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Yokohama Triennale: Mega-Wave—Towards a New Synthesis

by John McGee

Yayoi Kusama, Narcissus Garden, 1966
(Images courtesy the artists and the Yokohama Triennale)

Think art in Japan means kabuki and Kyoto? Try Yayoi Kusama and Yokohama. Having scored World Cup Soccer 2002, Yokohama’s trophy quest this year is the gilt-edge of “premier art destination.” This week the city welcomes 110 artists from around the world to Japan’s first major exhibition of its kind—Yokohama 2001: International Triennale of Contemporary Art, a.k.a. the Yokohama Triennale. 

Titled “Mega-Wave—Towards a New Synthesis,” the Triennale is an expo of some of the best artists in the world, from the entrancing, landscape-based, phenomenologial sculptures of Icelander Olafur Eliasson to the lively, handwritten-note collages of hearing-impaired American Joseph Grigely. Documenting the complex currents of today’s cultural zeitgeist, this kind of behemoth, super-museum exhibition has become a popular way for cities to position themselves on the expanding contemporary world art map. 

With four years of planning and a ¥600 million budget, the organizers are making a bold announcement of Japan’s arrival on the art scene. Half of this funding comes from the four main organizing bodies—the Japan Foundation, Asahi Shimbun, NHK and the City of Yokohama. The remaining 50 percent, just less than US$3 million, will come from donations and entrance fees. That’s a lot of entrance fees, especially when the average contemporary art museum show in Tokyo gets just 10,000 visitors. Triennale organizers hope to attract 300,000—roughly 1 percent of the population of the Kanto region. They feel that Japan wants and needs this kind of show partly for “entertainment” purposes, but more so because contemporary art can effect positive social change in the country by exposing visitors’ minds to exciting, unusual and new ways of thinking.

Stelarc, Exoskeleton 

Japan may need a contemporary art expo but, with Venice, Kwangju, Documenta and others, does the art world need Japan? To further complicate things, last summer’s debut of Niigata Prefecture’s triennial, “Echigo-Tsumari Art Necklace” (136 artists from 32 countries), would seem to have been this country’s first art extravaganza. Despite the ambitious curatorial guidance of Daikanyama’s Artfront Gallery, however, the Art Necklace was essentially a public art project, an economic salve for a far-flung farming region short on tourists. 

Think different 

To prove the significance of the Yokohama Triennale to Japan and the world, the show’s four curators (yes, four) have distinguished their exhibition with a strong theme, diversity, new work and a plethora of Asian artists. According to their curatorial statement, the show’s title refers to “great waves of change…inundating our entire society,” waves of new technology, social revolution and global environmental problems. The interdisciplinary, new Enlightenment model for this show is a counter-balance to the 20th century drive toward academic over-specialization. The curators seek “to transcend the conventional framework of art…promote greater exchange and dialogue between a broader range of fields, including science and philosophy…[and] create a new, comprehensive vision that brings art and society together as we enter the 21st century.” 

To draw connoisseurs and neophytes alike, the curators have compiled a diverse mix of artists, from 23-year-old animation installation artist Tabaimo to 77-year-old Hungarian architect Yona Friedman. Production is equally varied. Artists and non-artists—an ethnologist, fashion designers, musicians—who make things that function like art will flow together in the mega-wave, creating, the curators hope, “whirlpools of communication...that lead to new images of human possibility.”

As if volume and variety weren’t enough, all of the artists were asked to make new work. Though this is unusual, expensive and complicated, it ensures that even jaded art jetsetters won’t want to miss the Triennale. 

Noboru Subaki + Hisashi Muroi, The Insect World, 2001, inflatable installed
in the InterContinental Hotel

Moreover, with the Triennale being in Japan, 45 percent of the artists are Asian, 30 of those, Japanese. Except for the work of a few people—Yayoi Kusama’s “infinity net” paintings, Yoko Ono’s Fluxus experiments, Takashi Murakami’s semen-lasso whirling manga cowboy and Yoshitomo Nara’s dour, knife-wielding kiddies—Japanese contemporary
art has been, until recently, largely overlooked both at home and abroad. Most Japanese artists still gain international recognition as expatriates living in New York (Kusama), Cologne (Nara), or other major art centers. Likewise, the general availability of quality contemporary art exhibitions in Japan has long been inadequate. 

Determined to remedy this situation, the Japan Foundation (the cultural division of the Japanese Foreign Ministry) formed a study group of curators, professors and bureaucrats several years ago to outline the who, where, why and how of holding a periodic international contemporary art exhibition. Their mission: to promote and export native talent, import the best new art to Japan, spur free and critical thinking and, overall, boost interest in contemporary art in Japan. 

Yokohama, a town of 3.2 million often dismissed as a suburb of Tokyo, was chosen because it had a convenient location, ample space, a symbolic old, red-brick (aka renga) warehouse and money. Other cities were impractical for various reasons. Cramped Tokyo, the obvious choice for many, was bankrupt at the time of initial planning. Kyoto was good in theory—steeped in both traditional arts and radicalism (it's the birthplace of bosozuku motorcycle gangs and live houses, for example)—but lacked appropriate facilities. Yokohama, on the other hand, is open, especially around the main venues in Minato Mirai 21, has European-style buildings as proof of an international history, and is easily accessed by the target audience of Tokyo and Yokohama's combined 15 million inhabitants. 

To choose 110 artists representative of the diversity in current contemporary art, the organizers hired four curators—all men in their early 50s. Though anachronistically a-plural, the panel is varied. Shinji Kohmoto, senior curator at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, was responsible for the recent “Visions of the Body: Fashion or Invisible Corset?” Nobuo Nakamura is director of the Center for Contemporary Art CCA Kitakyushu, an art institute, and has written several books on art. Independent curator Fumio Nanjo has worked on public art projects, e.g. Shinjuku I-Land, and has been a commissioner for the Taipei Biennale and the Japanese commissioner for the Venice Biennale. Akira Tatehata, professor of contemporary art theory and criticism at Tama Art University, has also been Japanese commissioner of the Venice Biennale and used to be a curator at the National Museum of Art, Osaka. 

Navin Rawanchaikul, Unmapping (over the nights 
in Kwangju), 1997 

Finding agreement among them was not always easy. Nanjo confesses, “of course it’s difficult...but if we completely agree, it’s not a collaboration.” Even collaboration wasn’t a gimme: The biggest conflict was whether the Triennale should be four separate shows or one big art mosh-pit.

“Mega-Wave” is a little of both. All four agreed on the first 30 artists. They split the remaining 80 choices equally. According to the theme “Asia as Cultural Passage,” Tatehata invited mainly Asian artists like Thai Navin Rawanchaikul (mobile gallery in a Bangkok taxi), and Chinese Cai Guo Qiang (traditional fireworks, kites and Jacuzzi rock gardens). “Asia,” he says, “doesn’t exist as a fixed idea but is ambiguous, open, always shifting.” Nanjo took a journalistic approach, searching for unknown artists or people exploring the borders of art. For example, Masanori Oda, a Japanese ethnologist who will create an installation from the refuse of other artists and Frenchman Laurent Moriceau, who will collaborate with Japanese fashion collective 20471120. Nakamura sees the Triennale as “a starting point” for meeting and discussion. He followed his CCA interdisciplinary approach, choosing 28 international artists (like Yugoslav-born performance artist Marina Abramovic and Swiss video-maker Pipilotti Rist), architects and musicians under the theme “Future for Today.” Dubious of globalization and collective identities, Kohmoto’s “Advancing Matrix” uses biological metaphors to consider alternative social systems, like Noboru Tsubaki and Hisashi Muroi’s gargantuan inflated cricket nesting in the folds of the InterContinental Hotel, or pioneer experimental musician Yasunao Tone’s cell/parasite audio installation. 

The symbolic aka renga, the Red Brick Warehouse No. 1 

On the waterfront 

The curatorial disagreement spilled from artist selection to the installation of the work—to mix the curators’ themes or separate them? The solution, again a little of both, was partly determined by the available space. For example, low ceilings in the brick warehouse allowed only 25 artists—almost exactly accommodating Kohmoto’s program. Other historic, Western-style buildings—the Port of Yokohama Archives and the Port of Yokohama Memorial Hall—and two galleries inside Queen’s Square Mall house only one or two artists each.

About 70 percent of the artwork, though, will be clustered in small spaces off a “main street” promenade inside the Pacifico Yokohama Exhibition Hall, Minato Mirai 21’s waterfront convention center. Formerly docks and warehouses, futuristic redevelopment district Minato Mirai (literally “Port Future”) has been the site of feverish construction for several years. The result—part Akira, part Disney—is a fantasy of giant indoor malls, Japan’s tallest building (Landmark Tower), the sail-shaped Inter-Continental hotel and Kenzo Tange’s Yokohama Museum of Art. The art route—from the old town buildings, along the waterfront, past a port-side amusement park and malls to Minato Mirai—is an architectural timeline through the last 100 years or so of Yokohama’s maturation, linking the exotic, international history with the postmodern Japanese. 

But the superficial exuberance of heterogeneous architectural novelty belies a deep-seated impotence and lack of direction in Japanese society. “Due to the educational system,” notes Tatehata, “the younger generation has lost its power, curiosity and eccentricity.” Nanjo says that the recent spate of wanton mayhem—stabbing children at school, hijacking buses—shows that “young people want to do something but don’t have models to show them what.” He continues, “We are in the mega-wave...we are in the middle of drastic changes... particularly in Japan.” 

Yoko Ono, Freight Train, 2001

The curators, however, are as optimistic about the onsen-like regenerative properties contemporary art will infuse into Triennale-goers as they are emphatic about the need for change. More than just another entertainment option, they hope their “Mega-Wave,” their tsunami of possibility, can wrench young Japanese people from the undertow of apathy and rote thinking, give them a sense of purpose and, as Nanjo says, “show them how to be creative, see things differently and reconstruct society.” 

Yokohama 2001: International Triennale of Contemporary Art was held Sep 2-Nov 11, 2001 in Yokohama, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

©2006-2008 John McGee. All Rights Reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission.