| On a jam-packed subway ride one morning, a Muslim woman in head-scarf-to-covered-toe black sat pressed against a blonde babe in seersucker and Sperry Top-siders. Simultaneously, writers at USA Today churned out a story on Taco Bell’s new launch in downtown Shanghai. Japan Society says…they don’t know, either, but what an interesting question. The nonprofit’s upcoming exhibition, Making a Home: Japanese Contemporary Artists in New York, will be on view October 5, 2007 to September 13, 2008 and will showcase the work of 33 Japanese artists who call New York City home. |
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On a jam-packed subway ride one morning, a Muslim woman in head-scarf-to-covered-toe black sat pressed against a blonde babe in seersucker and Sperry Top-siders. Simultaneously, writers at USA Today churned out a story on Taco Bell’s new launch in downtown Shanghai.
In a world that is at once wonderfully diverse and increasingly homogenous, you have to wonder how loud (or soft) your country speaks for you anymore. Are our nations losing their voices? In the case of art, do we still have a national aesthetic? (Did we ever?)
Japan Society says…they don’t know, either, but what an interesting question. The nonprofit’s upcoming exhibition, Making a Home: Japanese Contemporary Artists in New York, will be on view January 13, 2008 to September 13, 2008 and will showcase the work of 33 Japanese artists who call New York City home. Some of them are leaders of the contemporary art world – Fluxus founding member Yoko Ono, Yasunao Tone, Ushio Shinohara – and some are emerging artists, like Misaki Kawai, Hiroyuki Nakamura and Hiroki Otsuka. Some are sculptors or sound artists, others will hang their works on mannequins stationed around the gallery space, and others will paint the gallery walls themselves. A number of new pieces were also commissioned specifically for the exhibition.
“I wanted to be as diverse as possible in selecting the group,” said Curator Eric C. Shiner. “[The show] is a cross-section of the Japanese aesthetic diaspora.” This is about how that Japanese diaspora has formed in New York City, and everyone’s got something different to say.
“I see myself now as a part of the diversity of the world and that cultivates the essential part of my political stance and my belief in the equality of people,” said Emiko Kasahara, who was born in Tokyo and lives in her studio in Brooklyn. “I will always see myself as a Japanese artist, but certainly an international Japanese one.”
When he was three months old, Yoichiro Yoda’s artist parents brought him here. Unlike him and Ono, for whom the idea of being “international” isn’t strange at all, Kyoko Sera moved to New York a few years ago, when she was 44 years old. According to Shiner, in those few years, Sera’s outlook on life has changed and she feels freer now to be creative, “so it is only a matter of time before her work starts to take on a different feel.”
And so the boundaries continue to blur. Western art and its images have been widespread in Japan since the 1950s, and fully part of the vocabulary of contemporary art there. Shiner saw this firsthand when studying art history at Osaka University, but he says the traditional arts are just as, if not more, important. Art schools there are divided into Western-style painting and Japanese-style painting.
“There are, of course, national or cultural traits in any artist’s work,” said Shiner, “but I think in this day and age, it has to be broadened to include influences from all around the world. Their own culture is now just one piece of the pie.”
