News, Reviews, Reports
Art Map #4 - 21_21 Design Sight, Roppongi
Today marks the release of Art Space Tokyo, Tokyo Art Map #4 — 21_21 Design Sight in Roppongi. Here’s what we have to say about the space:
Opened in 2007, this sleek, angular Tadao Ando-designed building is now one of Tokyo’s signature works of architecture: two triangular shards of steel-reinforced concrete and glass that rise up out of the ground, conveying lightness and poise.
And with the beautiful (if unseasonable — isn’t it supposed to be down pouring right about now?) weather lately, a great afternoon would be a stop by 21_21 and then a nap in the nearby park.
Min Tanaka to dance around SCAI The Bathhouse
From July 4 to July 8, Min Tanaka will be holding a performance and documentative exhibition titled “Locus Focus” at a number of sites around SCAI The Bathhouse.
Tanaka is an internationally renowned dancer/choreographer known for his distinctive interpretation of butoh movement. His “Locus Focus” series of performances takes place not in theatres, but in open air locations, and it has led him to several countries, including China and Spain, including a 45 day dance around Indonesia in 2004.
For this performance, he will dance from roughly 3pm every day in different locations around Yanaka. The dance will be recorded on video and played the following day at SCAI The Bathhouse. Nobuyoshi Araki will be photographing his dance on the 5th, and on all three days at 6pm there will be a talk given by the artist and a variety of guest speakers at the gallery.
More details about the location of each dance and the guest speakers are available on the gallery homepage.
New Gallery Building to Open in Ebisu
This is the latest chapter in Tokyo’s ongoing series of gallery relocations of the past six months. The building will house Nadiff bookshop, Magical Artroom and G/P Gallery.
Nadiff, Tokyo’s number one art bookshop, left its main premises in Omotesando last summer, and since then has been running only its museum shop outlets. The Roppongi gallery building closed in February this year, forcing its occupants to find new locations throughout the city, and news spread that Magical Artroom would be joining Nadiff in Ebisu. However, the opening date for this new building has been repeatedly postponed since then.
Magical Artroom was previously operated by a collective of Tokyo art world figures — collector and psychiatrist Satoshi Okada, art critic Kentaro Ichihara, and editor Shigeo Goto, with Haruka Ito running the office. Now, Haruka Ito is running the gallery, with Satoshi Okada as president and Masami Shiraishi (director of SCAI The Bathhouse) as a professional adviser. The former directors will also remain as advisers.
Shigeo Goto also announced recently that he will also be opening his own photography gallery in the same building, called G/P Gallery.
The new building will open on July 7, 7pm.
Music for a Rainy Day at Jun Aoki’s Sonorium
On Sunday, I made two great discoveries. Taka Ishii Gallery was holding a music event in the name of the gallery’s magazine ‘Fun Palace’ at the Jun Aoki-designed concert hall “sonorium” in Eifukucho.
I had never heard of the sonorium before, so it was a fantastic surprise to walk into such a serene, white, chapel-like space, nestled into a residential area. If it were a gallery, there is no doubt that it would have been featured in Art Space Tokyo. Anyone want to make Music Space Tokyo?
Throughout Sunday afternoon, a listening session was held for a recording of Morton Feldman’s composition String Quartet No.2. As it was being played in its full six-hour length, visitors were allowed to come and go as they pleased, and I arrived for the last hour. While I enjoyed Feldman’s minimal musings enough, it was really the following live performance by Swedish musician David Wenngren (aka “Library Tapes") that was so breathtaking.
Wenngren combines light, meditative piano chords and melodies with the hissing and humming static of field recordings. Against this gentle white noise, uplifting sweeps of strings work their way into his compositions — the perfect soundtrack for the pouring rain outside. You can hear plenty of sample tracks on his MySpace and Virb.com pages. I also recommend that any music and architecture lovers in Tokyo check out the sonorium.
‘Fun Palace’ is also an interesting bilingual journal of articles and interviews relating to contemporary art in its broadest sense, transcending genres. You can pick up the first issue at Taka Ishii Gallery, and the second issue, which will focus on dance, is due to be released this summer.
Art Space Tokyo in the Yomiuri Shinbun
A review of Art Space Tokyo was published in the Yomiuri Shinbun today. If the print in the image to the left is too small for you to see, you can read the online version here.
It’s a true pleasure to see the book get a positive reception. However, Christoph Mark’s focus on the idea that “investing in art is the domain of the rich” is potentially misleading. Later in the article he says:
“Though unlikely intended by the editors, one message that resonates through many of the stories is that, quite often, the people who run galleries or collect art appear to be those who can afford to.”
Running a gallery is no different to running any other business: you need money and a shrewd mind to do it. And people who buy art are by definition “those who can afford to”, just as food, paperclips, helicopters and Louis Vuitton handbags are bought only by “those who can afford to.”
Certainly, there are people in Tokyo who cannot afford to spend money on art, but the barrier to worthwhile art investment in Tokyo is currently set considerably lower than it is in London and New York. Prices for small works by young artists start as low as ¥20,000 - 30,000 ($200 - 300), and even the big name artists sell for very reasonable prices compared to their peers in Europe, the US and China.
As Mark notes, Art Space Tokyo is meant as “a snapshot of the Tokyo art world as it is now… and may help to better understand the city’s future.” In editing the book, I purposefully did not want to overstate the message that contemporary art in Tokyo is cheap. But it is. In my opinion, the Japanese contemporary art market is a collector’s paradise, full of insanely good bargains.
But it won’t stay this way for ever. When I asked collector Ryutaro Takahashi for his thoughts on future trends in Japanese contemporary art, he replied:
“Speaking in terms of quality versus cost, some Asian collectors have said that works by Japanese artists fetch a mere twenty-five percent of their true value, while Korean artists get fifty percent and Chinese artists are getting one hundred percent.... The talk is that in five or so years, the price-to-quality ratio for artwork in these three countries will equalize. At the very least, we can expect the work of young Japanese artists to grow in value for the next five years.” (p.49)
Art and Architecture Revamp Shibuya Station
It’s not often that you get to experience the smell of a new subway station, or feel happy to miss several trains while you wander around the platform staring at the architecture. Beijing will be unveiling its new subway lines for the Olympics in a couple of months, but right now, the Fukutoshin Line, opened in Tokyo over the weekend, is the world’s newest.
Designed to alleviate rush hour congestion on the western edge of the JR Yamanote Line, it runs from Shibuya up to Ikebukuro, and then up into Saitama Prefecture. In 2012 the current Shibuya terminus will connect to the Tokyu Toyoko Line, making it much easier to move between Saitama and Kanagawa prefectures.
The Shibuya Station end of the Fukutoshin Line has been designed by the master of concrete architecture Tadao Ando, who has integrated a large, vaulted ovoid structure into the center of the station — dubbed an “underground spaceship” — which makes for both a striking journey to and from the platforms, and allows for the free flow of air in and out of the station. Needing no fans for circulation, this is the world’s first naturally ventilated subway station.
Meanwhile, earlier this year the concourse between the JR Yamanote Line and the Inokashira Line was chosen as the permanent location for Taro Okamoto’s 30 meter-long mural The Myth of Tomorrow. The work has had something of a fraught history, detailed here on Tokyo Art Beat, and will finally settle into its permanent home in Shibuya in 2011.
YATAM (Yet Another Tokyo Art Map): Ghibli Museum, Kichijoji
Today marks the release of our third Art Space Tokyo art map: Ghibli Museum, Kichijoji / Mitaka. Ghibli Museum is the one art space featured far beyond the innards of the Yamanote Line (Nakaochiai Gallery and Gallery éf are also beyond the Yamanote Line, but not by much!).
A perfect 8 hours in Tokyo: Embrace one of these rare sun filled days as we head into the 2008 rainy season, spend the afternoon wandering around Inokashira Park (Sundays are especially good, but crowded), take in Ghibli Museum and then enjoy a delicious dinner in Kichijoji. Sure, you’ll be sweaty, but you’ll also be smiling and full and have a deeper insight into the mind of Mr. Miyazaki. For bonus points: on the Chuo line back into town, meditate on this Hitotoki.
PDF Art Map Downloads:
Ghibli Museum
Tokyo Gallery + BTAP
Project Space Kandada
“Absent City” Held at Gallery Within Assistant
Architectural unit assistant, run by Megumi Matsubara and Hiroi Ariyama, have started to hold a series of exhibitions titled “Absent City”. The first installment is being held at their studio space in Hatsudai, named “gallery within assistant” for these exhibitions.
The exhibition is presented as a memoir of Tokyo as an “absent” space that doesn’t exist. Seven portraits have been taken on the streets of Tokyo, and recordings of conversations with each of these people are being broadcast through the gallery. With the handheld radio you are given at the entrance, the soundtrack to this exhibition shifts from white noise to clarity and back again as you move towards and away from the images. In the middle of the room is a table inside of which is an elaborately constructed, abstract miniature of a city, which you are only able to peer at through a set of prisms and peepholes.
The show ends June 12 (TAB details here), but there are others planned, and as soon as news of the next one comes in, it will be announced on this blog.
For anyone in Paris, it’s worth noting that assistant are the people behind the “Galerie des Galeries” exhibition space currently installed in Galeries Lafayette.
Murakami sells big again
Following his record sale of Lonesome Cowboy at Sotheby’s on May 14, Takashi Murakami continues to see his major work sell out.
His LA gallery Blum & Poe, currently showing at Art Basel, the world’s largest modern and contemporary art fair, sold his 18.5 ft tall aluminum and steel sculpture Oval Buddha to an unnamed western European collector for US $8 million, not long after the fair opened. (Source: Bloomberg.)
Oval Buddha is a limited edition of three. It was due to be featured in the ©MURAKAMI exhibition currently taking place at the Brooklyn Museum (until July 13) but was reported to have been too big for the museum’s exhibition spaces.
For those who cannot afford $8 million, it is on view (until September 7) at the indoor public sculpture garden at 590 Madison Ave. facing 56th Street, open to the public free of charge.
Tokyo contemporary art market in flux
Today, 101Tokyo Contemporary Art Fair announced that it plans to expand for its next installment, upping the number of participating galleries to 60, from this year’s 28. Hence, it is calling for new, qualified directors to get in touch.
Having made sales of US $1 million, compared to the three-year-old Art Fair Tokyo’s US $10 million shows how much potential there is for the contemporary art market in Tokyo to take off if given the right platform.
Art Fair Tokyo currently occupies 3,000 square meters of the Tokyo International Forum each year, and is due to expand to 5,000 square meters in 2010. For next year, its Executive Director Misa Shin is looking at the possibility of holding a contemporary art annex to cater for the young commercial galleries that haven’t been able to make it into AFT so far.
We may never know whether AFT had this plan in mind before 101Tokyo appeared on the scene, or whether it’s a deliberate strategy to undercut 101Tokyo’s market before it takes root. Either way, a bit of competition in Tokyo’s art market can only be a good thing and I am looking forward to the coming months to see what kind of Tokyo Art Week takes shape for April 2009.
TAKASHI MURAKAMI ADVERT FOR LOUIS VUITTON
Takashi Murakami’s ongoing collaboration with Louis Vuitton has incited heated debate about the relationship between art and commerce. Love it or hate it, the next five minutes of video are, well, undeniably cute.
Art Map #2 - Tokyo Gallery + BTAP
What’s that you hear? I believe a new art map is hot off the presses. Download the map file right away, or tuck away the map link for later perusal.
Art Space Tokyo describes Tokyo Gallery + BTAP thusly:
Tokyo Gallery was founded in 1950 by Takashi Yamamoto, the man largely responsible for introducing contemporary art to Japan. As Japan’s first commercial contemporary art gallery, Tokyo Gallery has been at the center of the Tokyo art world for several decades and has continuously exhibited groundbreaking works by Japanese, Asian and Western artists.
Almost everyone knows Ginza but I would venture to say few know this seminal gallery. Tucked away in a back alley near Shinbashi, Tokyo Gallery + BTAP straddles one of those void-like interspaces long time residents of Tokyo know well. To the east lies all the shopping and glamour Ginza has built its reputation on. To the north, a gaggle of upscale hostess clubs; to the west Shinbashi and the Nagakin Capsule Tower, and deep to the south, Tsukiji.
Latest exhibition information and schedules can be found on the Tokyo Gallery + BTAP homepage or their Tokyo Art Beat listing.
Art Space Tokyo in the bookshops
I’m now back in Tokyo, taking in the whirlwind of activity that was the last ten days in New York.
When comparing the New York and Tokyo art scenes, aside from the larger number and size of galleries in New York, the key difference would be how NY has such distinct art areas, be it Chelsea, Soho, the Upper East Side, the Lower East Side or Williamsburg. With so many galleries concentrated into each of these areas, it is so easy to walk from door to door, from street to street, taking in dozens of shows at a time. In ten days I managed to see some sixty or so exhibitions!
Given how dispersed the galleries are in Tokyo, to do the same in here would be a physically exhausting feat, as Craig and I found out when we were doing our research for Art Space Tokyo last year. The pace of the gallery going experience in Tokyo is inherently different: although we marked other nearby galleries on the maps for each of the twelve spaces in AST, visiting these spaces is really about enjoying the charms of the surrounding area rather than just packing in exhibition after exhibition.
I’m pleased to see that Art Space Tokyo is now in Tokyo’s bookshops. Walking around Roppongi yesterday, I found it in the Tsutaya Roppongi Hills bookshop, the Roppongi Hills Art and Design Store in the Mori Art Museum and the SFT Store in the National Art Center. More outlets are listed here.
Checking out the New York art scene
Craig and I are finally in New York, getting our heads around all the exciting exhibitions and events taking place!
The first thing you cannot help but realize during an afternoon’s walk in Chelsea is how vast the galleries are compared to Tokyo. It feels like you could fit most of Tokyo’s major galleries inside David Zwirner’s cavernous space on W19th Street!
Differences aside, New York’s enthusiasm for Japanese contemporary art can be clearly felt as there are a number of related exhibitions on at the moment. Yoko Ono is having a solo show at Galerie Lelong; “Heavy Light”, a group show looking at contemporary Japanese photography is opening at the ICP this week; SANAA, the architects of the New Museum of Contemporary Art are showing the last ten years of their work in the same museum; and of course, Takashi Murakami is holding his colossal retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum.
The Japanese presence in NY just got a little stronger only a couple of weeks ago, when Tokyo Art Beat, the bilingual art listings website, finally launched New York Art Beat. It’s proving very useful for navigating this city…
Art Space Tokyo in the Guardian
Back in March, Craig and I showed a reporter from the Guardian around some of Tokyo’s museums and galleries, including a couple of the spaces featured in Art Space Tokyo. The article came out today but you can read it on the Guardian website here, or for a look at the printed version, click on the image above.
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A place to keep abreast of Art Space Tokyo related news, reviews, events and updates.
Art Space Tokyo is a 272 page guide to the Tokyo art world published by Chin Music Press.
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