`We need a system that lets people buy art without a lot of hassles.' TOMIO KOYAMA Art dealer

The black-turtlenecked dilettante, his pockets stuffed with cash and a key to a yellow Ferrari, would be welcome at one of Tomio Koyama's galleries in Tokyo. But so would John Smith and Hanako Suzuki, a couple of teenagers with only a little to spend but a big desire to understand and possess art.

Koyama is not your average art dealer. He is on a mission to popularize art-to make it more accessible, while the same time establish a clientele with less-than-fat wallets for new underfed artists.

Koyama, while cultivating young artists and young buyers, has already had big-time success.

At a prestigious New York art auction last year, one modern work from Japan sold for $380,000 (4.2 million yen).

This year another piece by the same artist went for $500,000.

Both were two-meter-high figures of young women who looked as though they had stepped out of an anime, that distinctively Japanese cartoon style.

Represented by Koyama, the artist grabbing the attention and raking in the cash is 41-year-old Takashi Murakami.

At the same auction house, in September this year, a portrait of a young woman with strikingly slanted eyes sold for around $50,000. This time the painter was 43-year-old Yoshitomo Nara-another Koyama artist.

Both are attracting high prices worldwide, rivaling top contemporary American and European artists, and are leaders of the Japanese art scene.

Obvious artistic gifts aside, both have been helped greatly by Koyama, a dealer very unusual in Japan, in that he promotes art by the living, not the dead.

``I have a partnerlike relationship with the artist. In corporate terms, the artist takes care of product development, and the dealer is responsible for publicity and marketing,'' says Koyama, at his main gallery on the banks of the Sumidagawa river in Tokyo.

Born the second son of a liquor merchant in Tokyo's Ningyocho district, Koyama was strongly attracted to the paintings of Vincent van Gogh while still in junior high school.

In his third and final year of junior high he browsed a catalogue from an exhibition by contemporary artist Jasper Johns.

``I had absolutely no idea what was what,'' he recalls.

Koyama set out to unravel the mystery. He rode his bicycle to the up-market Ginza district to visit art galleries, and after high school enrolled in Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

Later, while working at a gallery in Omotesando, he met Murakami. It was 1990 and Murakami was studying for his doctorate also at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

He invited Koyama along to the end-of-year exhibition at the university.

The more he met with artists of his generation, the more he saw the struggle they were having just to make a living in Japan.

Koyama organized an exhibition of Murakami's and Nara's works in 1996 at the gallery where he worked. The paintings all sold for hundreds of thousands of yen each, but it still wasn't enough to cover the cost of renting the gallery.

Koyama knew he needed a more modest space, better suited to exhibiting new artists.

He set out on his own, renting an extremely cheap place for 80,000 yen a month.

But the speculative bubble of the late 1980s, when Japanese corporations thought nothing of spending of millions of dollars on works like ``Sunflowers'' by van Gogh, was long gone. The domestic market had dried up.

``That being the case, we had to look overseas,'' says Koyama, who traveled the world visiting art fairs to sell works by Murakami and Nara.

Koyama opened a second gallery in March, in Yoyogi, a section of Tokyo with many colleges and universities. This salon is aimed late teens and 20-somethings who normally wouldn't think of stepping inside an art gallery much less buying anything.

``We need a system that lets people buy art without a lot of hassles,'' he says.

The Yoyogi gallery features works all priced at less than 100,000 yen, well within the range of some affluent youngsters.

``They could be buying a future Murakami or Nara,'' says Koyama, who is planning another similar gallery in Ginza soon.

``I want to popularize modern art and transform it into a more flexible kind of business, like movies or music,'' he says.

Art sales are constrained because, according to Koyama, the business model is so different from trading in other commodities.

``It's hard to run a business, because it doesn't make money in the short term like movies or music. My generation must change this to make art more comprehensible,'' he says.

He compares the operation of a traditional art gallery to a trading company.

``A gallery buys pictures, then sells them, requiring a great deal of financial sacrifice if they want to promote young artists. This often creates a sort of patron-client relationship with the artist. The position of the gallery is stronger than that of the artist.

``All the while, others are using all their energy to track down pieces by dead artists and are indifferent to contemporary works,'' he says.

``What I'm trying to do,'' Koyama explains, ``is create a business on the lines of what Leo Castelli did in the United States in the 1960s. I manage the artists that appeal to me, but on an equal footing. Rather like an editor collaborates with a novelist, I work with an artist to find the best strategy for selling his or her work.''

Koyama has found a growing number of Japanese artists of his own generation who he wants to work with.

``Distinctive, individual artists are essential to a gallery. Take Yoshitomo Nara, or Takashi Murakami. Only my gallery and one other in Japan handle their works. If we had a hundred such galleries, we could keep a thousand artists active in this country.'' he predicts.

Koyama's business really took off after he went to a meeting of young dealers in Los Angeles soon after opening his own gallery in 1996.

He took more than 50 works by young Japanese artists with him.

Each of the 33 dealers had a room to exhibit art for sale. Koyama was the only one from Asia.

During the five-day fair, Koyama sold about half the works for about $20,000. But there were two other important outcomes.

One, he found customers of all ages and both sexes were genuinely impressed with his enthusiasm for modern Japanese art. He felt energized, an experience he had never felt at a Japanese gallery. It was this sense of justification that inspired his determination to take art to the people.

Equally valuable was his networking with a group of young art dealers from around the globe.

As their respective galleries and businesses grew, the fair in L.A. eventually ended.

But the people he met now provide him with a network to market Japanese artists worldwide. It was through this group that Murakami and Nara got their big breaks.

Koyama's advice for beginners interested in finding and buying art is to ``look around galleries that have something different.

``Then analyze what it is that attracts you to the works, and once you've done that, buy something within your price range. Your interest in pictures will grow if you have some around you all the time.''(IHT/Asahi: December 6,2003) (12/06)