Contemporary art is having a bumper autumn in Tokyo this year, with the Tokyo Biennale, Sumida Mukojima Expo and Art Week Tokyo all happening in October and November. Of these three, Art Week Tokyo is the most conventional in terms of the exhibition of art objects in neutral gallery spaces that lean toward the cosmopolitan and urbane. The Tokyo Biennale, on the other hand, focuses on the local and exploring art as a process that connects people.
This notion is front and center for the 2023 biennale, titled “Create Linkage.” According to the online mission statement, it “aims to be an event where various ‘I’ meet and ‘we’ share.” This is not unusual for art festivals in Japan, most of which owe their existence to urban and rural regeneration projects and tend toward reaffirming the value of community. Compare, for example, the theme of the upcoming 2024 Venice Biennale: “Stranieri Ovunque: Foreigners Everywhere,” through which Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa aims to convey the message that “no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly and deep down inside a foreigner yourself.”
Min Nishihara, one of Tokyo Biennale’s two general directors, is a trained psychotherapist, and I asked how her professional background informed her role.
“One of the origins of the word ‘curator’ is ‘cure,’ so for me, the job is to accept artists and artwork ‘as is’; to fully accept their existence and that they are functioning,” she explains. “Sometimes artists suffer from huge social anxiety, and their message is difficult to convey — the curator can help. I want this biennale to be a mediation between the artist and society and vice versa.”
Living outside of Japan has also been a factor in how Nishihara wants to set the tone for the biennale. Considering that Tokyo is the largest metropolitan area in the world and the second wealthiest, the pressure to chase after accolades like “world-beating” and “premier” must have been in the ether. If it was, Nishihara and co-director Masato Nakamura seem to have resisted.
“I lived in the United States for 20 years,” Nishihara says, “and I saw that the art scene became really commercialized. This can have a negative effect on artists psychologically. This biennale is really relaxed; we accept anything.”
While the drive to be inclusive and communal can sometimes flatten art festivals into assemblies of mildly interesting but not very challenging thought experiments, the “we accept anything” maxim of the Tokyo Biennale is not a lack of curatorial discernment. Rather, it seems to be an openness to the breadth of art and human experience, and how the impact of one on the other can enhance both.
At one of the main venues, a wholesale building from the Showa Era (1926-89) of the Etoile Kaito enterprise, extraordinary installations by Naoya Hatakeyama and Naoki Sato are a response to the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. While ordered and visually gorgeous, these can also be read as obsession born of trauma. Hatakeyama’s “Rikuzen Takata 2011-2023” is a display of hundreds of color contact prints of his hometown in Iwate Prefecture, presented on a specially-made wooden stand that runs unbroken along the width of the building’s 7th floor. Slanted at 45 degrees, the photographs of Rikuzen Takata’s changing landscape in the aftermath of the disaster face upward like a face in prayer.
Meanwhile, Naoki Sato’s series of charcoal drawings of plants, “There, It Has Grown,” has elements of Henri Rousseau, Hokusai and Sesshu. Sato has been working on the series since 2014, and it has now reached a scale where in order to fit all the drawings into the already voluminous space of the venue, the many panels have been turned into a serpentine maze. Lighting for this installation is very low-key, and combined with disorienting fluctuations in scale and perspective, there is a haunted house ambiance to this version of Sato’s work. Parts of the piece have been exhibited elsewhere, but not with the benefit of so much space.
A Tama University professor, Sato is quietly working on new panels when I visit the biennale, and I ask how he would compare himself now to who he was when he started the project nine years ago. “I feel more confused and less like I know what I’m doing. I find myself discovering new plants and wondering, ‘What is this?’” he says.
Kayako Nakashima’s “Yellow Walls” is inspired by “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a late 19th-century Gothic horror story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman that revolves around the patriarchal social strictures termed the “Cult of Domesticity.” Nakashima’s work is a claustrophobia-inducing walled enclosure, covered with a frenzied yellow bird and foliage pattern. One of two doorbells on the wall activates an emergency bell on the far side of the installation, while two small alcoves contain a copy of Gilman’s book and a small sledgehammer. There are also two impractically tiny peepholes in the wall; one holds a mirrored surface that reflects back a distorted image of the viewer, while the other permits a look into the interior of the installation, which is filled with unadorned industrial scaffolding.
On the ground floor of the venue, I find the organizer of the “Super Sorted Garbage Bins 2023 Project,” Masaki Fujihata, tinkering with an oven. “I got it second-hand, but it doesn’t work. That’s fine, though — I like fixing things. I’m making pizzas out of plastic,” he says. The main set piece in Fujihata’s section of the festival is a kind of reverse convenience store, filled with boxes created for the waste from particular products. There is a box for only grilled onigiri (riceball) wrappers, with a different one for salmon onigiri; the packaging from a 7-Eleven vegetable curry is separated from House brand curry roux, and so on. In the same section, the work “Fusion-Plastic Debris” by Bruce Osborne incorporates found plastic waste extrusions that have solidified into random abstract shapes. “Plastic EP” by Saburo Ubukata features the sounds of different kinds of plastic set against an electronic soundscape and pressed onto a vinyl record. “It’s the sound of plastic on plastic,” Fujihata says with a wry smile.
Two programs within the biennale are “Prescription for Tokyo” and “Social Dive.” The former addresses the connection between social isolation, health, poverty and well-being. Based on a movement in healthcare being pioneered in the U.K., it encourages communal activities such as dance or drawing classes as an alternative to focusing only on alleviating physical symptoms. As Nishihara puts it: “I’m using art as a form of cognitive behavioral therapy.”
The “Social Dive” program is carried over from the biennale’s 2020/21 edition and was devised by Nakamura and Kazuko Koike, the creative director at the time. In comparison to the conciliatory middle ground between individualism and collectivism proposed in “Prescription for Tokyo,” “Social Dive” urges visitors and participating artists to “go beyond the narrow individualism of ‘me,’ and dive into the unknown world of ‘us’!”
One of the outstanding works in this program, despite the awkwardly-phrased core concept that reminds me of Hollywood sci-fi movies when invading aliens explain their good intentions, is a video recording of “Free Seat” by Pedro Carneiro Silva and Ardalan Aram. In this performance piece, Brazilian musician Silva sits at a keyboard in a public area opposite an empty chair. Without explanation or discussion, passersby sit and listen to a musical improvisation through headphones, while the interaction is recorded by filmmaker Aram. In one episode, filmed in Akihabara Station, Silva’s gentle melody quickly brings a young woman to tears. She asks Silva if she can hug him, and after she walks away, the camera lingers on Silva. The artist continues to sit quietly as crowds rush around him, his smile gradually turning into the normal poker face of strangers hiding their feelings from the crowd.
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