Ever since the Towada Art Center opened five years ago, the city in Aomori Prefecture has seen its prospects dramatically alter. Not only by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, but by the subsequent devastation of neighboring areas, all of which compounded the dwindling prosperity of Towada. It was detached from nearby Misawa in 2012 when the railway connecting the two cities closed, though conversely the prefecture as a whole benefited from an extended Tohoku Shinkansen Line stretching from the old terminus of nearby Hachinohe to the prefectural capital, Aomori City. There's a lot to love in this quiet, unassuming place but it has definitely seen better days.
With the help of the Art Center, this is now changing. It seems unlikely that a city renowned for horse breeding be best served by the addition of an art museum, and yet the Art Center is proving its worth, maintaining a healthy reputation with visitors traveling from afar to see artwork unlikely to be seen elsewhere in Japan.
"Survive," both the title and theme for Towada Oirase Art Festival 2013, marks the museum's five-year anniversary, and through performance and documentation related to a changing culture now reliant on the use of modern technology, the works explore relationships between the land we live on and its material value. Spread between the Art Center and sites in the Oirase area, the works have been curated and positioned to reflect each of their environments. Works at the Art Center, for example, echo the clinical, unforgiving space of a gallery space, while still taking in the surrounding landscapes of both Japan and abroad.