In Sight/ Arts & Entertainment: A new breed of artists brings art center back to the now

BY JEFF MICHAEL HAMMOND, CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Since opening just over a year ago now, the National Art Center, Tokyo (NACT) has, like many a Tokyo museum, held a number of exhibitions of crowd-pulling, big name artists (usually long since dead). In NACT's case it was Monet and Vermeer. In addition to staging these high-profile shows, one of the museum's professed aims, however, is the important one of introducing the public to contemporary artists. The museum's opening exhibition, "Living in the Material World: 'Things' in Art of the 20th Century and Beyond," was dedicated to this ideal as is its current exhibition, "Artist File 2008--The NACT Annual Show of Contemporary Art," which introduces viewers to eight artists, six from Japan and two from abroad. "We wanted to focus on individual artists, so we chose not to limit them by generation, media or nationality," says the exhibition's curator Yusuke Minami. In addition, there is no unifying theme or concept uniting the choice of works, either, which can make for an uneven flow of ideas from section to section, but conversely, allows each artist a huge amount of freedom. With artists being given one or more rooms each, the exhibition, according to Minami, "works like a collection of individual exhibitions."

One of the most delightful of these separate exhibitions is that by Hiroe Saeki, whose high quality and minutely detailed pencil works on smooth white Kent paper in some ways bridge the gap between traditional Japanese artistic techniques and contemporary art. The highly decorative manner of her approach is reminiscent of the Rimpa school of artists from 17th-century Japan, but her choice of subjects integrates traditional motifs of Japanese art (such as trees, flowers and birds) with twinkling ladies' jewelery, mobile phones and other trinkets of the modern age, all of these elements delicately transforming into each other.

These compositions are all set against vast expanses of white paper, or, rather, the white spaces are used as an integral part of the overall composition--another technique often used in traditional Japanese art, albeit in a softer, hazier manner. "Of course, Saeki knows about traditional Japanese art," says Minami, "but her materials are very different, and her blank space is quite harsh. It reminds me of a computer screen; it has a sense of the digital."

Around the corner from there, if the colors on the fabrics that form Masanori Sukenari's "Invention and Sinfonia FL." remind you of India, this is no coincidence, as the saffron, white and green are taken from that country's tricolor flag and re-worked into different patterns.

"The colors are from the Indian flag, but it is not Sukenari's aim to do anything political," Minami says.

"I think he is interested in the idea of the flag, and the idea of painting and the space in-between."

The piece was originally created as part of a site-specific work; the cloths were hung as flags outside the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi in 2007. With the change of site, not just the location but also the way we see them has changed. Now hanging flat on the wall, they could also be seen as similar to abstract paintings, even if that wasn't the artist's original intention.

Unlike a lot of contemporary art, most of the work in "Artist File 2008" is primarily aimed directly at your eyes and your emotions, rather than your capacity for abstract conceptualization, and in this sense is a pleasurable and relatively easy show to stroll through. "A lot of contemporary art can be 'difficult,' so I wanted this exhibition to be enjoyable." Minami says.

One that seems too heavy on concept and too thin on visual poetry, however, is Mio Shirai's often dully-lit video works on the nature of artistic expression. Even evoking the spirit of the artist Marcel Duchamp in "The Creative Act" (through reading the text of one of his speeches) seems insufficient. Duchamp, despite being a great art provocateur, was also acutely aware of the importance of sensuality in his choice of imagery (even found in objects such as a simple bicycle wheel or a urinal), something which these images tend to lack.

The same could not be said of the low-hung horizons of Finnish' photographer Elina Brotherus' misty, atmospheric landscapes, nor could it be said of Polixeni Papapetrou's vivid portrayals of Australia. The sensual imagery in Papapetrou's "Haunted Country" photo series concerns Australians' ambiguous interaction with the awe-inspiring nature and landscape of the outback. In particular, it takes some of its inspiration from the 1975 Peter Weir film "Picnic at Hanging Rock," a tale of three girls and a teacher who go missing on a school trip near the mysterious rock formation of the title. Her images are rich in color and imagery and seem to resonate somewhere in our subconscious, inspiring fascination and uneasiness in equal measure.

Visitors may have a similar kind of response to "Hako" by Hiraki Sawa, a six-channel video installation in which the six screens simultaneously show different dreamlike images--a clock ticking unusually fast, a Ferris wheel on a deserted beach, flickering shadows on a wall. "The work is like fragments of a story or fragments of memories," says Minami, "It's not Sawa's aim to tell a story, but rather to allow the visitors to connect the fragments in their own way."

NACT intends to continue "Artist File" every year, and is already planning next year's show. If they keep up the quality of this year's opening exhibition, in time it will surely become a benchmark for quality contemporary art in Japan.

* * *

"Artist File 2008--The NACT Annual Show of Contemporary Art" continues at the National Art Center, Tokyo through May 6.(IHT/Asahi: March 21,2008)