Imagining the other, On Art Week Tokyo 2024
#diary
Artforum.com
Lizzie Fitch & Ryan Trecartin at Prada Aoyama."BENTEN 2024 Art Night Kabukicho" late night performance, Ohjo Building, Tokyo. All photos: the author.Ei Arakawa-Nash performing at the National Art Center, Tokyo.Shiro Masuyama’s work in the “Messenger of Hell” exhibition at the Ohjo Building.Tianzhuo Chen’s Ocean Cage, 2024, at the Ohjo.One of the Niō guardian statues at the entrance of the Okura Museum of Art.
TOKYO‘S CONTEMPORARY ART SCENE remains enigmatic, even to frequent visitors from across Asia, who are often confounded by Japan’s linguistic and cultural barriers. It is also often eclipsed by the city’s dizzying array of attractions—from its renowned pop culture and cuisine to its striking architecture. Against this backdrop, Art Week Tokyo (AWT) offered a rare window for foreign art professionals into the city’s local art ecosystem. Landing on November 4, I headed straight to the opening reception at the Okura Tokyo, where I encountered only a few familiar faces from the international art world, including Yung Ma, Pi Li, Doryun Chong, Joselina Cruz, and Nikita Yingqian Cai. Pi Li and Doryun Chong came to participate as speakers in the National Art Center Tokyo’s symposium “How has Japanese contemporary art changed since 1989?”—a preliminary step toward a joint exhibition between NACT and M+ scheduled for next year. Meanwhile, Nikita told me that her attendance was tied to an exclusive curator roundtable during the week. While the meetings of such worldwide curatorial voices at a market-focused art week might seem puzzling, AWT cofounder and director Ninagawa Atsuko has repeatedly emphasized that the organizers hope to position it as more than a mere platform for commercial exchange; rather, it is part of a long-term plan to cultivate a thriving and sustainable artistic ecosystem. This year’s AWT, with its roster of forty galleries and thirteen partner institutions, distinguished itself from the adjacent, more overtly commercial Art Basel Hong Kong by offering a dynamic program that invigorated fellow art professionals amid a somewhat subdued market.
Leaving the reception that evening, I joined Hong Kong–based curators André Chan and Chin-Yin Chong for our next destination: “BENTEN 2024 Art Night Kabukicho,” an event orchestrated by the artist collective Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group. Set in Kabukicho in the center of Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, renowned for its bustling nightlife, this three-day art event transformed Kabukicho into an interactive art platform, connecting the neighborhood’s emerging art spaces and clubs. We arrived just in time to catch the last show of the night. On the second floor of the historic Ohjo Building, artist Chen Tianzhuo was presenting some of his latest works, including the performance video of Ocean Cage (2024) alongside a monumental whale installation. These works departed from Indonesia’s traditional whaling practices, investigating the complex entanglement between cetaceans, fishermen, and their ancestors. Chen’s works interwove folklore and legend to explore notions of justice that transcended human constructs. True to his signature style, the artist transformed the unconventional architectural space into an immersive theatrical environment, rich with ritualistic subcultural elements.
Ascending to the fourth floor of the Ohjo, we encountered “Messenger from Hell,” a collaborative project by artists Shiro Masuyama, Kazuhiko Hachiya, Makoto Aida, and Sayako Kishimoto. This fascinating exhibition allowed outlanders like myself to comprehend the unique art history embedded within Shinjuku, resurrecting performances and happenings staged by the four artists between 1983 and 2004. A highlight was Shiro Masuyama’s re-creation of his 2004 experimental installation, originally situated on the street near the Ohjo. Mimicking the aesthetic of Japanese adult entertainment signage, the piece featured a light box bearing the text “A Shameful Look Free for Your Watch.” When viewers peered inside through its peephole, they discovered their own hunched, voyeuristic figure captured by a hidden camera from afar—a work that, even twenty years after its creation, continues to brilliantly engage with Kabukicho’s distinctive street aesthetics. As midnight approached, the action shifted to the building’s basement level, where DOMMUNE, the renowned platform for livestreaming Tokyo’s cultural pulse, had established its “DOMMUNE KABUKICHO” satellite studio for an extended broadcast.
Yet the packed program left me with considerable regrets about what beckoned me but I couldn’t experience. “A-Yoko” (Art Yokocho Alley) promised an all-night feast of food, drinks, merchandise, and performances stretching from 10 p.m. into the early hours. I also missed Yu Cheng-Ta’s pop-up queer club, Ei Arakawa-Nash’s interactive street skits, and poet-artist Aoyagi Natsumi’s enchanting projections on Shinjuku’s digital billboards. The list was carried on by BENTEN Art Night Kabukicho, which detailed eleven locations across Shinjuku. Scrolling through the forty-three pages of events and guest profiles on its official website, I couldn’t help but wish I’d arrived earlier to fully immerse myself in this festival.
The second morning brought me to the Okura Museum of Art, a private institution owned by the Okura Tokyo, for the opening of AWT Focus. Curated by Mori Art Museum director Mami Kataoka, this group exhibition undoubtedly snatched the spotlight of the entire art week. Under the ambitious theme “Earth, Wind, and Fire: Visions of the Future from Asia,” the show featured fifty-seven artists and collectives, organized into four thematic sections: “cosmic structures,” “hand, body, and prayer,” “invisible powers,” and “natural cycles and ecosystems.” Blurring the lines between a micro-scale art fair and institutional exhibition, AWT Focus established a curatorial framework wherein curators provided the thematic proposition, invited participating galleries, and later selected works that resonated with the overarching theme. Many of the pieces in AWT Focus demanded prolonged engagement, referencing subjects that went beyond commonly discussed contemporary discourses such as identity, race and ethnicity, and advanced science and technology. Instead, the exhibition veered into explorations of materiality, cosmology, and the psyche within Asian cultures. Indeed, viewed through this cosmological lens, the temporality of the artworks seemed to dissolve: An intriguing visual dialogue echoed between The Two Generals, a painting by Indonesian artist Heri Dono, and the flanking Kamakura-Muromachi period Niō guardian statues at the museum’s entrance. Similarly, Taiwanese artist Charwei Tsai’s painting We Came Whirling out of Nothingness XII–V (2021), with its spiraling Heart Sutra text, was juxtaposed in the exhibition with a Han-dynasty TLV mirror from the museum’s collection. Together, the two works constructed a trans-spatio-temporal intertextuality. Numerous works in this exhibition embodied a synthesis of traditional craftsmanship, indigenous materials, mythologies, and worldviews. Hatta Yutaka’s Work 65–66 (ca. 1965–66), for instance, evoked the cyclical geometric patterns prevalent in Japanese family crests, while Haegue Yang’s Mesmerizing Mesh (2024) drew inspiration from paper crafts used in Korean prayer rituals. Standing before these pieces, with their imperturbable forms, I found myself questioning established definitions of contemporary art and wondering whether the long-standing Western art-historical canons for understanding abstract art might need rewriting.
The gallery-hopping schedule during AWT was relentlessly tight, with just two days to visit at least ten local galleries and two institutions. Beyond the established Art Basel regulars—Taka Ishii Gallery, Gallery Koyanagi, Ota Fine Arts, SCAI the Bathhouse, and Shugo Arts—we explored several “emerging” spaces (as they’re considered in Tokyo) founded after 2000, including waiting room, Gallery 38, Kaoyokoyuki, and Fig. Our trip coincided with the most nail-biting moment of the US presidential election. On the first day, my fellow art professionals from the States on the AWT shuttle bus shared their hopeful outlook, only to receive the dispiriting news of Trump’s reelection victory during the second evening’s dinner banquet. The AWT shuttle bus terminated at the National Art Center Tokyo, where Ei Arakawa-Nash was performing as part of his solo exhibition. The performance, characterized by his trademark blend of interactivity and absurdism, explored the predicament of New York’s modern and contemporary painters, especially how they grappled with the challenges of digital technology. While his stance appeared deliberately ambiguous to me—wavering between satire and a kind of wistful envy toward the painters—the performance thoroughly captivated its audience. After all, who could resist the fun in having a spree or wreaking havoc within the museum’s pristine “white box” setting? The performance reached its climax when, under Arakawa’s direction, staff members hoisted institutional leaders—including Doryun Chong and Kathy Halbreich—and playfully launched them through slashed painting canvases.
The AWT symposium’s central theme, “Imagining Others: Transnational Visions of Contemporary Art,” echoed questions that had lingered throughout my week. Art Week Tokyo editorial director Andrew Maerkle posed a thought-provoking inquiry: “How do we imagine others? And how do the others imagine us?” He pitched a question to three other guest speakers on the panel—how should we address domestic challenges while maintaining an open-minded perspective? Susanne Pfeffer restated the importance of deep listening for each other and art’s power to dismantle outdated stereotypes, while Sohrab Mohebbi advocated a more fluid interpretation of “nationality.” Mami Kataoka approached the dynamics between local and external worlds through the lens of this year’s AWT Focus exhibition theme—Asian philosophical and cosmological perspectives—which I found particularly illuminating. Over recent decades, addressing questions of “otherness” by examining how globalization has enabled the exploitation of the Global South has yielded effective insights. However, in our current moment, technological transnationalism demands a more planetary perspective. The post-pandemic era has elevated previously localized and nation-specific discussions to a planetary dimension, particularly against the backdrop of rapid technological advancement. In this evolving landscape, what insights can Asia offer? Perhaps cosmological perspectives that await our discovery.
Translated from Mandarin by Jiajing Lily Sun.