Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Tom Sanford at Tomoya Saito Gallery

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

Tom Sanford at Tomoya Saito Gallery

by John McGee

With the opening of his space a month ago, Tomoya Saito became a full-time gallerist. Full-time as in 24/7, 365 days a year: Saito’s apartment is the gallery. Saito not only surrounds himself with art, but with artists—he’s also turned this second floor of an old house in Shibuya into a hostel for visitors like gallery-opening painter Tom Sanford. 

Painting of Tupac Shakur by Tom Sanford
(Image courtesy the artist)

Burbling over with sincerity and enthusiasm, Saito, 37, explains that his “new sense gallery” is an exciting confluence of contemporary art exhibitions and monthly techno events (he’s a big fan). “DJ parties are important for democracy in art,” says the gallerist. He hopes this combination will draw a diverse mix of art collectors, artists, local young people, IT professionals from Shibuya’s Bit Valley, designers, etc. But don’t the neighbors in this quiet residential area worry about an inflow of hipsters and thumping music? Apparently not. Saito claims that even the 73-year-old oba-san who lives next door likes dancing. 

To find work for his gallery, Saito spent three months in New York, visiting more than 400 artists. He especially liked Brooklyn, where he and Sanford met. The two have more in common than their initials: they’re both attracted to an overlapping of art and music. 

“Hip hop is incredibly important to US culture," says Sanford. As a white suburban youth, Sanford, 26, idolized the mythopoetic world of Public Enemy and other hip hop maestros. He has since taken a slightly more critical view, lauding the musical style for its innovation and postmodern hybridization. 

Using both old school and new school methods—oil, acrylic and glaze on panel—Sanford collages images from American hip hop magazines like "The Source" with the backgrounds and compositions of early Christian icon paintings. For example, the dead body of Jesus lying on a rock in the Avignon Pieta becomes Tupac Shakur’s bullet-ridden body on the hood of a BMW. 

Sanford’s Columbia University-educated mind makes myriad analogies between the semiotics of hip hop's visual culture and pre-Renaissance Christian art: the orant (praying) gestures of icons and sign-throwing gangsters as a “shorthand” for the faithful; the politics of forging an appropriate identity; the concerns about mortality and resurrection; and East Coast/Orthodox-West Coast/Catholic rivalries. Stopping short of calling it a new religion, Sanford says, “hip hop represents a subculture...kids take cues and identify themselves with it.” Nevertheless, he concedes that even though hip hop's complex myth-making and elaborate conspiracies penetrate deep into youth culture, they are little more than sales gimmicks. 

What’s Sanford’s moral stance, given the negative stereotypes the music promotes—the apotheosis of greed and power, usually at the end of a gun barrel? The artist says, “I’m not in the business of preaching...I think they’re interesting pictures.” 

The Tomoya Saito Gallery is in a knot of charming, well-tended 40-year-old wooden Japanese houses just off Meiji Dori between Shibuya and Ebisu. It's around the back and upstairs from the streetside Panda Gallery. Saito's next music event is a Christmas party featuring house/goa/techno DJ Yoich ("Mismatched music and art is interesting," says the gallerist).

This exhibition was held Dec 2001-Jan 2002 at Tomoya Saito Gallery in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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