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Japan’s environments: Natural, local, global, imperial
In the third and final article of our Japan week, we take a look at the ways that various Japanese museums and galleries approach differing environments and cultural contexts...
April 27, 2023
The natural environment matters in Japanese culture, and many cultural institutions too explore the ‘coexistence’ or symbiotic relationship between human art and nature. Atop a hill in Hakone, a historic post station along the Old Tōkaidō Road, the POLA Museum uses glass architecture to become part of the national park. The blend of natural and artificial lights play with our perceptions of the art on display; a wholly unique experience.
Its current exhibition, Interior Visions, excels when it looks through windows, which challenge the binary between inside and outside, portraits and landscapes. (Blink and you’ll miss Henri Matisse’s Mediterranean ‘Woman by the Window’ (1935), the only work left unlit.)
Like its permanent collection, it is a parade through 19th and 20th century French art. There though, we stop off with Léonard Foujita (Fujita Tsuguharu), a Japanese artist often excluded and overlooked from Parisian art history and, domestically, reduced to his cats. Here, he fits in with his contemporaries, but also goes further in his range of media, and deeper into the city.
Interior Visions gives Berthe Morisot, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and Wolfgang Tillmans rooms of their own, but Kusama Yayoi is the only Japanese artist afforded the same space. (The others, Sato Midori and Moriyama Yuichiro, and Takada Akiko and Masako, work in collaboration.)
It’s a different story outside; if the indoors are home to establishment, European sculptures, POLA’s outdoor Nature Trail features exclusively contemporary Asian artists, many exhibiting on their own soil.
With its urban outpost in Tokyo, the extensive POLA collection comes from the cash from the eponymous cosmetics business. Indeed, many Japanese shops and department stores also have museums and exhibition spaces in them, blurring another boundary between consumer/culture.
Kusama is capitalised on Naoshima too. The art island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea was developed in the 1980s, publicly touted as an effort to tackle deindustrialisation and underpopulation. A polka-dot bus deposits ‘art pilgrims’ at Miyanoura Port, where her iconic pumpkin sits beneath the Benesse House Museum.
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The Museum, like much of the island, is the design of architect Andō Tadao. But the most powerful works are found in situ at the Valley Gallery, where Kusama’s infamous stainless steel balls, created for the 1966 Venice Biennale, quietly clatter on the water, literally reflecting their surroundings.
Tourists flock on ferries to Naoshima, then leave, a similar relationship to the sort of cultural gentrification seen in Margate. There’s little interaction with the local community, on the other side of the island, or those at the end of their queues for lunches or ice creams. Few continue on to the Art House Projects on Inujima, or Teshima, home of the Teshima Yokoo House.
Its creator, Yokoo Tadanori, is also celebrated more locally. His dedicated museum in Kobe shares Benesse’s glass architecture and sculptural works, but here, it does not look out or over, rather invite the outside in. Born in nearby Nishiwaki, Hyōgo, Yokoo now practices in Tokyo, but for a time lived in the Museum’s Aotoni-cho neighbourhood.
Its current exhibition, Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku), celebrates ten years of the museum with works from all thirty of its exhibitions. It’s a chaotic journey across the world, as Yokoo challenges ideas around (Western) modernism and originality, emphasising historical continuity in his contemporary prints, paintings, and graphic designs.
It is also an exhibition about exhibitions, as much about the museum curators as the artist himself. They share the artist’s ‘inexhaustible energy’ as he continues to throw himself into his work despite approaching the age of 90.
Travel may be accommodated in Japanese museums, but there’s scant discussion of empire, nor do we get much about how local and global environments are connected by shared imperial histories. At the time of my travels, the National Museum of Ethnology also looked over these legacies and beyond its borders, with a nevertheless well-curated exhibition on Arte Popular: The Creative and Critical Power of Latin Americans.
One notable exception is the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (FAAM). Curated with purpose, its pan-Asian collection and Asian-centric captions introduces viewers to the continent’s national pioneers in historic and modern art. Most, as a result, are men, but it’s great, bold, and incredibly accessible.
Its artists work across disciplines and styles: contemporary South Korean artist Yun Hyongkeun ‘departed from’ the European Art Informel (Abstract Expressionism), drawing from the movement to depict more natural subjects. Mongolian photographer Enkhbatym Likhagvador uses black-and-white images of agricultural landscapes to evoke a historical memory of plenty, a time before the colonial exploitation of natural resources.
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Much of the collection focuses on Indonesia (Java), with a special display on the Art of Bali Island. We learn how Walter Spies, a Russian-born German painter and musician, ‘encouraged’ local artists to paint in their Gamelan tradition, giving rise to Javanese modern art. But artists bring their own preferences and prejudices - indeed, we can’t help but see the influence of Western orientalism and Rousseau in the works of I Dewa Putu Sena.
FAAM encourages us to broaden our understanding of Japanese environments, plural. To move beyond the romanticisation of nature – the stories told of ‘official Japan’ – and more deeply engage with the reality on the ground. To see how Japan’s global connections are evident in its local communities, and museums.
Interior Visions: From Bonnard to Tillmans and Contemporary Artists is on view at the POLA Museum of Art, Hakone until 2 July 2023.
Benesse House Museum on Naoshima is open year-round.
Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku) is on view at the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art until 7 May 2023.
The Permanent Collection (Asia Gallery) of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka is open year-round.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The natural environment matters in Japanese culture, and many cultural institutions too explore the ‘coexistence’ or symbiotic relationship between human art and nature. Atop a hill in Hakone, a historic post station along the Old Tōkaidō Road, the POLA Museum uses glass architecture to become part of the national park. The blend of natural and artificial lights play with our perceptions of the art on display; a wholly unique experience.
Its current exhibition, Interior Visions, excels when it looks through windows, which challenge the binary between inside and outside, portraits and landscapes. (Blink and you’ll miss Henri Matisse’s Mediterranean ‘Woman by the Window’ (1935), the only work left unlit.)
Like its permanent collection, it is a parade through 19th and 20th century French art. There though, we stop off with Léonard Foujita (Fujita Tsuguharu), a Japanese artist often excluded and overlooked from Parisian art history and, domestically, reduced to his cats. Here, he fits in with his contemporaries, but also goes further in his range of media, and deeper into the city.
Interior Visions gives Berthe Morisot, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and Wolfgang Tillmans rooms of their own, but Kusama Yayoi is the only Japanese artist afforded the same space. (The others, Sato Midori and Moriyama Yuichiro, and Takada Akiko and Masako, work in collaboration.)
It’s a different story outside; if the indoors are home to establishment, European sculptures, POLA’s outdoor Nature Trail features exclusively contemporary Asian artists, many exhibiting on their own soil.
With its urban outpost in Tokyo, the extensive POLA collection comes from the cash from the eponymous cosmetics business. Indeed, many Japanese shops and department stores also have museums and exhibition spaces in them, blurring another boundary between consumer/culture.
Kusama is capitalised on Naoshima too. The art island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea was developed in the 1980s, publicly touted as an effort to tackle deindustrialisation and underpopulation. A polka-dot bus deposits ‘art pilgrims’ at Miyanoura Port, where her iconic pumpkin sits beneath the Benesse House Museum.
The Museum, like much of the island, is the design of architect Andō Tadao. But the most powerful works are found in situ at the Valley Gallery, where Kusama’s infamous stainless steel balls, created for the 1966 Venice Biennale, quietly clatter on the water, literally reflecting their surroundings.
Tourists flock on ferries to Naoshima, then leave, a similar relationship to the sort of cultural gentrification seen in Margate. There’s little interaction with the local community, on the other side of the island, or those at the end of their queues for lunches or ice creams. Few continue on to the Art House Projects on Inujima, or Teshima, home of the Teshima Yokoo House.
Its creator, Yokoo Tadanori, is also celebrated more locally. His dedicated museum in Kobe shares Benesse’s glass architecture and sculptural works, but here, it does not look out or over, rather invite the outside in. Born in nearby Nishiwaki, Hyōgo, Yokoo now practices in Tokyo, but for a time lived in the Museum’s Aotoni-cho neighbourhood.
Its current exhibition, Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku), celebrates ten years of the museum with works from all thirty of its exhibitions. It’s a chaotic journey across the world, as Yokoo challenges ideas around (Western) modernism and originality, emphasising historical continuity in his contemporary prints, paintings, and graphic designs.
It is also an exhibition about exhibitions, as much about the museum curators as the artist himself. They share the artist’s ‘inexhaustible energy’ as he continues to throw himself into his work despite approaching the age of 90.
Travel may be accommodated in Japanese museums, but there’s scant discussion of empire, nor do we get much about how local and global environments are connected by shared imperial histories. At the time of my travels, the National Museum of Ethnology also looked over these legacies and beyond its borders, with a nevertheless well-curated exhibition on Arte Popular: The Creative and Critical Power of Latin Americans.
One notable exception is the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (FAAM). Curated with purpose, its pan-Asian collection and Asian-centric captions introduces viewers to the continent’s national pioneers in historic and modern art. Most, as a result, are men, but it’s great, bold, and incredibly accessible.
Its artists work across disciplines and styles: contemporary South Korean artist Yun Hyongkeun ‘departed from’ the European Art Informel (Abstract Expressionism), drawing from the movement to depict more natural subjects. Mongolian photographer Enkhbatym Likhagvador uses black-and-white images of agricultural landscapes to evoke a historical memory of plenty, a time before the colonial exploitation of natural resources.
Much of the collection focuses on Indonesia (Java), with a special display on the Art of Bali Island. We learn how Walter Spies, a Russian-born German painter and musician, ‘encouraged’ local artists to paint in their Gamelan tradition, giving rise to Javanese modern art. But artists bring their own preferences and prejudices - indeed, we can’t help but see the influence of Western orientalism and Rousseau in the works of I Dewa Putu Sena.
FAAM encourages us to broaden our understanding of Japanese environments, plural. To move beyond the romanticisation of nature – the stories told of ‘official Japan’ – and more deeply engage with the reality on the ground. To see how Japan’s global connections are evident in its local communities, and museums.
Interior Visions: From Bonnard to Tillmans and Contemporary Artists is on view at the POLA Museum of Art, Hakone until 2 July 2023.
Benesse House Museum on Naoshima is open year-round.
Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku) is on view at the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art until 7 May 2023.
The Permanent Collection (Asia Gallery) of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka is open year-round.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The natural environment matters in Japanese culture, and many cultural institutions too explore the ‘coexistence’ or symbiotic relationship between human art and nature. Atop a hill in Hakone, a historic post station along the Old Tōkaidō Road, the POLA Museum uses glass architecture to become part of the national park. The blend of natural and artificial lights play with our perceptions of the art on display; a wholly unique experience.
Its current exhibition, Interior Visions, excels when it looks through windows, which challenge the binary between inside and outside, portraits and landscapes. (Blink and you’ll miss Henri Matisse’s Mediterranean ‘Woman by the Window’ (1935), the only work left unlit.)
Like its permanent collection, it is a parade through 19th and 20th century French art. There though, we stop off with Léonard Foujita (Fujita Tsuguharu), a Japanese artist often excluded and overlooked from Parisian art history and, domestically, reduced to his cats. Here, he fits in with his contemporaries, but also goes further in his range of media, and deeper into the city.
Interior Visions gives Berthe Morisot, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and Wolfgang Tillmans rooms of their own, but Kusama Yayoi is the only Japanese artist afforded the same space. (The others, Sato Midori and Moriyama Yuichiro, and Takada Akiko and Masako, work in collaboration.)
It’s a different story outside; if the indoors are home to establishment, European sculptures, POLA’s outdoor Nature Trail features exclusively contemporary Asian artists, many exhibiting on their own soil.
With its urban outpost in Tokyo, the extensive POLA collection comes from the cash from the eponymous cosmetics business. Indeed, many Japanese shops and department stores also have museums and exhibition spaces in them, blurring another boundary between consumer/culture.
Kusama is capitalised on Naoshima too. The art island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea was developed in the 1980s, publicly touted as an effort to tackle deindustrialisation and underpopulation. A polka-dot bus deposits ‘art pilgrims’ at Miyanoura Port, where her iconic pumpkin sits beneath the Benesse House Museum.
The Museum, like much of the island, is the design of architect Andō Tadao. But the most powerful works are found in situ at the Valley Gallery, where Kusama’s infamous stainless steel balls, created for the 1966 Venice Biennale, quietly clatter on the water, literally reflecting their surroundings.
Tourists flock on ferries to Naoshima, then leave, a similar relationship to the sort of cultural gentrification seen in Margate. There’s little interaction with the local community, on the other side of the island, or those at the end of their queues for lunches or ice creams. Few continue on to the Art House Projects on Inujima, or Teshima, home of the Teshima Yokoo House.
Its creator, Yokoo Tadanori, is also celebrated more locally. His dedicated museum in Kobe shares Benesse’s glass architecture and sculptural works, but here, it does not look out or over, rather invite the outside in. Born in nearby Nishiwaki, Hyōgo, Yokoo now practices in Tokyo, but for a time lived in the Museum’s Aotoni-cho neighbourhood.
Its current exhibition, Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku), celebrates ten years of the museum with works from all thirty of its exhibitions. It’s a chaotic journey across the world, as Yokoo challenges ideas around (Western) modernism and originality, emphasising historical continuity in his contemporary prints, paintings, and graphic designs.
It is also an exhibition about exhibitions, as much about the museum curators as the artist himself. They share the artist’s ‘inexhaustible energy’ as he continues to throw himself into his work despite approaching the age of 90.
Travel may be accommodated in Japanese museums, but there’s scant discussion of empire, nor do we get much about how local and global environments are connected by shared imperial histories. At the time of my travels, the National Museum of Ethnology also looked over these legacies and beyond its borders, with a nevertheless well-curated exhibition on Arte Popular: The Creative and Critical Power of Latin Americans.
One notable exception is the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (FAAM). Curated with purpose, its pan-Asian collection and Asian-centric captions introduces viewers to the continent’s national pioneers in historic and modern art. Most, as a result, are men, but it’s great, bold, and incredibly accessible.
Its artists work across disciplines and styles: contemporary South Korean artist Yun Hyongkeun ‘departed from’ the European Art Informel (Abstract Expressionism), drawing from the movement to depict more natural subjects. Mongolian photographer Enkhbatym Likhagvador uses black-and-white images of agricultural landscapes to evoke a historical memory of plenty, a time before the colonial exploitation of natural resources.
Much of the collection focuses on Indonesia (Java), with a special display on the Art of Bali Island. We learn how Walter Spies, a Russian-born German painter and musician, ‘encouraged’ local artists to paint in their Gamelan tradition, giving rise to Javanese modern art. But artists bring their own preferences and prejudices - indeed, we can’t help but see the influence of Western orientalism and Rousseau in the works of I Dewa Putu Sena.
FAAM encourages us to broaden our understanding of Japanese environments, plural. To move beyond the romanticisation of nature – the stories told of ‘official Japan’ – and more deeply engage with the reality on the ground. To see how Japan’s global connections are evident in its local communities, and museums.
Interior Visions: From Bonnard to Tillmans and Contemporary Artists is on view at the POLA Museum of Art, Hakone until 2 July 2023.
Benesse House Museum on Naoshima is open year-round.
Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku) is on view at the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art until 7 May 2023.
The Permanent Collection (Asia Gallery) of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka is open year-round.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The natural environment matters in Japanese culture, and many cultural institutions too explore the ‘coexistence’ or symbiotic relationship between human art and nature. Atop a hill in Hakone, a historic post station along the Old Tōkaidō Road, the POLA Museum uses glass architecture to become part of the national park. The blend of natural and artificial lights play with our perceptions of the art on display; a wholly unique experience.
Its current exhibition, Interior Visions, excels when it looks through windows, which challenge the binary between inside and outside, portraits and landscapes. (Blink and you’ll miss Henri Matisse’s Mediterranean ‘Woman by the Window’ (1935), the only work left unlit.)
Like its permanent collection, it is a parade through 19th and 20th century French art. There though, we stop off with Léonard Foujita (Fujita Tsuguharu), a Japanese artist often excluded and overlooked from Parisian art history and, domestically, reduced to his cats. Here, he fits in with his contemporaries, but also goes further in his range of media, and deeper into the city.
Interior Visions gives Berthe Morisot, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and Wolfgang Tillmans rooms of their own, but Kusama Yayoi is the only Japanese artist afforded the same space. (The others, Sato Midori and Moriyama Yuichiro, and Takada Akiko and Masako, work in collaboration.)
It’s a different story outside; if the indoors are home to establishment, European sculptures, POLA’s outdoor Nature Trail features exclusively contemporary Asian artists, many exhibiting on their own soil.
With its urban outpost in Tokyo, the extensive POLA collection comes from the cash from the eponymous cosmetics business. Indeed, many Japanese shops and department stores also have museums and exhibition spaces in them, blurring another boundary between consumer/culture.
Kusama is capitalised on Naoshima too. The art island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea was developed in the 1980s, publicly touted as an effort to tackle deindustrialisation and underpopulation. A polka-dot bus deposits ‘art pilgrims’ at Miyanoura Port, where her iconic pumpkin sits beneath the Benesse House Museum.
The Museum, like much of the island, is the design of architect Andō Tadao. But the most powerful works are found in situ at the Valley Gallery, where Kusama’s infamous stainless steel balls, created for the 1966 Venice Biennale, quietly clatter on the water, literally reflecting their surroundings.
Tourists flock on ferries to Naoshima, then leave, a similar relationship to the sort of cultural gentrification seen in Margate. There’s little interaction with the local community, on the other side of the island, or those at the end of their queues for lunches or ice creams. Few continue on to the Art House Projects on Inujima, or Teshima, home of the Teshima Yokoo House.
Its creator, Yokoo Tadanori, is also celebrated more locally. His dedicated museum in Kobe shares Benesse’s glass architecture and sculptural works, but here, it does not look out or over, rather invite the outside in. Born in nearby Nishiwaki, Hyōgo, Yokoo now practices in Tokyo, but for a time lived in the Museum’s Aotoni-cho neighbourhood.
Its current exhibition, Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku), celebrates ten years of the museum with works from all thirty of its exhibitions. It’s a chaotic journey across the world, as Yokoo challenges ideas around (Western) modernism and originality, emphasising historical continuity in his contemporary prints, paintings, and graphic designs.
It is also an exhibition about exhibitions, as much about the museum curators as the artist himself. They share the artist’s ‘inexhaustible energy’ as he continues to throw himself into his work despite approaching the age of 90.
Travel may be accommodated in Japanese museums, but there’s scant discussion of empire, nor do we get much about how local and global environments are connected by shared imperial histories. At the time of my travels, the National Museum of Ethnology also looked over these legacies and beyond its borders, with a nevertheless well-curated exhibition on Arte Popular: The Creative and Critical Power of Latin Americans.
One notable exception is the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (FAAM). Curated with purpose, its pan-Asian collection and Asian-centric captions introduces viewers to the continent’s national pioneers in historic and modern art. Most, as a result, are men, but it’s great, bold, and incredibly accessible.
Its artists work across disciplines and styles: contemporary South Korean artist Yun Hyongkeun ‘departed from’ the European Art Informel (Abstract Expressionism), drawing from the movement to depict more natural subjects. Mongolian photographer Enkhbatym Likhagvador uses black-and-white images of agricultural landscapes to evoke a historical memory of plenty, a time before the colonial exploitation of natural resources.
Much of the collection focuses on Indonesia (Java), with a special display on the Art of Bali Island. We learn how Walter Spies, a Russian-born German painter and musician, ‘encouraged’ local artists to paint in their Gamelan tradition, giving rise to Javanese modern art. But artists bring their own preferences and prejudices - indeed, we can’t help but see the influence of Western orientalism and Rousseau in the works of I Dewa Putu Sena.
FAAM encourages us to broaden our understanding of Japanese environments, plural. To move beyond the romanticisation of nature – the stories told of ‘official Japan’ – and more deeply engage with the reality on the ground. To see how Japan’s global connections are evident in its local communities, and museums.
Interior Visions: From Bonnard to Tillmans and Contemporary Artists is on view at the POLA Museum of Art, Hakone until 2 July 2023.
Benesse House Museum on Naoshima is open year-round.
Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku) is on view at the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art until 7 May 2023.
The Permanent Collection (Asia Gallery) of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka is open year-round.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The natural environment matters in Japanese culture, and many cultural institutions too explore the ‘coexistence’ or symbiotic relationship between human art and nature. Atop a hill in Hakone, a historic post station along the Old Tōkaidō Road, the POLA Museum uses glass architecture to become part of the national park. The blend of natural and artificial lights play with our perceptions of the art on display; a wholly unique experience.
Its current exhibition, Interior Visions, excels when it looks through windows, which challenge the binary between inside and outside, portraits and landscapes. (Blink and you’ll miss Henri Matisse’s Mediterranean ‘Woman by the Window’ (1935), the only work left unlit.)
Like its permanent collection, it is a parade through 19th and 20th century French art. There though, we stop off with Léonard Foujita (Fujita Tsuguharu), a Japanese artist often excluded and overlooked from Parisian art history and, domestically, reduced to his cats. Here, he fits in with his contemporaries, but also goes further in his range of media, and deeper into the city.
Interior Visions gives Berthe Morisot, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and Wolfgang Tillmans rooms of their own, but Kusama Yayoi is the only Japanese artist afforded the same space. (The others, Sato Midori and Moriyama Yuichiro, and Takada Akiko and Masako, work in collaboration.)
It’s a different story outside; if the indoors are home to establishment, European sculptures, POLA’s outdoor Nature Trail features exclusively contemporary Asian artists, many exhibiting on their own soil.
With its urban outpost in Tokyo, the extensive POLA collection comes from the cash from the eponymous cosmetics business. Indeed, many Japanese shops and department stores also have museums and exhibition spaces in them, blurring another boundary between consumer/culture.
Kusama is capitalised on Naoshima too. The art island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea was developed in the 1980s, publicly touted as an effort to tackle deindustrialisation and underpopulation. A polka-dot bus deposits ‘art pilgrims’ at Miyanoura Port, where her iconic pumpkin sits beneath the Benesse House Museum.
The Museum, like much of the island, is the design of architect Andō Tadao. But the most powerful works are found in situ at the Valley Gallery, where Kusama’s infamous stainless steel balls, created for the 1966 Venice Biennale, quietly clatter on the water, literally reflecting their surroundings.
Tourists flock on ferries to Naoshima, then leave, a similar relationship to the sort of cultural gentrification seen in Margate. There’s little interaction with the local community, on the other side of the island, or those at the end of their queues for lunches or ice creams. Few continue on to the Art House Projects on Inujima, or Teshima, home of the Teshima Yokoo House.
Its creator, Yokoo Tadanori, is also celebrated more locally. His dedicated museum in Kobe shares Benesse’s glass architecture and sculptural works, but here, it does not look out or over, rather invite the outside in. Born in nearby Nishiwaki, Hyōgo, Yokoo now practices in Tokyo, but for a time lived in the Museum’s Aotoni-cho neighbourhood.
Its current exhibition, Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku), celebrates ten years of the museum with works from all thirty of its exhibitions. It’s a chaotic journey across the world, as Yokoo challenges ideas around (Western) modernism and originality, emphasising historical continuity in his contemporary prints, paintings, and graphic designs.
It is also an exhibition about exhibitions, as much about the museum curators as the artist himself. They share the artist’s ‘inexhaustible energy’ as he continues to throw himself into his work despite approaching the age of 90.
Travel may be accommodated in Japanese museums, but there’s scant discussion of empire, nor do we get much about how local and global environments are connected by shared imperial histories. At the time of my travels, the National Museum of Ethnology also looked over these legacies and beyond its borders, with a nevertheless well-curated exhibition on Arte Popular: The Creative and Critical Power of Latin Americans.
One notable exception is the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (FAAM). Curated with purpose, its pan-Asian collection and Asian-centric captions introduces viewers to the continent’s national pioneers in historic and modern art. Most, as a result, are men, but it’s great, bold, and incredibly accessible.
Its artists work across disciplines and styles: contemporary South Korean artist Yun Hyongkeun ‘departed from’ the European Art Informel (Abstract Expressionism), drawing from the movement to depict more natural subjects. Mongolian photographer Enkhbatym Likhagvador uses black-and-white images of agricultural landscapes to evoke a historical memory of plenty, a time before the colonial exploitation of natural resources.
Much of the collection focuses on Indonesia (Java), with a special display on the Art of Bali Island. We learn how Walter Spies, a Russian-born German painter and musician, ‘encouraged’ local artists to paint in their Gamelan tradition, giving rise to Javanese modern art. But artists bring their own preferences and prejudices - indeed, we can’t help but see the influence of Western orientalism and Rousseau in the works of I Dewa Putu Sena.
FAAM encourages us to broaden our understanding of Japanese environments, plural. To move beyond the romanticisation of nature – the stories told of ‘official Japan’ – and more deeply engage with the reality on the ground. To see how Japan’s global connections are evident in its local communities, and museums.
Interior Visions: From Bonnard to Tillmans and Contemporary Artists is on view at the POLA Museum of Art, Hakone until 2 July 2023.
Benesse House Museum on Naoshima is open year-round.
Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku) is on view at the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art until 7 May 2023.
The Permanent Collection (Asia Gallery) of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka is open year-round.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The natural environment matters in Japanese culture, and many cultural institutions too explore the ‘coexistence’ or symbiotic relationship between human art and nature. Atop a hill in Hakone, a historic post station along the Old Tōkaidō Road, the POLA Museum uses glass architecture to become part of the national park. The blend of natural and artificial lights play with our perceptions of the art on display; a wholly unique experience.
Its current exhibition, Interior Visions, excels when it looks through windows, which challenge the binary between inside and outside, portraits and landscapes. (Blink and you’ll miss Henri Matisse’s Mediterranean ‘Woman by the Window’ (1935), the only work left unlit.)
Like its permanent collection, it is a parade through 19th and 20th century French art. There though, we stop off with Léonard Foujita (Fujita Tsuguharu), a Japanese artist often excluded and overlooked from Parisian art history and, domestically, reduced to his cats. Here, he fits in with his contemporaries, but also goes further in his range of media, and deeper into the city.
Interior Visions gives Berthe Morisot, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and Wolfgang Tillmans rooms of their own, but Kusama Yayoi is the only Japanese artist afforded the same space. (The others, Sato Midori and Moriyama Yuichiro, and Takada Akiko and Masako, work in collaboration.)
It’s a different story outside; if the indoors are home to establishment, European sculptures, POLA’s outdoor Nature Trail features exclusively contemporary Asian artists, many exhibiting on their own soil.
With its urban outpost in Tokyo, the extensive POLA collection comes from the cash from the eponymous cosmetics business. Indeed, many Japanese shops and department stores also have museums and exhibition spaces in them, blurring another boundary between consumer/culture.
Kusama is capitalised on Naoshima too. The art island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea was developed in the 1980s, publicly touted as an effort to tackle deindustrialisation and underpopulation. A polka-dot bus deposits ‘art pilgrims’ at Miyanoura Port, where her iconic pumpkin sits beneath the Benesse House Museum.
The Museum, like much of the island, is the design of architect Andō Tadao. But the most powerful works are found in situ at the Valley Gallery, where Kusama’s infamous stainless steel balls, created for the 1966 Venice Biennale, quietly clatter on the water, literally reflecting their surroundings.
Tourists flock on ferries to Naoshima, then leave, a similar relationship to the sort of cultural gentrification seen in Margate. There’s little interaction with the local community, on the other side of the island, or those at the end of their queues for lunches or ice creams. Few continue on to the Art House Projects on Inujima, or Teshima, home of the Teshima Yokoo House.
Its creator, Yokoo Tadanori, is also celebrated more locally. His dedicated museum in Kobe shares Benesse’s glass architecture and sculptural works, but here, it does not look out or over, rather invite the outside in. Born in nearby Nishiwaki, Hyōgo, Yokoo now practices in Tokyo, but for a time lived in the Museum’s Aotoni-cho neighbourhood.
Its current exhibition, Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku), celebrates ten years of the museum with works from all thirty of its exhibitions. It’s a chaotic journey across the world, as Yokoo challenges ideas around (Western) modernism and originality, emphasising historical continuity in his contemporary prints, paintings, and graphic designs.
It is also an exhibition about exhibitions, as much about the museum curators as the artist himself. They share the artist’s ‘inexhaustible energy’ as he continues to throw himself into his work despite approaching the age of 90.
Travel may be accommodated in Japanese museums, but there’s scant discussion of empire, nor do we get much about how local and global environments are connected by shared imperial histories. At the time of my travels, the National Museum of Ethnology also looked over these legacies and beyond its borders, with a nevertheless well-curated exhibition on Arte Popular: The Creative and Critical Power of Latin Americans.
One notable exception is the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (FAAM). Curated with purpose, its pan-Asian collection and Asian-centric captions introduces viewers to the continent’s national pioneers in historic and modern art. Most, as a result, are men, but it’s great, bold, and incredibly accessible.
Its artists work across disciplines and styles: contemporary South Korean artist Yun Hyongkeun ‘departed from’ the European Art Informel (Abstract Expressionism), drawing from the movement to depict more natural subjects. Mongolian photographer Enkhbatym Likhagvador uses black-and-white images of agricultural landscapes to evoke a historical memory of plenty, a time before the colonial exploitation of natural resources.
Much of the collection focuses on Indonesia (Java), with a special display on the Art of Bali Island. We learn how Walter Spies, a Russian-born German painter and musician, ‘encouraged’ local artists to paint in their Gamelan tradition, giving rise to Javanese modern art. But artists bring their own preferences and prejudices - indeed, we can’t help but see the influence of Western orientalism and Rousseau in the works of I Dewa Putu Sena.
FAAM encourages us to broaden our understanding of Japanese environments, plural. To move beyond the romanticisation of nature – the stories told of ‘official Japan’ – and more deeply engage with the reality on the ground. To see how Japan’s global connections are evident in its local communities, and museums.
Interior Visions: From Bonnard to Tillmans and Contemporary Artists is on view at the POLA Museum of Art, Hakone until 2 July 2023.
Benesse House Museum on Naoshima is open year-round.
Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku) is on view at the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art until 7 May 2023.
The Permanent Collection (Asia Gallery) of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka is open year-round.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The natural environment matters in Japanese culture, and many cultural institutions too explore the ‘coexistence’ or symbiotic relationship between human art and nature. Atop a hill in Hakone, a historic post station along the Old Tōkaidō Road, the POLA Museum uses glass architecture to become part of the national park. The blend of natural and artificial lights play with our perceptions of the art on display; a wholly unique experience.
Its current exhibition, Interior Visions, excels when it looks through windows, which challenge the binary between inside and outside, portraits and landscapes. (Blink and you’ll miss Henri Matisse’s Mediterranean ‘Woman by the Window’ (1935), the only work left unlit.)
Like its permanent collection, it is a parade through 19th and 20th century French art. There though, we stop off with Léonard Foujita (Fujita Tsuguharu), a Japanese artist often excluded and overlooked from Parisian art history and, domestically, reduced to his cats. Here, he fits in with his contemporaries, but also goes further in his range of media, and deeper into the city.
Interior Visions gives Berthe Morisot, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and Wolfgang Tillmans rooms of their own, but Kusama Yayoi is the only Japanese artist afforded the same space. (The others, Sato Midori and Moriyama Yuichiro, and Takada Akiko and Masako, work in collaboration.)
It’s a different story outside; if the indoors are home to establishment, European sculptures, POLA’s outdoor Nature Trail features exclusively contemporary Asian artists, many exhibiting on their own soil.
With its urban outpost in Tokyo, the extensive POLA collection comes from the cash from the eponymous cosmetics business. Indeed, many Japanese shops and department stores also have museums and exhibition spaces in them, blurring another boundary between consumer/culture.
Kusama is capitalised on Naoshima too. The art island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea was developed in the 1980s, publicly touted as an effort to tackle deindustrialisation and underpopulation. A polka-dot bus deposits ‘art pilgrims’ at Miyanoura Port, where her iconic pumpkin sits beneath the Benesse House Museum.
The Museum, like much of the island, is the design of architect Andō Tadao. But the most powerful works are found in situ at the Valley Gallery, where Kusama’s infamous stainless steel balls, created for the 1966 Venice Biennale, quietly clatter on the water, literally reflecting their surroundings.
Tourists flock on ferries to Naoshima, then leave, a similar relationship to the sort of cultural gentrification seen in Margate. There’s little interaction with the local community, on the other side of the island, or those at the end of their queues for lunches or ice creams. Few continue on to the Art House Projects on Inujima, or Teshima, home of the Teshima Yokoo House.
Its creator, Yokoo Tadanori, is also celebrated more locally. His dedicated museum in Kobe shares Benesse’s glass architecture and sculptural works, but here, it does not look out or over, rather invite the outside in. Born in nearby Nishiwaki, Hyōgo, Yokoo now practices in Tokyo, but for a time lived in the Museum’s Aotoni-cho neighbourhood.
Its current exhibition, Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku), celebrates ten years of the museum with works from all thirty of its exhibitions. It’s a chaotic journey across the world, as Yokoo challenges ideas around (Western) modernism and originality, emphasising historical continuity in his contemporary prints, paintings, and graphic designs.
It is also an exhibition about exhibitions, as much about the museum curators as the artist himself. They share the artist’s ‘inexhaustible energy’ as he continues to throw himself into his work despite approaching the age of 90.
Travel may be accommodated in Japanese museums, but there’s scant discussion of empire, nor do we get much about how local and global environments are connected by shared imperial histories. At the time of my travels, the National Museum of Ethnology also looked over these legacies and beyond its borders, with a nevertheless well-curated exhibition on Arte Popular: The Creative and Critical Power of Latin Americans.
One notable exception is the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (FAAM). Curated with purpose, its pan-Asian collection and Asian-centric captions introduces viewers to the continent’s national pioneers in historic and modern art. Most, as a result, are men, but it’s great, bold, and incredibly accessible.
Its artists work across disciplines and styles: contemporary South Korean artist Yun Hyongkeun ‘departed from’ the European Art Informel (Abstract Expressionism), drawing from the movement to depict more natural subjects. Mongolian photographer Enkhbatym Likhagvador uses black-and-white images of agricultural landscapes to evoke a historical memory of plenty, a time before the colonial exploitation of natural resources.
Much of the collection focuses on Indonesia (Java), with a special display on the Art of Bali Island. We learn how Walter Spies, a Russian-born German painter and musician, ‘encouraged’ local artists to paint in their Gamelan tradition, giving rise to Javanese modern art. But artists bring their own preferences and prejudices - indeed, we can’t help but see the influence of Western orientalism and Rousseau in the works of I Dewa Putu Sena.
FAAM encourages us to broaden our understanding of Japanese environments, plural. To move beyond the romanticisation of nature – the stories told of ‘official Japan’ – and more deeply engage with the reality on the ground. To see how Japan’s global connections are evident in its local communities, and museums.
Interior Visions: From Bonnard to Tillmans and Contemporary Artists is on view at the POLA Museum of Art, Hakone until 2 July 2023.
Benesse House Museum on Naoshima is open year-round.
Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku) is on view at the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art until 7 May 2023.
The Permanent Collection (Asia Gallery) of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka is open year-round.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The natural environment matters in Japanese culture, and many cultural institutions too explore the ‘coexistence’ or symbiotic relationship between human art and nature. Atop a hill in Hakone, a historic post station along the Old Tōkaidō Road, the POLA Museum uses glass architecture to become part of the national park. The blend of natural and artificial lights play with our perceptions of the art on display; a wholly unique experience.
Its current exhibition, Interior Visions, excels when it looks through windows, which challenge the binary between inside and outside, portraits and landscapes. (Blink and you’ll miss Henri Matisse’s Mediterranean ‘Woman by the Window’ (1935), the only work left unlit.)
Like its permanent collection, it is a parade through 19th and 20th century French art. There though, we stop off with Léonard Foujita (Fujita Tsuguharu), a Japanese artist often excluded and overlooked from Parisian art history and, domestically, reduced to his cats. Here, he fits in with his contemporaries, but also goes further in his range of media, and deeper into the city.
Interior Visions gives Berthe Morisot, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and Wolfgang Tillmans rooms of their own, but Kusama Yayoi is the only Japanese artist afforded the same space. (The others, Sato Midori and Moriyama Yuichiro, and Takada Akiko and Masako, work in collaboration.)
It’s a different story outside; if the indoors are home to establishment, European sculptures, POLA’s outdoor Nature Trail features exclusively contemporary Asian artists, many exhibiting on their own soil.
With its urban outpost in Tokyo, the extensive POLA collection comes from the cash from the eponymous cosmetics business. Indeed, many Japanese shops and department stores also have museums and exhibition spaces in them, blurring another boundary between consumer/culture.
Kusama is capitalised on Naoshima too. The art island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea was developed in the 1980s, publicly touted as an effort to tackle deindustrialisation and underpopulation. A polka-dot bus deposits ‘art pilgrims’ at Miyanoura Port, where her iconic pumpkin sits beneath the Benesse House Museum.
The Museum, like much of the island, is the design of architect Andō Tadao. But the most powerful works are found in situ at the Valley Gallery, where Kusama’s infamous stainless steel balls, created for the 1966 Venice Biennale, quietly clatter on the water, literally reflecting their surroundings.
Tourists flock on ferries to Naoshima, then leave, a similar relationship to the sort of cultural gentrification seen in Margate. There’s little interaction with the local community, on the other side of the island, or those at the end of their queues for lunches or ice creams. Few continue on to the Art House Projects on Inujima, or Teshima, home of the Teshima Yokoo House.
Its creator, Yokoo Tadanori, is also celebrated more locally. His dedicated museum in Kobe shares Benesse’s glass architecture and sculptural works, but here, it does not look out or over, rather invite the outside in. Born in nearby Nishiwaki, Hyōgo, Yokoo now practices in Tokyo, but for a time lived in the Museum’s Aotoni-cho neighbourhood.
Its current exhibition, Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku), celebrates ten years of the museum with works from all thirty of its exhibitions. It’s a chaotic journey across the world, as Yokoo challenges ideas around (Western) modernism and originality, emphasising historical continuity in his contemporary prints, paintings, and graphic designs.
It is also an exhibition about exhibitions, as much about the museum curators as the artist himself. They share the artist’s ‘inexhaustible energy’ as he continues to throw himself into his work despite approaching the age of 90.
Travel may be accommodated in Japanese museums, but there’s scant discussion of empire, nor do we get much about how local and global environments are connected by shared imperial histories. At the time of my travels, the National Museum of Ethnology also looked over these legacies and beyond its borders, with a nevertheless well-curated exhibition on Arte Popular: The Creative and Critical Power of Latin Americans.
One notable exception is the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (FAAM). Curated with purpose, its pan-Asian collection and Asian-centric captions introduces viewers to the continent’s national pioneers in historic and modern art. Most, as a result, are men, but it’s great, bold, and incredibly accessible.
Its artists work across disciplines and styles: contemporary South Korean artist Yun Hyongkeun ‘departed from’ the European Art Informel (Abstract Expressionism), drawing from the movement to depict more natural subjects. Mongolian photographer Enkhbatym Likhagvador uses black-and-white images of agricultural landscapes to evoke a historical memory of plenty, a time before the colonial exploitation of natural resources.
Much of the collection focuses on Indonesia (Java), with a special display on the Art of Bali Island. We learn how Walter Spies, a Russian-born German painter and musician, ‘encouraged’ local artists to paint in their Gamelan tradition, giving rise to Javanese modern art. But artists bring their own preferences and prejudices - indeed, we can’t help but see the influence of Western orientalism and Rousseau in the works of I Dewa Putu Sena.
FAAM encourages us to broaden our understanding of Japanese environments, plural. To move beyond the romanticisation of nature – the stories told of ‘official Japan’ – and more deeply engage with the reality on the ground. To see how Japan’s global connections are evident in its local communities, and museums.
Interior Visions: From Bonnard to Tillmans and Contemporary Artists is on view at the POLA Museum of Art, Hakone until 2 July 2023.
Benesse House Museum on Naoshima is open year-round.
Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku) is on view at the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art until 7 May 2023.
The Permanent Collection (Asia Gallery) of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka is open year-round.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The natural environment matters in Japanese culture, and many cultural institutions too explore the ‘coexistence’ or symbiotic relationship between human art and nature. Atop a hill in Hakone, a historic post station along the Old Tōkaidō Road, the POLA Museum uses glass architecture to become part of the national park. The blend of natural and artificial lights play with our perceptions of the art on display; a wholly unique experience.
Its current exhibition, Interior Visions, excels when it looks through windows, which challenge the binary between inside and outside, portraits and landscapes. (Blink and you’ll miss Henri Matisse’s Mediterranean ‘Woman by the Window’ (1935), the only work left unlit.)
Like its permanent collection, it is a parade through 19th and 20th century French art. There though, we stop off with Léonard Foujita (Fujita Tsuguharu), a Japanese artist often excluded and overlooked from Parisian art history and, domestically, reduced to his cats. Here, he fits in with his contemporaries, but also goes further in his range of media, and deeper into the city.
Interior Visions gives Berthe Morisot, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and Wolfgang Tillmans rooms of their own, but Kusama Yayoi is the only Japanese artist afforded the same space. (The others, Sato Midori and Moriyama Yuichiro, and Takada Akiko and Masako, work in collaboration.)
It’s a different story outside; if the indoors are home to establishment, European sculptures, POLA’s outdoor Nature Trail features exclusively contemporary Asian artists, many exhibiting on their own soil.
With its urban outpost in Tokyo, the extensive POLA collection comes from the cash from the eponymous cosmetics business. Indeed, many Japanese shops and department stores also have museums and exhibition spaces in them, blurring another boundary between consumer/culture.
Kusama is capitalised on Naoshima too. The art island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea was developed in the 1980s, publicly touted as an effort to tackle deindustrialisation and underpopulation. A polka-dot bus deposits ‘art pilgrims’ at Miyanoura Port, where her iconic pumpkin sits beneath the Benesse House Museum.
The Museum, like much of the island, is the design of architect Andō Tadao. But the most powerful works are found in situ at the Valley Gallery, where Kusama’s infamous stainless steel balls, created for the 1966 Venice Biennale, quietly clatter on the water, literally reflecting their surroundings.
Tourists flock on ferries to Naoshima, then leave, a similar relationship to the sort of cultural gentrification seen in Margate. There’s little interaction with the local community, on the other side of the island, or those at the end of their queues for lunches or ice creams. Few continue on to the Art House Projects on Inujima, or Teshima, home of the Teshima Yokoo House.
Its creator, Yokoo Tadanori, is also celebrated more locally. His dedicated museum in Kobe shares Benesse’s glass architecture and sculptural works, but here, it does not look out or over, rather invite the outside in. Born in nearby Nishiwaki, Hyōgo, Yokoo now practices in Tokyo, but for a time lived in the Museum’s Aotoni-cho neighbourhood.
Its current exhibition, Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku), celebrates ten years of the museum with works from all thirty of its exhibitions. It’s a chaotic journey across the world, as Yokoo challenges ideas around (Western) modernism and originality, emphasising historical continuity in his contemporary prints, paintings, and graphic designs.
It is also an exhibition about exhibitions, as much about the museum curators as the artist himself. They share the artist’s ‘inexhaustible energy’ as he continues to throw himself into his work despite approaching the age of 90.
Travel may be accommodated in Japanese museums, but there’s scant discussion of empire, nor do we get much about how local and global environments are connected by shared imperial histories. At the time of my travels, the National Museum of Ethnology also looked over these legacies and beyond its borders, with a nevertheless well-curated exhibition on Arte Popular: The Creative and Critical Power of Latin Americans.
One notable exception is the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (FAAM). Curated with purpose, its pan-Asian collection and Asian-centric captions introduces viewers to the continent’s national pioneers in historic and modern art. Most, as a result, are men, but it’s great, bold, and incredibly accessible.
Its artists work across disciplines and styles: contemporary South Korean artist Yun Hyongkeun ‘departed from’ the European Art Informel (Abstract Expressionism), drawing from the movement to depict more natural subjects. Mongolian photographer Enkhbatym Likhagvador uses black-and-white images of agricultural landscapes to evoke a historical memory of plenty, a time before the colonial exploitation of natural resources.
Much of the collection focuses on Indonesia (Java), with a special display on the Art of Bali Island. We learn how Walter Spies, a Russian-born German painter and musician, ‘encouraged’ local artists to paint in their Gamelan tradition, giving rise to Javanese modern art. But artists bring their own preferences and prejudices - indeed, we can’t help but see the influence of Western orientalism and Rousseau in the works of I Dewa Putu Sena.
FAAM encourages us to broaden our understanding of Japanese environments, plural. To move beyond the romanticisation of nature – the stories told of ‘official Japan’ – and more deeply engage with the reality on the ground. To see how Japan’s global connections are evident in its local communities, and museums.
Interior Visions: From Bonnard to Tillmans and Contemporary Artists is on view at the POLA Museum of Art, Hakone until 2 July 2023.
Benesse House Museum on Naoshima is open year-round.
Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku) is on view at the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art until 7 May 2023.
The Permanent Collection (Asia Gallery) of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka is open year-round.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The natural environment matters in Japanese culture, and many cultural institutions too explore the ‘coexistence’ or symbiotic relationship between human art and nature. Atop a hill in Hakone, a historic post station along the Old Tōkaidō Road, the POLA Museum uses glass architecture to become part of the national park. The blend of natural and artificial lights play with our perceptions of the art on display; a wholly unique experience.
Its current exhibition, Interior Visions, excels when it looks through windows, which challenge the binary between inside and outside, portraits and landscapes. (Blink and you’ll miss Henri Matisse’s Mediterranean ‘Woman by the Window’ (1935), the only work left unlit.)
Like its permanent collection, it is a parade through 19th and 20th century French art. There though, we stop off with Léonard Foujita (Fujita Tsuguharu), a Japanese artist often excluded and overlooked from Parisian art history and, domestically, reduced to his cats. Here, he fits in with his contemporaries, but also goes further in his range of media, and deeper into the city.
Interior Visions gives Berthe Morisot, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and Wolfgang Tillmans rooms of their own, but Kusama Yayoi is the only Japanese artist afforded the same space. (The others, Sato Midori and Moriyama Yuichiro, and Takada Akiko and Masako, work in collaboration.)
It’s a different story outside; if the indoors are home to establishment, European sculptures, POLA’s outdoor Nature Trail features exclusively contemporary Asian artists, many exhibiting on their own soil.
With its urban outpost in Tokyo, the extensive POLA collection comes from the cash from the eponymous cosmetics business. Indeed, many Japanese shops and department stores also have museums and exhibition spaces in them, blurring another boundary between consumer/culture.
Kusama is capitalised on Naoshima too. The art island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea was developed in the 1980s, publicly touted as an effort to tackle deindustrialisation and underpopulation. A polka-dot bus deposits ‘art pilgrims’ at Miyanoura Port, where her iconic pumpkin sits beneath the Benesse House Museum.
The Museum, like much of the island, is the design of architect Andō Tadao. But the most powerful works are found in situ at the Valley Gallery, where Kusama’s infamous stainless steel balls, created for the 1966 Venice Biennale, quietly clatter on the water, literally reflecting their surroundings.
Tourists flock on ferries to Naoshima, then leave, a similar relationship to the sort of cultural gentrification seen in Margate. There’s little interaction with the local community, on the other side of the island, or those at the end of their queues for lunches or ice creams. Few continue on to the Art House Projects on Inujima, or Teshima, home of the Teshima Yokoo House.
Its creator, Yokoo Tadanori, is also celebrated more locally. His dedicated museum in Kobe shares Benesse’s glass architecture and sculptural works, but here, it does not look out or over, rather invite the outside in. Born in nearby Nishiwaki, Hyōgo, Yokoo now practices in Tokyo, but for a time lived in the Museum’s Aotoni-cho neighbourhood.
Its current exhibition, Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku), celebrates ten years of the museum with works from all thirty of its exhibitions. It’s a chaotic journey across the world, as Yokoo challenges ideas around (Western) modernism and originality, emphasising historical continuity in his contemporary prints, paintings, and graphic designs.
It is also an exhibition about exhibitions, as much about the museum curators as the artist himself. They share the artist’s ‘inexhaustible energy’ as he continues to throw himself into his work despite approaching the age of 90.
Travel may be accommodated in Japanese museums, but there’s scant discussion of empire, nor do we get much about how local and global environments are connected by shared imperial histories. At the time of my travels, the National Museum of Ethnology also looked over these legacies and beyond its borders, with a nevertheless well-curated exhibition on Arte Popular: The Creative and Critical Power of Latin Americans.
One notable exception is the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (FAAM). Curated with purpose, its pan-Asian collection and Asian-centric captions introduces viewers to the continent’s national pioneers in historic and modern art. Most, as a result, are men, but it’s great, bold, and incredibly accessible.
Its artists work across disciplines and styles: contemporary South Korean artist Yun Hyongkeun ‘departed from’ the European Art Informel (Abstract Expressionism), drawing from the movement to depict more natural subjects. Mongolian photographer Enkhbatym Likhagvador uses black-and-white images of agricultural landscapes to evoke a historical memory of plenty, a time before the colonial exploitation of natural resources.
Much of the collection focuses on Indonesia (Java), with a special display on the Art of Bali Island. We learn how Walter Spies, a Russian-born German painter and musician, ‘encouraged’ local artists to paint in their Gamelan tradition, giving rise to Javanese modern art. But artists bring their own preferences and prejudices - indeed, we can’t help but see the influence of Western orientalism and Rousseau in the works of I Dewa Putu Sena.
FAAM encourages us to broaden our understanding of Japanese environments, plural. To move beyond the romanticisation of nature – the stories told of ‘official Japan’ – and more deeply engage with the reality on the ground. To see how Japan’s global connections are evident in its local communities, and museums.
Interior Visions: From Bonnard to Tillmans and Contemporary Artists is on view at the POLA Museum of Art, Hakone until 2 July 2023.
Benesse House Museum on Naoshima is open year-round.
Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku) is on view at the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art until 7 May 2023.
The Permanent Collection (Asia Gallery) of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka is open year-round.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The natural environment matters in Japanese culture, and many cultural institutions too explore the ‘coexistence’ or symbiotic relationship between human art and nature. Atop a hill in Hakone, a historic post station along the Old Tōkaidō Road, the POLA Museum uses glass architecture to become part of the national park. The blend of natural and artificial lights play with our perceptions of the art on display; a wholly unique experience.
Its current exhibition, Interior Visions, excels when it looks through windows, which challenge the binary between inside and outside, portraits and landscapes. (Blink and you’ll miss Henri Matisse’s Mediterranean ‘Woman by the Window’ (1935), the only work left unlit.)
Like its permanent collection, it is a parade through 19th and 20th century French art. There though, we stop off with Léonard Foujita (Fujita Tsuguharu), a Japanese artist often excluded and overlooked from Parisian art history and, domestically, reduced to his cats. Here, he fits in with his contemporaries, but also goes further in his range of media, and deeper into the city.
Interior Visions gives Berthe Morisot, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and Wolfgang Tillmans rooms of their own, but Kusama Yayoi is the only Japanese artist afforded the same space. (The others, Sato Midori and Moriyama Yuichiro, and Takada Akiko and Masako, work in collaboration.)
It’s a different story outside; if the indoors are home to establishment, European sculptures, POLA’s outdoor Nature Trail features exclusively contemporary Asian artists, many exhibiting on their own soil.
With its urban outpost in Tokyo, the extensive POLA collection comes from the cash from the eponymous cosmetics business. Indeed, many Japanese shops and department stores also have museums and exhibition spaces in them, blurring another boundary between consumer/culture.
Kusama is capitalised on Naoshima too. The art island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea was developed in the 1980s, publicly touted as an effort to tackle deindustrialisation and underpopulation. A polka-dot bus deposits ‘art pilgrims’ at Miyanoura Port, where her iconic pumpkin sits beneath the Benesse House Museum.
The Museum, like much of the island, is the design of architect Andō Tadao. But the most powerful works are found in situ at the Valley Gallery, where Kusama’s infamous stainless steel balls, created for the 1966 Venice Biennale, quietly clatter on the water, literally reflecting their surroundings.
Tourists flock on ferries to Naoshima, then leave, a similar relationship to the sort of cultural gentrification seen in Margate. There’s little interaction with the local community, on the other side of the island, or those at the end of their queues for lunches or ice creams. Few continue on to the Art House Projects on Inujima, or Teshima, home of the Teshima Yokoo House.
Its creator, Yokoo Tadanori, is also celebrated more locally. His dedicated museum in Kobe shares Benesse’s glass architecture and sculptural works, but here, it does not look out or over, rather invite the outside in. Born in nearby Nishiwaki, Hyōgo, Yokoo now practices in Tokyo, but for a time lived in the Museum’s Aotoni-cho neighbourhood.
Its current exhibition, Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku), celebrates ten years of the museum with works from all thirty of its exhibitions. It’s a chaotic journey across the world, as Yokoo challenges ideas around (Western) modernism and originality, emphasising historical continuity in his contemporary prints, paintings, and graphic designs.
It is also an exhibition about exhibitions, as much about the museum curators as the artist himself. They share the artist’s ‘inexhaustible energy’ as he continues to throw himself into his work despite approaching the age of 90.
Travel may be accommodated in Japanese museums, but there’s scant discussion of empire, nor do we get much about how local and global environments are connected by shared imperial histories. At the time of my travels, the National Museum of Ethnology also looked over these legacies and beyond its borders, with a nevertheless well-curated exhibition on Arte Popular: The Creative and Critical Power of Latin Americans.
One notable exception is the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (FAAM). Curated with purpose, its pan-Asian collection and Asian-centric captions introduces viewers to the continent’s national pioneers in historic and modern art. Most, as a result, are men, but it’s great, bold, and incredibly accessible.
Its artists work across disciplines and styles: contemporary South Korean artist Yun Hyongkeun ‘departed from’ the European Art Informel (Abstract Expressionism), drawing from the movement to depict more natural subjects. Mongolian photographer Enkhbatym Likhagvador uses black-and-white images of agricultural landscapes to evoke a historical memory of plenty, a time before the colonial exploitation of natural resources.
Much of the collection focuses on Indonesia (Java), with a special display on the Art of Bali Island. We learn how Walter Spies, a Russian-born German painter and musician, ‘encouraged’ local artists to paint in their Gamelan tradition, giving rise to Javanese modern art. But artists bring their own preferences and prejudices - indeed, we can’t help but see the influence of Western orientalism and Rousseau in the works of I Dewa Putu Sena.
FAAM encourages us to broaden our understanding of Japanese environments, plural. To move beyond the romanticisation of nature – the stories told of ‘official Japan’ – and more deeply engage with the reality on the ground. To see how Japan’s global connections are evident in its local communities, and museums.
Interior Visions: From Bonnard to Tillmans and Contemporary Artists is on view at the POLA Museum of Art, Hakone until 2 July 2023.
Benesse House Museum on Naoshima is open year-round.
Yokoo Tadanori: A Full Stomach! (Man-Man-Puku-Puku-Man-Puku) is on view at the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art until 7 May 2023.
The Permanent Collection (Asia Gallery) of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka is open year-round.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
