Art Space Tokyo: An intimate guide to the Tokyo art world

ART SPACE TOKYO REVIEWED IN METROPOLIS

Posted by Ashley on Tuesday, October 21st 2008

This week’s issue of Metropolis has a review of Art Space Tokyo in it, which you can read online here.

Craig and I are happy to see that writer and editor of Japan Today, CB Liddell, has enjoyed AST, which he calls “a compact, attractively designed book” that “manages to throw a lot of light on many of the broader issues surrounding Japan’s contemporary art scene.”

Liddell was particularly interested in the way that Yukihito Tabata of Tokyo Gallery + BTAP addressed the China’s dominance of Asia’s art scene and Takashi Murakami’s use of the term “peace lag” to summarize Japan’s infantilization, brought up in my interview with Atsuko Koyanagi of Gallery Koyanagi. The reviews of AST that we’ve had so far have tended to concentrate on the quality of book’s production, so it is satisfying to read an article that focusses on its content.

There are, however, a few points in the review that I find problematic. My response has ended up being twice as long as Liddell’s review, but I think the issues that come up are important and worth addressing.

Firstly, the article begins with the line “It’s a paradox: While Tokyo is one of the ugliest cities in the world, the Japanese are a naturally artistic race.”

Imagine an article coming out of a mainstream New York publication that began with the assertion that “While Brooklyn is one of the poorer boroughs of the city, the Jews who live there are a race naturally inclined to make money.” It wouldn’t happen.

It would have been better had Liddell left his racialist worldview out of the review (and I mean racialist, not racist), but then it seems to be a recurrent element in other articles of his. A quick search of his past writings has turned up gems such as:

“Very few people would argue with the idea that the Japanese are cuter than most other races.”

and

“The Japanese, along with several other Asian races that share similar characteristics, have long been a rice-eating nation.”

Both of these statements have been printed in Metropolis, so it would seem to suggest bad judgement on behalf of the editors as much as the writer.

Secondly, Liddell suggests that the book’s choice of twelve venues and its interview + article format is “a little too trendy and time sensitive.” He backs this up by saying that “As the art scene continues to morph and mutate, this work is likely to date more quickly than one focused on the recurring themes and wellsprings of Japanese art.”

Well, Art Space Tokyo is a guide book, and guides inevitably have some information in them that goes out of date, so it seems unnecessary to criticize that element. More importantly, for any book review to call for a different book altogether is entirely beside the point.

As far as we know, the twelve spaces chosen for the book are unlikely to close or relocate anytime soon, if ever, so the core of the guide’s information is sound for the foreseeable future. In fact, this was one of our key reasons for focussing on the spaces and their owners rather than the art itself: these galleries and museums should still be there in five to ten years, whereas the art they show will certainly change. Even if all of the information in this book outdates eventually, by that time one would hope that updated guides of this kind will be much more readily available, and AST will remain as a useful snapshot of the Tokyo art scene as it was in the late 2000s.

Liddell’s next critique is that “The fact that personal preferences and connections were important in this project gives it a cliquey, art insider tone, but this is mitigated by the clarity of the language, which, for the most part, successfully avoids the jargonism and dog-whistle phrases that normally litter art criticism.”

At the very least, Liddell is saying that despite its “art insider” origins, Art Space Tokyo is not pretentious and makes itself easily accessible. However, the suggestion alone that the book is somehow the result of cliquey nepotism is grossly mistaken, and the irony is that any Tokyo art world insider can clearly see that. The only point in common between these galleries and museums is that they all have distinctive architecture or histories — those are the primary reasons we chose them. In terms of the Tokyo art world’s internal hierarchies and interrelationships, AST’s choice of venues is actually highly unconventional, something that was noted by many of the people who took part. The book is a deliberate mix of spaces, be they old or new, famous or barely known, and their inclusion in the project was initiated irrespective of the various social circles that they are part of.

Liddell’s assumption about these “connections” is a misunderstanding that can probably be explained quite easily. Before writing the review, he emailed me a few questions about why and how we made the book. In my reply, I wrote about how well suited Craig and I were to collaborate with each other, because “Craig makes stunningly beautiful books, and from my work as an editor at Tokyo Art Beat, I had the kind of overview and contacts within the Tokyo art world necessary to get the project started.”

Perhaps “contacts” was a misleading choice of word that implies a cliqueyness that actually wasn’t there. My point of emphasis was more that my prior work at Tokyo Art Beat had given me the kind of experience required to recognise what each gallery represents within the broader art world. If Craig had simply wanted to make a book about pretty buildings, he could have done that alone. I was there to give a sense of the kind of narratives that would come out of each gallery before we approached them: for example, Tokyo Gallery + BTAP would help us cover the significance of Ginza and Beijing; Aoyama | Meguro is one of the key second generation galleries to have emerged in the last four years; GA Gallery is one of only two architecture focussed galleries in the city, and so on.

Once we had decided which galleries and museums we wanted to take part, we set up meetings with them and pitched the project, and there were no cards for us to pull. Of course, I knew a few of the participants beforhand, but I was meeting most of them for the first time, and equally there are many other gallery owners I know who weren’t a part of the book. Art Space Tokyo is hardly the product of an insider job.

Lastly, it was disappointing to see Liddell dismiss the value of the essays in Art Space Tokyo not because of any specific complaint, but merely because some of them were written by “foreigners” (the nuance of his choice of word is different from saying “non-Japanese"). Asides from the fact that the ratio of the six essay writers’ nationalities was in fact two Japanese, two half-Japanese and two non-Japanese — all of whom are long-term Tokyo residents — it doesn’t make much sense for Liddell to have started the review by decrying the Japanese art world’s lack of success in establishing itself on the international stage and yet ignore the value of commentary by non-Japanese who work in its midst. These people play an essential part in the internationalisation of Tokyo’s art scene.

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Update (Oct 24): Ian Lynam, who contributed the “Syntax of Tokyo Graffiti” essay to Art Space Tokyo linked to this post from the “META no TAME” blog at Néojaponisme. You can read his response and since the AST blog has no comments function, discussion can be continued on META no TAME.