Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Emotional Site (short version)

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Emotional Site (short version)

by John McGee

Installation by Yoshihiro Suda (Image courtesy the artist)

The group show “Emotional Site” was a bittersweet farewell to the Shokuryo Building, a three-story former rice and food market built in 1927 that had served as one of the Tokyo’s alternative mainstays for nearly 20 years and a center of contemporary galleries for about six. But “old and atmospheric” rarely lasts in the City of Perpetual Renewal and soon the Shokuryo will be torn down and replaced by condos. 

The four galleries associated with the building’s art history banded together to produce this all-too-brief, nine-day exhibition of 36 of their artists. No room went unused. Abandoned offices of pickle makers and rice merchants displayed copious drawings by Yoshitomo Nara, videos by Jeanne Dunning and Gillian Wearing, and even early pieces by Takashi Murakami. A photo of Paul McCarthy’s Death Ship performance was well-positioned high on the wall above a putrid toilet in one of the ancient coed bathrooms. 

Several artists produced memorable site-specific installations that captured the building’s unique spaces and history. Hee Chang Yoon hung lumpy, imperfect ceramic block protrusions about waist-high on several of the interior walls. Painted the faded blue-gray of the hallways they occupied, the objects seemed to be organic growths which, like the flaking paint, scarred linoleum, and stained and sunbleached floors, traced the building’s aging process. 

The Shokuryo Building in Sagacho
(Image courtesy Ryuji Miyamoto)

Yasumasa Morimura had one of his breakthrough shows in Sagacho Exhibition Space, Shokuryo’s most important alternative gallery, in the late 1980s. For Emotional Site, Morimura installed a series of video monitors in the spooky, low-ceilinged storage chambers of the blue-lit, dungeon-like basement boiler rooms. Peeping through small windows in the doors to each of the tiny rooms, you could see (and hear) close-ups of hands clapping at different speeds, interspersed with silent intervals of blackness. A sculpture of two hands clasped together as in prayer or at the contact point of clapping was floodlit in the center of the floor of a larger room. 

In the broad open courtyard, emerging artist Shintaro Miyake—dressed in a homemade kabuki outfit with a comic, oversized head sprouting red braids—painted a huge version of one of his female figures in a hilarious performance. As hundreds of spectators hung out of windows, off balconies and from the rooftop, Miyake swept onto the enormous canvas. He picked up a giant roller brush and scurried awkwardly back and forth for about 20 minutes trying to keep his floor-length braids of red hair from falling into the black paint outline. Throughout, Miyake proclaimed his intentions in a loud kabuki voice, “Now I’m painting the mouth!,” and so on. The spectacle culminated in a shower of confetti thrown from overhead, drifting down around the artist as he twirled in the center of his creation. 

The huge public turnout for "Emotional Site" revealed both the desperate need for a major alternative art space in Tokyo, the surprising amount of support for one—more than 1,700 visitors on one Sunday—and the incredible loss the Shokuryo represents.

This exhibition was held Nov 2002 at the Shokuryo Building in Sagacho, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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