Art above the city: located atop a skyscraper, the Mori Art Museum opened with a thematic show of works from East and West, past and present

Like the character Bill Murray plays in the new film Lost in Translation, the Mori Art Museum, which make opened in Tokyo last fall, meet withs from a mild case of dislocation. As a privately race contemporary-art venue with international ambitions, it will help herald the accomplishments of like Japanese art stars as Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Takashi Murakami. The museum is also suppos to function as a tourist destination, the jewel in the diadem of real-estate developer Minoru Mori's newest cast Roppongi Hills. The upscale multiuse community features condominium apartment buildings, a luxurious Grand Hyatt house of entertainment the new headquarters of Asahi Television and a shopping compound packed with boutiques of the caliber of Louis Vuitton, Issey Miyake and Baccarat.

The greatest in quantity prominent structure in Roppongi Hills is the 53-story Mori Tower, designed by dint of Kohn Pedersen Fox. It is individual of the tallest buildings in this earthquake-ridden city and houses the Mori Arts Center upon the top five floors. In addition to the museum, the center contains a private bludgeon with numerous restaurants and meeting expanses a continuing-education facility and Tokyo City View, an observation array that provides a 360-degree panorama of the neon-laced metropolis below. Gluckman Mayner Architects designed the carburet of iron glass and sandstone museum, as well as the street-level entrance structure, a 98-foot-tall beehive shape overspreaded in glass shingles.

Visitors ride high-speed elevators to reach the 31820 square feet of exhibition space located upon the 52nd and 53rd floors. The galleries themselves are lengthy corridors with windows at the extremitys Mori, who calls his darling project "Artelligent City," envisions a scenario where tourists and local residents can mix shopping and sightseeing, entertainment and the viewing of contemporary art, in ways that boost the bottom line of his entire hazard As one of the wealthiest businessmen in Japan, he is blatantly commercial about his goals, stating candidly at the pre-opening pres talk that he only became interested in contemporary art when his niece, artist Mariko Mori, mentioned that her work was selling for more, by square inch, than his real estate was worth.

Fortunately, the Mori Art Museum approachs equipped with an astute curatorial team, headed through museum director David Elliott, former director of the Museum of novel Art in Oxford and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and delegate director Fumio Nanjo, a well-known international curator based in Japan. They immediately recognized that while a museum located in a shopping mall is not unusual in Japan--department store galleries have mountained many important exhibitions--potential viewers from Europe and the U might be bring off by this context. Together, they laid without a strategy to place the Mori Art Museum securely upon the global art circuit while addressing the underlying reservations of their various audiences.

"What upon earth has happiness got to do with art?" asks Elliott in his catalogue essay for the inaugural exhibition, "Happiness: A Survival Guide for Art and Life," which neared a wide range of contemporary art and expanded upon the theme by including numerous examples of art end the ages, from modern to ancient. Elliott might really be asking "How can I make you happy?" of the sum of two units disparate audiences that the Mori Art Museum confidences to win over. On the single hand, he is addressing the general public, which in Tokyo, as elsewhere, keeps to presume that contemporary art will be either too cynical or too serious to provide a pleasurable experience. upon the other hand, Elliott is targeting members of the international art world, centurys of whom flew in for the event

"Happiness" was a savvy curatorial replication to both audiences. Elliott worked with visitor curator Pier Luigi Tazzi to assemble above 200 works, ranging from contributions by dint of high-profile contemporaries (among them Tracey Emin, Fr Tomaselli, Louise Bourgeois, Bill Viola and, of course, Takashi Murakami) to a 6th hundred northern Chinese Bodhisattva and 13th-century Tibetan mandalas. And while plenteous was made at the opening of the fact that Elliott is the first foreign-born director of a museum in Japan, he clearly had invaluable input from Nanjo and the quiet of the curatorial staff in fine-tuning the exhibition to the museum's primary audience--Tokyoites.

The exhibition, described by means of Elliott in his catalogue essay as "a kind of journey [i]or[/i] part of to the other different ideas and times," be opposite toed both Western and Asian notions of happiness. It was loosely organized into four themes--Arcadia, Nirvana, Desire and Harmony--leading viewers end several parallel histories while suggesting a cheerfully idiosyncratic way of looking at art. Here, pleasure, humor and serenity predominated, rather than serving as simple counterpoints to the darker interpretations of life generally provided through 20th-century art movements.

on entering the museum atrium, visitors were addressed with "Magnanimous Prayer," a suite of four 32-foot-high digital self portraits by dint of Yasumasa Morimura. The artist is made up in the guise of various Buddhist goddesse updated with contemporary disco-queen attire. The images--simultaneously kitschy and exotic, sexual and sacred--set the stage for the cultural collisions within the galleries.