R
E
V N
E
X
T
With autumn in full swing, Tokyo witnessed the opening of a new museum, two avant-garde multimedia exhibitions and a cultural exchange with China.
Yayoi Kusama: “Creation Is a Solitary Pursuit, Love Is What Brings You Closer to Art”
Oct 1, 2017 – Feb 25, 2018
Prolific Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama officially opened her museum this month. Located in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, the institution plans to showcase biannual exhibitions of Kusama’s work, in addition to acting as a venue for lectures and events centered around the artist.
Built by Japanese architecture firm Kume Sekkei, the narrow, all-white structure spans 5 storeys. The lobby floor has a small gift shop selling Kusama cookies, purses and scarves. Two levels of exhibition space somehow house dozens of works in a limited footprint. The museum also houses a seemingly permanent version of Kusama’s famous mirrored infinity rooms. On the rooftop, visitors will find a small library and a pumpkin sculpture.
Due to its massive popularity, the museum implements strict visitor guidelines, allowing a maximum of 70 visitors to enter every 90 minutes, with four time slots per day. Tickets are sold out through January 2018.
Taro Mizutani x Undercover: “Chaos / Balance”
Oct 13–21
In a commercial gallery below Marc Jacobs’s Bookmarc store in Harajuku, the brand regularly mounts exhibitions that feature contemporary artists, encompassing fashion photographers and street artists from both Japan and abroad.
This month, the concrete basement presented a selection of photographs by Taro Mizutani, documenting fashion designer Jun Takahashi’s label Undercover. Showing images with theatrical compositions from fashion presentations and obscure details from the designer’s studio, the exhibition included photographs that fall within a wide range of dimensions, from poster-sized to those as small as a business card, and includes a light box display featuring repurposed vintage speakers. Every print was limited to an edition of one.
As part of the 2017 Japan-China Curator Exchange Program organized in Tokyo by the Japan Foundation, Japanese and Chinese curators met on October 23, 2017, to develop an understanding of the cultural scenes in both countries. Courtesy Japan Foundation.
Japan-China Curator Exchange Program
Oct 17–26
Every year since 2015, the Japan Foundation has invited young Chinese curators to join an intensive ten-day tour of Japan’s contemporary art scene. This October, the Japan-China Curator Exchange Program included four curators, scholars and writers from Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai, and offered them the chance to meet with their counterparts in several of Japan’s top art institutions.
The program was designed to promote artistic exchange by strengthening the ties between a new generation of art professionals, while arranging introductions with the goal of establishing future collaborations involving Japanese and Chinese artists.
This year’s participants were Bian Ka, exhibition manager of K11 Concepts Limited Kunsthalle Department, Beijing; Chao Jiaxing, senior curator of Shanghai’s Start Museum; Liu Tian, independent curator and PhD candidate at the Institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thoughts, School of Inter-Media Art, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou; and Zhang Hanlu, independent curator and associate editor, Artforum China.
Yang Fudong: “The Coloured Sky: New Women II”
Oct 18, 2017 – Mar 11, 2018
Following a nearly year-long exhibition featuring light artist Dan Flavin, Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo unveiled a new show this month with Yang Fudong’s “The Coloured Sky: New Women II” at the brand’s flagship Omotesando location.
The Chinese artist’s multisensory work was selected from the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s collection and features a five-screen video projection in the expansive gallery, each part of the same project and presented in color, a departure from the artist’s preferred method of shooting in 35 mm black-and-white film.
The video showcases Yang’s cast of five women, in various states of consciousness, posing seductively while positioned before artificial backdrops with real and fake animals. The footage is set to a natural soundtrack, and references a Chinese story dating back to the third century BCE that is the origin of the proverb “point to a deer and call it a horse,” which is used to describe those who confound right and wrong.
The show is part of the “Hors-les-murs” program, which presents previously unexhibited work from the foundation’s collection at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Beijing and Venice.
Notes from Nippon is a monthly blog featuring a roundup of news and exhibition openings from Japan.
Peter Augustus Owen is the Tokyo-based associate publisher of ArtAsiaPacific.
To read more of ArtAsiaPacific’s articles, visit our Digital Library.