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Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Akira Yamaguchi: Exhibition Exhibition Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan. Akira Yamaguchi: Exhibition Exhibitionby John McGee  Akira Yamaguchi, Portable
Folding Chashitsu, 2002, mixed media, Most artists are happy to have one solo exhibition at a time. Tokyo-based Akira Yamaguchi (b. 1969) is holding 14, all in one gallery. Actually, "Exhibition Exhibition" is one large
show of Yamaguchi's technology- Dubbed the "Yamaguchiya Oriennale," the "group show" is a collection of small, often pitiful ori (dregs) dredged up as a by-product of the artist's creative process—an IV drip rigged to a milk carton, a video of the artist making a drawing, then burning it, and so on—and slid into separate, locker-sized booths. 
Detail of Show the Flag,
2003,
oil on The fine wine is in the main gallery. Portable Folding Chashitsu (2002) is a one-tatami tearoom that folds into a mattress-sized box on wheels. Tearooms often incorporate gnarled wood and unfinished walls to evoke rustic simplicity. Yamaguchi, who is soft-spoken and formal but fights to conceal his mischievous streak, says he stays true to the original concept of the tearoom but updates the materials, covering the exterior in a patchwork of brown, blue and clear corrugated vinyl siding. The four multi-paneled oil paintings stretching and bending around the gallery walls—"the landscape for the tearoom," says the artist—also (con)fuse the traditional and the modern. Each painting reads right to left, like narrative e-maki scrolls, and clouds and architecture divide the action. Three take place in a fictional machine-age Edo. The Nine Aspects (2003) plays off the Buddhist kusozu theme. Usually such paintings show a husband watching his wife age and die, teaching that beauty and life are transitory. In Yamaguchi's version, a man witnesses the passing away of his beloved motorcycle, a hybrid with the head of a live horse and the back end of a Honda. Over time, it is stripped of parts and flesh, finally turning into a rusty frame with a bleached skull. Yamaguchi's post-modern centaur is odd (in many ways). But, the artist says, "there's an element of beauty in machinery that aesthetically complements the beauty of nature." In Flowers (2003), for example, bionic birds flap wings with metal joints, Terminator tree branches sway on mechanical articulators, and flowers sprout from roots of steel. 
Installation view of
"Yamaguchiya Show the Flag (2003), a meisho (famous places)-style painting of an alternative Edo, adds another layer of strangeness by collaging recent world events with pop-culture fictions. In the upper right corner, the starting point, are two tall towers, burning. The twin towers? Probably, but they've been Japan-ified with gabled roofs sticking out here and there. In the center of the painting, mikoshi (parade floats) tanks parade through town like victorious rebels at the end of a Star Wars epic. Fighter planes transform from WWII Mitsubishi Zeroes to 1990s Burt Rutans in the skies over tile-roofed aircraft carriers. By the way, who's fighting? "We don't know," says Yamaguchi. "It looks like a festival doesn't it?" At first glance, Yamaguchi's artworks are faux nostalgic, a kind of kimonoed yesteryear. But closer up, they take on complicated issues of contemporary Japanese society—the role of tradition, the promises and failures of technology, the burden of the past—in images as sharp-tongued as they are expertly drawn. _______________________________________This exhibition was held May-June 2003 at Mizuma Art Gallery in Naka-Meguro, Tokyo, Japan. ©2006 John McGee |
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