called "La Resurrection de Edith Piaf"; for the latter, "Homage a Napoleon le Grand."

While the installations in Brussels, Rome and Paris are historic studies, Georges Adeagbo considers his piece for Japan an inquiry into spiritual aspects of nonlinear nature, exploring the simultaneousness of events in time and space.