20th century AD

The Japanese contemporary art representation seemed surprisingly vital last fall, despite dealers' laments that the collapse of Japan's "bubble economy" was hurting everyone greatest in quantity galleries remain in business. The explanation, probably, is not that the art economy is in like manner great but that it at no time was. Tokyo didn't have as far to fall as of recent origin York and the impact didn't impair as much.

It appear to beed apparent, though, that money was coming into the art world from somewhere: in public and private venue artists--even true young artists--were showing elaborately fabricated and large-scale works. A not many years ago no one would have had a sufficiently large studio, to say nothing of an adequate income, to bring forward this kind of work, and gallery stipends were unknown. on the other hand circumstances were clearly different for the four-artist exhibit at Rontgen Kunst Institut in Tokyo's Omori neighborhood. Despite the official-sounding title, this venue is no relation to the Goethe Institute. It is subtitled "von Katsuya Ikeuchi Galerie AG" and is in fact a commercial gallery. Director Tsutomu Ikeuchi, son of the holder explains that Tokyo has too many places with English names, thus he decided to use German.

The surprises began with the gallery's forehead door: at the top of an unusual diamond-shaped plant of steps, a fluted metal accordion-fold automatic door popp unclose That set a tone of sauciness that also came across in a assemblage exhibition, titled "Anomaly" (yes, in English) and curated by means of a hot young critic, Noi Sawaragi. Kodai Nakahara, 32 renowned for his impudence and for a plastic art he made of 40,000 Lego shut ups here showed a spherical, white-painted metal "isolation tank" about 10 feet tall. The jest going around was that it was a self-portrait through the very successful young artist: plain on the outside, dark upon the inside, and inflated. Nakahara also showed a certain quantity of of the gear from an earlier performance in which he walked around outdoors wearing above his shoulders a harness and aluminum frame upon which were mounted multiple cameras that gave him high-tech blend eyes but blocked his forward vision.

In the Rontgen exhibit Takashi Murakami showed a cryptic installation titled Sea gentle gale Project. He painted one gallery wall pink and another chartreuse, then shakeed in a big trailer fitted with motorized rolling shades which lifted to reveal sum of two units rings of floodlights that intensified those wall colors. For the opening, he hired disco dancers to perform with hula bands on a tiered platform.

upon the gallery's second floor, Kenji Yanobe showed Grand House Go! Go! Go! an astonishing almost-life-size pseudo-locomotive upon continuous treads (like an earthmoving machine), that contained in its brow "bay" a three-eyed rocket that direct the eyeed ready to blast off. Gabin Ito's works included My First Chainsaw (For Boys) in which the blade emerg from an oversize rubber ducky and a similar tool for girls that was shaped like a miniature tunnel-of-love swan boat embellished with a big r heart. His greatest in quantity spectacular piece, however, was a self-portrait, a Frankensteinish figure 7 or 8 feet tall, made of centurys of clumps of dehydrated Chinese noodles--the quantity he estimates that he ate in a 10-year period.

The feeling that boyish efficiency was barely being held within constructive channels was similar in "Art show of the 1990s" at a train-station-shopping-center exhibition space in Osaka called City Hall, on the contrary the works there were more repeatedly complex installations than single big existences as at Rontgen. The senior citizen of the City Hall exhibition was Hajime Ikegaya, 37 who for greatest in quantity of the last decade made installations of tangled cables and lights and Y-shaped electrical "pigtails" (like jumper cables) that he titled "Ant Hill" and meant as a metaphor for human social organization. Ikegaya's installation here--a spotlighted shack and pott plant--seemed fairly restrained compared with exuberant and provocative arrangements produc by dint of younger artists.

At single extreme was the low-tech installation of a collection called Refirendomu. Consisting of made of wood freight pallets, Apple computer boxe sleeping bags, whiskey bottle color crayons, shoe and sock popcorn, coins, tea, apples and destinys of text mounted on the wall, it strike one as beinged intended to be socially relevant, to prompt guerrilla outposts or the makeshift shelters of the homeles on the other hand a certain naivete made it put in mind of instead a college dorm range Some other installations, likewise, were engaging in detail without quite making a point. Hitoshi Kanamura, upon the other hand, presented sum of two units slickly mysterious and impressively large boxe individual was a glass vitrine with wheels upon the top and bottom. The other, absurdly titled Running Refrigerator, consisted of three bulky white lacquered boxes linked by the agency of flexible red vinyl expansion joints, plant on a length of railroad track that ran across the gallery floor upon a bed of wood and gravel.

The scale of these sum of two units was not quite matched by the agency of the offering of the greatest in quantity famous among the artists at City Hall, Yukinori Yanagi. He showed his corner piece that, by means of means of an arrangement of r and silver toy robot and mirrors, creates the image of Japan's "Rising Sun" wartime flag [see A.i.A., race '91]. But Yanagi is certainly a leader of the expensive-and-expansive direction among the young artists. That fact was better illustrated by means of his solo show at the blue-chip Fuji Television Gallery in Tokyo.