The celebratory mood surrounding Yokohama's new CREAM — Creativity for Arts and Media — festival was disrupted when one of the participating artists, Masaki Fujihata, unexpectedly announced that he would be withdrawing his work.
At the Oct. 30 opening press conference Fujihata said that he would withdraw his work in protest over director Fumihiko Sumitomo's organization of the festival.
Fujihata outlined his complaints, including what he described as insensitive treatment of participating artists and the lack of a strong curatorial concept, in a pamphlet that he distributed at the press conference and later reproduced on his blog hosted by the art Web site ART-iT.
Fujihata told the Japan Times that he waited until the press conference to announce his decision in order to open up public discussion about the event's organization. "If I simply withdrew," he said, "the problem would just disappear, no one would know about it."
Fujihata said he had heard complaints about Sumitomo from other artists and administrators involved with the festival and was finally moved to action after disagreeing with Sumitomo over how his multimedia work "Simultaneous Echoes" (2009), for which sound was an integral component, should be displayed in the context of others in its vicinity in the BankART NYK exhibition venue.
When reached for comment, Sumitomo said, "It was very surprising, but I've had a lot of e-mails and phone calls from other artists expressing their support for me."
Also a professor at Tokyo University of the Arts, Fujihata was in fact deputy director of the selection committee that appointed Sumitomo to run the festival. From speaking with Fujihata, it was unclear to what degree his role on the committee gave him oversight of Sumitomo or contributed to his perception that the director was mismanaging the festival.