Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Twelve Japanese Artists from the Venice Biennale 1952-2001

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Twelve Japanese Artists from the Venice Biennale 1952-2001

by John McGee

Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, Sign Pole, 1968 and A Bridge in May, 1968
(Photos courtesy Art Tower Mito)

Mito, Ibaraki and Venice, Italy. Both surrounded by water. Both ... All right, the two have almost nothing in common. This multi-generational group show at Art Tower Mito, however, highlights one important connection—contemporary art. 

Since 1952, a total of 78 Japanese artists have participated in the world-renowned Venice Biennale of contemporary art. From those, 12 artists with familial, academic, or other connections to Ibaraki were selected for this exhibition. 

Curator Eriko Osaka wanted to display the diversity of Japanese contemporary art and show the continuing “vivid activity” of the artists who have been in the Biennale. With the Biennale and Ibaraki as frames, this exhibition “shows the development of contemporary art, the power of the artists, and how contemporary art talks about our time,” according to Osaka.

In general, the exhibition feels like a series of solo shows. There are documentary-style photos of Osaka Stadium (Naoya Hatakeyama), suspension experiments (Morio Shinoda), and an installation of hats, frying pans and other objects hanging from the ceiling (Ay-O). But it is a useful introduction to Japanese artists considered important at different points over the last 50 years. 

In one room, Kosho Ito (who appeared in the 1984 Venice Biennale) covered the floor and part of one wall of a gallery with neat rows of ceramic sculpture. Large maroon chunks—which appear to be torn from mud flats—were fired from frozen clay. Smaller grayish, rough-hewn nodules shine like opalescent gravel. In the next gallery, a red revolving police light blinks out from one of the minimalist, translucent acrylic and light sculptures by Katsuhiro Yamaguchi (1968). 

Katsuhiko Hibino (1995) held workshops where over 100 people built a variety of toy-car-sized bridges from paper, cardboard and wood. Hibino connected the bridges into long stretches of overpasses and curving off ramps that meander through the gallery like Tokyo's elevated freeway.

Katsuhiko Hibino, on the bridge, 2002, mixed media

Tadashi Kawamata recreated a site-specific piece. In 1982, his elevated orange cedar plank platform-cum-shelter banked around the back of the Japanese Pavilion in Venice like a fragment of a poorly constructed ship's hull. At Mito, he has installed it on a purple-tiled outdoor walkway, above a fountain. 

In addition to comparing different periods of some of the artists, this exhibition, according to Osaka, also traces the history of the Japanese Pavilion. At Japan's first Biennale appearance in 1952, the traditional Japanese landscapes of Taikan Yokoyama—a superstar earlier in the century—hung alongside modern paintings. In 1958, Yoshi Kinouchi showed his Rodin-influenced lumpy, full-figured crouching women in terra cotta. Gradually, though, Japanese curators became more interested in younger artists and wanted to show “up-to-date art,” says Osaka. 

That might include new media artists like Tatsuo Miyajima (1999) or Yoichiro Kawaguchi (1995). Each of the teal-green LEDs etched in the lightly smoked mirror of Miyajima's stunning new piece counts from one to nine at different rates. At zero, the LED goes blank. Thus, different parts of the field of roughly 200 counters are constantly and randomly blinking. Kawaguchi's “hi-vision” 3-D computer graphics videos take viewers on fantastic voyages inside dense color-patterned worlds of spinning, bulging, undulating orbs and tubules that rapidly rise and shrink. 

By the way, Mito, like Venice, has at least one beautiful tower—an elongated spiral of equilateral titanium triangles marking the 100th anniversary of the town and rising from the middle of the Arata Isozaki-designed 1989 Art Tower Mito complex.

The Twelve Japanese Artists from the Venice Biennale 1952-2001 exhibition was held Nov-Dec at Art Tower Mito in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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