Mori Museum Events Postponed

Dear Julia Friedman,

Exhibition Openings of "French Window" and "MAM Project 014" 
and Exhibition-Related Programs/events to Be Postponed Until Further Notice

Mori Art Museum would like to express our deepest condolences to those affected by the Tohoku and Pacific Ocean Earthquake on last Friday, March 11.
Out of the concerns for the power consumption caused by the earthquake and to ensure safety, Mori Art Museum has decided to postpone the scheduled opening of two exhibitions, "French Window: Looking at Contemporary Art through the Marcel Duchamp Prize" and "MAM Project 014: Taguchi Yukihiro" until further notice. 

Also in accordance, some of the scheduled exhibition-related programs and events are to be cancelled.
The new dates for the exhibition opening and related programs/events will be announced once determined.
The Museum would like to announce that there have been no human injuries, no damages to the facilities and artworks.
We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

1. Exhibitions Subject to Postponement
"French Window: Looking at Contemporary Art through the Marcel Duchamp Prize" 
"MAM Project 014: Taguchi Yukihiro"

2. Scheduled Events and Public Programs, Subject to Cancellation
- 17 March [Thu]: Press Conference, Exhibition Preview, Opening Ceremony and Reception
- 18 March [Fri]: Talk Session "Looking at the French Art Scene through the Marcel Duchamp Prize"
- 19 March [Sat]: Artists Talk ("French Window" Exhibition)
- 21 March [Mon]: Artist Talk ("MAM 014 Project: Taguchi Yukihiro" Exhibition) 

Yours sincerely,

Mr. Watanabe, Ms. Taki, Ms. Shinagawa, Ms. Okazaki
Public Relations
Mori Art Museum
Tel: +81-3-6406-6111
Fax: +81-3-6406-9351
www.mori.art.museum/eng
pr@mori.art.museum
53F Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, 6-10-1 Roppongi,
Minato-ku, Tokyo Japan

Happy New Year! Top Tokyo Exhibitions of 2010

To celebrate the glorious end of Tokyo's 2010 exhibition year I put together the list of three of my favorite shows of the year. For the sake of even distribution I picked one show by an emerging gallery, one show by an established gallery and one museum show. 

Venue: TANA Bookshelf Gallery

Exhibition: SHIBUHAUSE installation

SHIBUHAUSE exhibition/performance installation view 

 Why: TANA was my most exciting discovery of the year. This new gallery unhinged itself from the constrictions brought on by commercial pressures without compromising its creative ambitions. Great new addition to the Tokyo art world.

Venue: Rat Hole Gallery

Exhibition: Miwa Yanagi "Lullaby"

“Lullaby,” 2009, 12 minutes, edition of 5, image courtesy of the gallery

Why: This show cleverly combined the works from an older photographic Fairy Tales series (2004–2006) with the her new video work Lullaby (2009) using the images in the photographs as a poetic key to unlock the symbolic cache of the video. I reviewed this show in the May 2010 issue of Artforum.

 

 

Venue: Mori Art Museum

Exhibition: Roppongi Crossing: Can there be Art?

KAMI & friends scateboarding performance, photo Joji Shimamoto

Why: This super-sized exhibition, for all the faults other reviewers noticed, definitely succeeded in showing the multifarious character of contemporary Japanese art. 

 

Roppongi Crossing 2010

This year's Roppongi Crossing exhibition poses a mega-rhetorical question: "Can There Be Art?" We know the answer, of course, but for the sake of doing a convincing lineup of the new talent, the Mori Art Museum built the show around the theme of street-generated art using the works works of young Japanese artists. Similarly to the VOCA exhibition, the Roppongi Crossing participants were chosen by a team of contemporary art professionals, in this case three Mori curators. But unlike VOCA that limited itself to the two-dimensional works, the Mori show offers a variety of different media. The exhibition will culminate in the allocation of the "People's Prize" which will be announced on June 13. If you visit the exhibition by June 8th you will have a chance to put your vote in the ballot box. I copy below the list of artist whose work will be on view from March 20 through July 4. Do not miss Artists' Talks on March 20th and June 5th (both 14:00 to 16:00) and check the "Public Programs" page for performance times.

Aikawa Masaru Amemiya Yosuke Aoyama Satoru Chim↑Pom contact Gonzo Dumb Type HITOTZUKI (Kami + Sasu) Kato Tsubasa Koganezawa Takehito Morimura Yasumasa

Rogues' Gallery Shiga Lieko Suzuki Hiraku Takamine Tadasu Teruya Yuken UJINO Yahata Aki Yokomizo Shizuka Yoneda Tomoko

"Medicine and Art: Imaging a Future for Life and Love"

View of the video installation by Magnus Wallin (Excercise Parade, 2001, double backprojection, 3-D animated video). Image courtesy Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin

Despite its generic sounding title the Mori Art Museum’s current show insightfully combines the old (Leonardo da Vinci) and the new (Damien Hirst), medical equipment and art, Nihonga painting and contemporary installations. The common tissue here, literally, is the human body—its make-up, its existence and functions, its alteration and deterioration.

The exhibition is immensely enjoyable as it presents more than a mere glimpse into the ways artists see humans and humanity. Their approaches, that run a gamut from admiration to pity, from curiosity to detachment, inevitably provoke a similar range of emotions in the visitors to the show. Many instances that cause such poignant reactions, not surprisingly, involve death, children and premature aging: Walter Schels’ sullen photographs of an 18 month-old shortly before and immediately after her death (2004) and Patricia Piccinini’s prematurely aged Game Boys (2002) are just two examples. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Gilles Barbier's cheeky installation of the aged superheroes (L'Hospice, 2002), featuring saggy and wrinkly Wonderwoman, prone Captan America fit with an i.v., Superman supported by a walker and the Catwoman, catnapping in front of the turned off television.

Because the three sections of the show emphasize primarily the subject matter of the works, those who come in hopes of unadulterated aesthetic experiences from the art featured alongside various tomes on anatomy and scores of prosthetic limbs might end up disappointed. To be sure, looking through the medical artifacts (most of them from the Wellcome Trust collection) requires a different mode of seeing from that suitable for conceptual art, pen drawings by Leonardo, or Nihonga painting. The show’s visual schmorgesborg of art and manufactured articles forces the viewers to arbitrate continuously between their thinking and their emotions. Ironically, it is our very humanity that hinders our perception. The emotional stakes make it next to impossible to step back and allow for a duly museum detachment.

A tip: when you make it to Lee Byung Ho’s 2009 Vanitas Bust in the room before last (right next to the Game Boys), take your time looking at the bust. The show is on through February 28, 2010.

Ai WeiWei at the Mori

Curated by Mami Kataoka. If you have not seen this show yet, it will be on through November 8. I post my review below.

Ai Weiwei: According to What? expertly showcases Ai’s flipping’em-all-meets-exemplary-social-consciousness attitude; it propels viewers out of the sterility of museum experience by the evocation of dead schoolchildren and on-camera destruction of an ancient artifact. Yet the exhibition is not at all a forum for a politicized conceptual artist rebelling against totalitarian oppression or aesthetic colonialism. The work on view at the Mori Art Museum is too subtle, diverse and sophisticated to be read as straightforward visual declaration of political views.

Not that politics should be ignored. Last August Ai was among twelve people detained by Chinese police in order to prevent them from attending the trial of a dissident, Tan Zuoren. Tan is an activist whose writings on the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising and the investigations of schoolchildren’s deaths in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake landed him in jail on charges of subversion. The Sichuan tragedy was exacerbated by the shabby construction of local schools where many children were buried alive while nearby government offices, built to a higher standard, remained standing. Without much regard for his own personal safety Ai Weiwei became a vocal critic of the government that, in the aftermath of the quake, was making no effort to release the names of the young victims. Ai set up a blog, and through a network of volunteers began to gather the information, publishing children’s names and vital statistics for the world to see. When some expressed their surprise at Ai’s altruistic social activism, he made it clear that it was his responsibility as an artist to act on behalf of those who so needed it.

The objects in the Mori galleries are about the past and present of Ai’s motherland as much as they are about his impressive knowledge of the recent and not so recent history of Western art. His 2006 wooden sculpture Untitled is a truncated icosahedron based on Leonardo da Vinci’s exploration of pure geometry published in Luca Pacioli’s 1509 De Divina Proportione. But the object’s architectural scale and its execution, using traditional Chinese joinery, suggest for it a distinct space somewhere between minimalist and the Arts and Crafts. At the same time, Ai’s painstaking searching out the right materials for the right objects—freshwater pearls, rare woods, blocs of pressed tea—makes him a rightful heir of Russian Constructivism mediated by way of minimalist experimentation (although much of his work would certainly be too metaphorical for Donald Judd). Historical reference also lurks in the antique jar with Coca-Cola label painted on it (Coca-Cola Vase, 1997) and in various liquor bottles encapsulating Tang Dynasty figurines (1993–1994). These provide a tongue-in-cheek conjuring up of Pop as they pointedly question the value of authenticity in art, whether modern or antique.

Equally witty is the 2003 Forever, an assemblage of 42 not quite functional bicycles (all missing steering bars and pedals), linked into a multi-tier circular construction. This comment on the formerly ubiquitous, now endangered, mode of transportation for the Chinese bears an ironically eternal brand name of the Forever Company—a popular bicycle manufacturer from Shanghai. The work successfully combines social/spatial metaphors with minimalist specificity. Of course, for contemporary art a bicycle in museum context is anything but a neutral object: here, Alexander Dumas’ advice on finding the culprit can be appropriately paraphrased into “cherchez Duchamp.” Ai’s use of pre-fabricated, non-art objects such as bottles, furniture and bicycle parts inevitably relates him to Duchamp, perhaps, again via minimalist adaptations of objects meant for uses other than museum display. As the artist himself wittily pointed out during the eight-hour marathon symposium held in conjunction with his exhibition: “Culture is a readymade,” and much of what is shown at the Mori runs the spectrum from specific objects to meta-comments on culture(s), all serving to get his message across.

So what is Ai’s message? The Mori show is all about breaking apart and putting together. Among the objects on display are the 1995 Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn— a photographic triptych that documents the artist’s notoriously iconoclastic act, and his 2008 Snake Ceiling,—a site-specific installation that alludes to a different kind of destruction—largely preventable deaths of schoolchildren in the Sichuan earthquake. The familiar Chinese snake is actually composed of the students’ backpacks, small ones used by preschoolers and the adult-sized ones made for the older kids. A photographic series called Provisional Landscape (2002–2008) is a deconstruction of a cityscape that changes over the period of six years as the government destroys, empties and rebuilds a neighborhood; the Map of China (2006) is a 3-D depiction of the country assembled in rare wood. In all of that building and compiling Ai relies on conceptual games of proportion, scale and multiplicity. His 2004 Chan’an Boulevard tracks the relationship of time and space as the artist filmed a minute of tape every 50 meters along the mammoth forty-five kilometer boulevard. The Bowl of Pearls (2006) is a pair of bulky bowls, each one meter in diameter, full of fresh-water pearls—their minute size emphasizing the discrepancy with their enormous quantity. Kippe (2006) is an elaborate construction of tightly laid pieces of wood from demolished temples stacked in between a set of parallel bars; the Ton of Tea (2006) is a cubic meter block of pressed Yunnan Province tea, its compressed weight measuring exactly one ton. With great humor and humility, the artist breaks down actual and visual matter into the smallest units in order to construct it anew, creating objects full of references to geopolitics and aesthetics. Still, it is not all for the eye and the brain. Ai’s Mori Museum exhibition also gratifies visitors by its multi-sensory quality. Many of the rooms first draw in the viewers through their smell—pu’er tea, exotic wood—only then revealing Ai’s mental gymnastics of scale and multiplicity, his social metaphors and his cultural palimpsests.