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Gallery Side 2

by John McGee

Gallery Side 2, tucked behind Akasaka Twin Tower (Photos: John McGee)

Back in the pre-digital LP days, hit songs filled side one of an album. The grooves of side two were always a little different, more personal. “You can listen passively to side one...side two you have to decide to listen to,” says gallerist Junko Shimada, who, deciding it fit her style, so named her contemporary art space. Since its founding four years ago, Gallery Side 2 has matched its moniker, not toeing the Top-40 populist line, but pushing the progressive, indie edge as one of the city’s best art spaces. 

Shimada spent seven years in New York City, getting her MA in art history at NYU and learning the ropes at the top-notch 303 and Gavin Brown galleries. When she moved back to Tokyo, her hometown, she opened shop in the basement of a Sendagaya apartment building and jumped into the local art community. Her first show featured the performance/video work of Yutaka Sone, a participant in this year’s Yokohama International Triennale of Contemporary Art. 

Taro Shinoda, 4S, 2001 

Shimada is interested in artists, like Sone, who can cross borders or hybridize ideas. Now she works with five Japanese (e.g. painter Keiko Sono) and eight international artists (e.g. Thai installation artist Rirkrit Tiravanija), a large proportion of whom are women. Shimada says that female artists offer softer, more emotionally inflected conceptual work. And she prefers the term “work with” because her gallerist-artist relationships are more than management and representation. “I want to consider [the gallery] more like a home...for the artist,” Shimada says.

Earlier this year, Shimada decided to move her space in order to meet new people and introduce art in a more casual, just-passing-by manner. She initially considered the Nishi-Shinjuku neighborhood that’s home to Wako Works of Art and Kenji Taki Gallery. But her childhood roots and the high foot-traffic and convenience of centrally-located Akasaka made her new big-window storefront irresistible. 

Why open a gallery on Wall Street? Akasaka may lack the hip of Omotesando and the glitz of Ginza, but compensates with a steady flow of businesspeople shuttling between the twin power bases of Tameike Sanno’s high finance and Nagatacho’s politics. “Red slope” is also home to the national culture body, the Japan Foundation, and its major exhibition space, the Japan Foundation Forum. The Sendagaya basement may have been more “side two” underground, but street-level Akasaka is a more shrewd crossover re-mix. 

Gallerist Junko Shimada

Nevertheless, Shimada holds true to her ideals, opening her new space with Taro Shinoda. Shinoda, 37, studied traditional Japanese landscape design at a special high school, learning to distill natural elements and create the infinite within limited boundaries. When he discovered that art often sought similar results, he was hooked. One of his first major works, a modern, technological version of a Japanese garden, used florescent lights moving on tracks over a pool of white liquid. 

In this show, the artist has constructed a sculptural mobile sound unit, a “sketch” made of parts recycled from his piece in the Yokohama Triennale. A raucous blend of city noises (“like a movie soundtrack,” says Shinoda) careens out of cardboard speaker cabinets stacked on low carts.

This exhibition was held Oct 2001 at Gallery Side 2 in Akasaka, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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