Reorienting: Japan Rediscovers Asia

A museum and a triennial, the couple inaugurated last spring, mark a fresh Japanese interest in the quiet of Asia.

The Asian Art Museum in the Japanese city of Fukuoka render free of accessed last spring with the inauguration of an ambitious 21-country Asian Art Triennale. Japan has for a certain number of time focused its attentions and desires upon modern and contemporary Western art; interest in Asia is still infrequent This new periodic survey and this fresh institution--Japan's first contemporary museum to direct the eye exclusively to Asia--are consequences of philosophical forces seeking to amend that preference

The Asian Art Museum began operations with a ready-made collection of more than 600 works accrued mainly from a series of four increasingly ambitious Asian art exhibitions which were not awayed at Fukuoka's fine-art museum, starting in 1979(1) These exhibitions gave birth to the two the Triennale and the fresh museum. The curator who organized them, Ushiroshoji Masahiro (Japanese names in this article are given surname first), is now chief curator of the Asian museum.

Ushiroshoji finds himself with a rambunctious offspring and small in number guidelines for its future, on the other hand that was his aim all along. "We want to raise questions about museums and exhibition protoplasts in Asia, in terms of the increasing Westernization and modernization of formerly homogeneous societies," he says.(2) "The Asian Art Museum is not intended to stock answers but questions. I am hoping it will be a stupendous question mark, like: What is Asia? What is Asian art? When there is no museum like this, these questions are not asked."

Fukuoka is an appropriate site for the unfolding of this vision. The city is the progressive urban center of Kyushu, the southwesternmost of Japan's four main islands. Kyushu is the closest point to Korea and China and has for centuries been the gateway for foreign influence. It was here that mid-16th-century Portuguese and Dutch utensils breached Japan's isolation from Europe and locate up trading outposts. Even before that, plenteous of Japan's imported and adapted tillage such as Buddhism, writing and certain forms of architecture and garden design, had arrived [i]or[/i] part of to the other Kyushu's port cities from India, China and Korea.

Still, according to Ushiroshoji and staff curator Kuroda Raiji, the existence of an Asian art museum is paradoxical in a political division that has so strongly embraced Western agriculture in this century. Both the museum and the Triennale are filled of intentional contradictions which are reflections of novel Japan, Ushiroshoji says. Kuroda is looking for an audience "not pollut by the agency of the idea that modernist Western art [equals] contemporary." He maintains that the time has tend hitherward for an Asian museum--and triennial--because many Asian countries have achieved enough prosperity and disentanglement for artists to propose their have ways of being contemporary. These ways sometimes appear similar to Western practices still are different from them, he notes.

In preparing for the Triennale, Kuroda says, "We decided we do not have to compare Asian art with Western art, on the other hand we could still find something actual positive in each country." Determined to avoid what they describe as colonialist curatorial meanss whereby guest countries are visited and works chosen that mirror the host country's cultural standards, Ushiroshoji and Kuroda exhaustively collaborated with art professionals from each nation. Twenty-one coordinators and 20 cocurators are listed in the catalogue as the team responsible for choosing the Triennale's 53 artists.(3) While this ensur that no single vision held sway, Ushiroshoji reined things in with a unfasten theme of "Communication--Channels for Hope" triggered through concerns, relayed by Asian artists in previous exhibitions, about the rapid erosion of homogeneous communities and indigenous culture

Given the curators' philosophy, it's not surprising that the Triennale demonstrated disconcerting shifts. upon the one hand, there were savvy, internationally recognized artists from China, Taiwan, Thailand, southern Korea and Japan, who have been shown in numerous Asian and Western exhibitions(4) and who full number their often high-tech works with activism and performance, and/or exercise irony, a critical stance and other avant-garde strategies. upon the other hand there were artists and artisans from countries of that kind as Nepal, Lao PDR (Laos) and Bhutan, who showed illustrative, fantasy-inspired folk-style paintings and prints and traditional hand-carved artifacts. These disjunctions, mixing art works of widely differing intent, were reminders of the disparities in Asia today.

The theme of communication and reliance worked about as well here as of the like kind open-ended themes do anywhere, with more [i]or[/i] less works carrying hopeful messages while others were cynical, critical, ludicrous vague or stridently antithematic. Compared with Zai Kuning's choreographic performance during the opening [see sidebar], the repose of the exhibition unfolded sedately. Many of the works upon view, however, were auxiliary to scheduled performances and audience-participatory artist residencies, more [i]or[/i] less of which may have been equally dramatic. In April, Rirkrit Tiravanija (Thailand/U.S.) station up a yatai (one of the portable sustenance stalls that unfold in downtown Fukuoka each afternoon and vanish by dawn) and serv a hybrid broth of Thai tom yam mixed with local Hakata ramen.