Shigeo Anzai, a photographer of artists, says he loses interest when a subject becomes too famous. That's why his retrospective at the National Art Center, Tokyo, is full of pictures of young, fresh faces.
It's also why most of those faces are taut with an unmistakable tension — of ambition unrealized, self-confidence untested and destiny untold. There's a slim Takashi Murakami grinning like a TV host in 1992, Yoshitomo Nara holding up a painting in 1996 like an in-your-face hawker, and a bare-chested Tsuyoshi Ozawa drinking milk during a performance in Takamatsu that year.
If peeping into the past of Japan's current crop of leading fortysomething artists isn't your cup of tea, then how about the older generations? The 68-year-old Anzai has been doing this since 1970. In a 1983 shot, painter Atsuko Tanaka stands nervously in front of the kind of rings-and-dots works that now fetch more than $40,000 on the auction circuit; in 1980, a wrinkle-free Yayoi Kusama stands in front of her dot paintings.