Yutaro Midorikawa looks like what in Japan is known as a soshoku-kei danshi — a herbivorous male. The carefully sculpted goatee, Clark Kent glasses (lensless, of course) and tight-fitting suit seem to advertise membership of that bracket of young men who have few goals in life other than to preen and play video games. Then he opens his mouth, and in an instant the stereotype is overturned. "I like to think of myself as a hunter," he says.
That self-characterization is even more surprising when you consider that Midorikawa is in fact a curator, or a gallerist/curator — a profession that is rarely compared to blood sport. And yet there he was, in a Roppongi cafe earlier this week, 27 years old and cheerfully explaining that his ancestors were whale hunters in northern Japan, and that he, too, is involved in the pursuit of the "big game" that lurk beneath the "surface."
And as the confidence, ambition and fearlessness suggested by that hunting analogy sink in, the events of the last few months, too, start to make sense. It makes sense, for example, how 0000, the gallery Midorikawa established in Kyoto in February this year with three other like-minded twentysomethings, has already produced some of the most creative art events seen in Japan in years; and it makes sense that a superstar like Takashi Murakami would have become so enamored of the group that he would entrust them with one of his galleries — Hidari Zingaro, in Tokyo's Nakano district — for a month of exhibitions that started on December 16.