Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Happiness: A Survival Guide for Art and Life

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

Happiness: A Survival Guide for Art and Life

by John McGee

Entrance hall with Yasumasa Morimura's A Magnanimous Prayer 
(two of three), 2003, inkjet print on polythene sheet and Jeong So-Youn's
Stairway to Heaven, 2000, white feathers (Photo: John McGee)

Happiness is a warm puppy. Or a warm gun. It depends on who you ask. For the Mori Art Museum's inaugural exhibition, director David Elliott and co-curator Pier Luigi Tazzi turned to 180 artists from as far apart as Norway and North Korea. Their approximately 230 "answers" to what happiness is (works in nearly every media, from stone sculpture to video installation) trace divergent concepts of the ephemeral feeling through centuries of world art. 

The earliest piece is a limestone Chinese bodhisattva head, ca. 550-570A.D. The most recent are a free beer garden in a Roppongi Hills courtyard (by Surasi Kusolwong), enormous poofy fabric flowers in the museum entrance cone (Choi Jeong-Hwa), and 21 other pieces commissioned for the show. But there are no timelines. Elliott calls this a journey, not a survey. 

Hakuin Ekaku, One Hundred 
Happinesses, Edo Period (1767), 
ink on paper, Tanaka Daizaburo, 
Tokyo (Courtesy Victoria Miro Gallery,
London)

Maps lead the way. The world is diagrammed on a pair of painted Edo Period Japanese screens, embroidered as national flags by Alighiero Boetti, tricked from politics into poetics by Marcel Broodthaers and collaged as a multi-screen video travelogue by Fischli and Weiss. 

From here, four loose categories
—Arcadia, Nirvana, Desire and Harmony—keep things on track. 

"Arcadia" is a place of idealized landscapes. Sailboats scoot through a Monet seascape. Monks laugh in a Japanese ink painting. And North Korean potato farmers smile as they weigh their bounty in a propaganda painting by Kim Sung-Ryong. 

"Nirvana" is more abstract and taut. The cool perfection of an Ad Reinhardt black painting faces a pair of white Robert Rymans across the room. Between them stand serene Buddha sculptures from Gupta Period India and Kamakura Period Japan. Women of every stripe—Bridget Riley, Agnes Martin and Yayoi Kusama (okay, nets)—fill another room. 

With "Desire," things gets physical and, as you might expect, messy. Curvaceous hosts greet you at the entrance—a sculpture of voluptuous goddess Parvati (11th-century India) and a painting of the fat-bellied Chinese god of contentment, Hotei (by Kano Masanobu, Muromachi Period Japan). Shunga (erotic prints and paintings) by Hokusai and Shunsho share a private room with Northern Indian miniatures of lovers. Stacks of green and red stick chewing gum by Koo Jeong line the wall just outside, near Louise Bourgeois' pink marble sculpture of a sphere with three hands for feet. 

Finally, you reach "Harmony." Here arrays of ancient linga (stone phalluses) meet crystal yantra and 13th-century painted Tibetan mandala resonate with Fred Tomaselli's fantastical collage paintings of birds and bees. 

Installation view inside the "Arcadia" section with Jeff Koons, Bear and 
Policeman, 1988 in foreground (Photo: John McGee)

The show itself is not harmonious. It's a provocative mix of work made for wildly different purposes—religious worship, aesthetic enjoyment, propaganda—from different eras and cultures. As alluded to above, sometimes the juxtapositions flow in an "oh, of course" way. Other times, the show boldly asks you to consider potentially contentious relationships, e.g. between a crowd-pleasing Henry Moore sculpture of a family and Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi-tainted film "Olympia." 

One weakness of the show is that putting young-ish artists with masters can seem like unjustified career promotion (see Takashi Murakami's abysmal room of smiling flowers). Another is occasional redundancy—too much of the same kind of work by one artist. 

But as a whole, it's a thought-provoking exhibition and a promising start for the museum. If you believe happiness is where you find it, look here. Unlike John Lennon in Yoko Ono's video, it won't take you an hour to crack a smile.

This exhibition was held Oct 2003-Jan 2004 at Mori Art Museum in Roppongi, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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