Contemporary Art in Japan
After Gutai and Mono-ha, artists in Japan stopped gathering under a single banner. This band is less a style than a place to put the people who are carrying on, each by their own method. Sugimoto Hiroshi began photographing Seascapes in 1980. A photograph divided into an upper and a lower half by the horizon, taken at seas all over the world for more than forty years. Every sea looks the same, and every one of them is different. For the Theaters series, he left the shutter open in a cinema for the length of one whole film. The screen blows out to pure white. Photograph the whole of a film and nothing is photographed. Aida Makoto made War Picture Returns between 1995 and 1999, walking straight into the war painting, the place Japanese art least wants to touch (this is fifty years after the story I wrote in the Yokoyama Taikan part of this map). Nawa Kohei began PixCell in 2002. Cover a taxidermied animal in glass spheres and the surface turns into a lens, so the figure inside never settles anywhere. Chim↑Pom formed in 2005. They keep placing works out in the city, on the line between what is permitted and what is not. Yamaguchi Akira paints present-day landscapes with fukinuki yatai, the device of the Rakuchu Rakugai screens (views of Kyoto in and out of the capital) in which the roof is lifted off so you can see inside. His own explanation, though, is not a return. He says he wanted to find a way forward in the Japanese painting that came before Western painting arrived, and to take the modernization of Japanese art and do it over once more, himself. He is not being nostalgic; he is doing it over. That Aida Makoto invited him into a group show in 1997 is the surest connection in this band. Otake Shinro has been making the scrapbooks since 1977, and there are now more than seventy of them. In 1996, hearing that the neon letters reading Uwajima Station were about to be thrown away, he climbed onto the roof himself, cut the welds, lowered the letters one at a time on a rope and carried them home. In 2009 he made the Naoshima Bath I Love Yu on Naoshima, a bathhouse you can actually get into. Kato Izumi gave up the brush and puts paint on with his bare hands. He carves wood and stone as well. When he was chosen for the Venice Biennale in 2007, he was in no school at all. Asked about a connection to Japanese Pop Art, he answered that there were parts he agreed with and parts he did not. What they have in common is that none of them has claimed a school of their own. The first discovery of this map was that the name comes later, and usually as an insult, but here the name itself has not yet been given by anyone.