Contemporary Japanese Art. CraftsGirl

The modern Japanese art scene seems to be completely globalized. Artists travel between Tokyo and New York, almost all received European or American education, they talk about their work in international art English. However, this picture is far from complete.

National shapes and trends are proving to be one of the most sought-after items Japan has to offer to the world market. artistic ideas and works.

plane operation. How superflat combines American geek culture and traditional Japanese painting

Takashi Murakami. "Tang Tan Bo"

If in the Western world for almost everyone (except perhaps the most ardent postmodern theorists) the boundary between high and popular culture is still relevant, albeit problematic, in Japan these worlds are totally mixed.

An example of this is Takashi Murakami, who successfully combines exhibitions in the world's best galleries and streaming production.

Recording of the tour of the Murakami exhibition "There will be gentle rain"

However, Murakami's relationship with popular culture - and for Japan this is primarily the culture of manga and anime fans (otaku) - is more complicated. Philosopher Hiroki Azuma criticizes the understanding of otaku as an authentic Japanese phenomenon. Otaku consider themselves directly connected with the traditions of the Edo period of the 17th-19th centuries - the era of isolationism and the rejection of modernization. Azuma claims that the otaku movement is based on manga, animation, graphic novels, computer games- could have arisen only in the context of the post-war American occupation as a result of the import of American culture. The art of Murakami and his followers reinvents otaku with pop art techniques and debunks the nationalist myth of the tradition's authenticity. It represents a "re-Americanization of Japaneseized American culture."

From an art history point of view, superflat is closest to the early Japanese painting ukiyo-e. Most famous work in this tradition - engraving " A big wave in Kanagawa" by Katsushiki Hokusai (1823-1831).

For Western modernism, the discovery of Japanese painting was a breakthrough. It made it possible to see the picture as a plane and seeks not to overcome this peculiarity of it, but to work with it.

Katsushiki Hokusai. "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa"

Pioneers of performance. What does Japanese art of the 1950s mean today

Documentation creative process Akira Kanayama and Kazuo Shiragi

Superflat took shape only in the 2000s. But the artistic actions significant for world art began in Japan much earlier - and even earlier than in the West.

The performative turn in art took place at the turn of the 60s and 70s of the last century. In Japan, the performance appeared in the fifties.

For the first time, the Gutai Group has shifted its focus from the creation of self-sufficient objects to the process of their production. From here - one step to the abandonment of the art object in favor of an ephemeral event.

Although individual artists from Gutai (and there were 59 of them in twenty years) actively existed in the international context, understanding Japanese as their collective activity post-war art generally began in the West quite recently. The boom came in 2013 with several exhibitions in small galleries in New York and Los Angeles, Tokyo 1955-1970: The New Avant-Garde at MoMA, and the massive historical retrospective Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Guggenheim Museum. The Moscow import of Japanese art seems to be an almost belated continuation of this trend.

Sadamasa Motonaga. Work (Water) at the Guggenheim Museum

It is striking how modern these retrospective exhibitions look. For example, the central object of the exposition at the Guggenheim Museum is the reconstruction of Work (Water) by Sadamasa Motonaga, in which the levels of the museum rotunda are connected by polyethylene pipes with colored water. They are reminiscent of brush strokes that have been torn off the canvas and exemplify Gutai's central focus on "concreteness" (translated from Japanese name groups), the materiality of the objects with which the artist works.

Many members of Gutai received an education related to classical nihonga painting, many are biographically attached to the religious context of Zen Buddhism, to its characteristic Japanese calligraphy. All of them found a new, procedural or participatory approach to ancient traditions. Kazuo Shiraga has videotaped how he draws his anti-Rauschenberg monochromes with his feet, and even created paintings in public.

Minoru Yoshida turned flowers from Japanese prints into psychedelic objects - an example of this is the Bisexual Flower, one of the first kinetic (moving) sculptures in the world.

The curators of the exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum talk about the political significance of these works:

"The Gutai demonstrated the importance of free individual action, demolition of audience expectations, and even stupidity as ways to counter the social passivity and conformity that, over decades, allowed a militaristic government to gain a critical mass of influence, invade China, and then join World War II."

Good and wise. Why Artists Left Japan for America in the 1960s

Gutai was the exception to the rule in post-war Japan. Avant-garde groups remained marginal, the art world was strictly hierarchical. The main way to recognition was participation in competitions held by recognized associations of classical artists. Therefore, many preferred to go to the West and integrate into the English-language art system.

It was especially hard for women. Even in the progressive Gutai, the share of their presence did not reach even a fifth. What can we say about traditional institutions, for access to which it was necessary special education. By the sixties, girls had already acquired the right to it, however, learning art (if it was not about decorative, which was part of the skill set ryosai kenbo- a good wife and a wise mother) was a socially frowned upon occupation.

Yoko Ono. cut piece

The story of the emigration of five powerful Japanese female artists from Tokyo to the United States was the subject of Midori Yoshimoto's study "Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York". Yayoi Kusama, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi and Shigeko Kubota at the start of their careers decided to leave for New York and worked there, including on the modernization of the traditions of Japanese art. Only Yoko Ono grew up in the US - but she also deliberately refused to return to Japan, having become disillusioned with Tokyo's artistic hierarchy during her short stay in 1962-1964.

Ono became the most famous of the five - not only as the wife of John Lennon, but also as the author of proto-feminist performances dedicated to objectification. female body. There are obvious parallels between Cut Piece It, in which the audience could cut off pieces of the artist's clothes, and "Rhythm 0" by the "grandmother of performance" Marina Abramović.

On short legs. How to pass the author's acting training Tadashi Suzuki

In the case of Ono and Gutai, the methods and themes of their work, separated from the authors, became internationally significant. There are other forms of export - when the artist's works are perceived with interest in the international arena, but the borrowing of the actual method does not occur because of its specificity. The most striking case is Tadashi Suzuki's acting training system.

The Suzuki Theater is loved even in Russia - and this is not surprising. Last time he was with us in 2016 with the performance of The Trojan Women based on the texts of Euripides, and in the 2000s he came several times with productions of Shakespeare and Chekhov. Suzuki transferred the action of the plays to the current Japanese context and offered non-obvious interpretations of the texts: he discovered anti-Semitism in Ivanov and compared it with the disdainful attitude of the Japanese towards the Chinese, transferred the action of King Lear to a Japanese lunatic asylum.

Suzuki built his system in opposition to the Russian theater school. IN late XIX century, during the so-called Meiji period, the modernizing imperial Japan experienced the rise of opposition movements. The result was a large-scale westernization of a previously extremely closed culture. Among the imported forms was the Stanislavsky system, which still remains in Japan (and in Russia) one of the main directorial methods.

Suzuki exercises

In the sixties, when Suzuki began his career, the thesis was spreading more and more that because of their bodily features, Japanese actors could not get used to roles from Western texts that filled the then repertoire. The young director managed to offer the most convincing alternative.

Suzuki's system of exercises, called leg grammar, includes dozens of ways to sit, and even more to stand and walk.

His actors usually play barefoot and seem, by lowering the center of gravity, as tightly tied to the ground as possible, heavy. Suzuki teaches them and foreign performers his technique in the village of Toga, in ancient Japanese houses filled with modern equipment. His troupe gives only about 70 performances a year, and the rest of the time he lives, almost without leaving the village and having no time for personal affairs - only work.

The Toga Center appeared in the 1970s and was designed at the request of the director by the world-famous architect Arata Isozaka. Suzuki's system might seem patriarchal and conservative, but he himself talks about Toga in modern terms of decentralization. Even in the middle of the 2000s, Suzuki understood the importance of exporting art from the capital to the regions and organizing local production points. According to the director, the theatrical map of Japan in many ways resembles the Russian one - art is concentrated in Tokyo and a few less major centers. Russian theater a company that regularly goes on tour in small towns and is based far from the capital would also not hurt.

SCOT Company Center in Toga

Flower trails. What resource did modern theater discover in noh and kabuki systems

The Suzuki method grows out of two ancient Japanese traditions - but also kabuki. It is not only that these types of theater are often characterized as the art of walking, but also in more obvious details. Suzuki often follows the rule about the performance of all roles by men, uses characteristic spatial solutions, for example, hanamichi ("the path of flowers") of the kabuki pattern - a platform extending from the stage into the depths auditorium. He also exploits quite recognizable symbols like flowers and scrolls.

Of course, in global world Not there is talk about the privilege of the Japanese to use their national forms.

The theater of one of the most significant directors of our time, the American Robert Wilson, was built on borrowings from but.

He not only uses masks and make-up that remind the mass audience of Japan, but also borrows the ways of acting based on the maximum slowdown of movement and self-sufficient expressiveness of the gesture. Combining traditional and ritual forms with cutting-edge lighting scores and minimalist music (one of the most famous works Wilson - a production of Philip Glass's opera "Einstein on the Beach"), Wilson essentially produces the synthesis of origins and relevance that much of modern art strives for.

Robert Wilson. "Einstein on the Beach"

From no and kabuki grew one of the pillars modern dance- buto, literally translated - dance of darkness. Invented in 1959 by choreographers Kazuo Ono and Tatsumi Hijikata, who also drew on a low center of gravity and concentration on the feet, butoh was about bringing reflections from traumatic war experiences into the bodily dimension.

“They showed the body sick, collapsing, even monstrous, monstrous.<…>The movements are either slow, or deliberately sharp, explosive. For this, a special technique is used, when the movement is carried out as if without involving the main muscles, due to the bone levers of the skeleton,” dance historian Irina Sirotkina inscribes butoh in the history of the liberation of the body, connects it with the departure from ballet normativity. She compares butoh with the practices of dancers and choreographers of the early 20th century - Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Mary Wigman, speaks of the influence on later "postmodern" dance.

A fragment of the dance of Katsura Kana, the modern successor of the butoh tradition

Today, butoh in its original form is no longer an avant-garde practice, but a historical reconstruction.

However, the movement dictionary developed by Ohno, Hijikata and their followers remains a valuable resource for contemporary choreographers. In the West, it is used by Dimitris Papaioannou, Anton Adasinsky and even in the video for “Belong To The World” by The Weekend. In Japan, the successor of the butoh tradition is, for example, Saburo Teshigawara, who will come to Russia in October. Although he himself denies parallels with the dance of darkness, critics find quite recognizable signs: a seemingly boneless body, fragility, noiseless step. True, they are already placed in the context of postmodernist choreography - with its high tempo, runs, work with postindustrial noise music.

Saburo Teshigawara. metamorphosis

Locally global. How is contemporary Japanese art similar to Western art?

The works of Teshigawara and many of his colleagues organically fit into the programs of the best Western contemporary dance festivals. If you skim through the descriptions of performances and performances that were shown at the Festival / Tokyo - the largest annual show of Japanese theater, then it will be difficult to notice fundamental differences from European trends.

One of the central themes is site-specificity - Japanese artists explore the spaces of Tokyo, ranging from clumps of capitalism in the form of skyscrapers to marginal areas of otaku concentration.

Another topic is the study of intergenerational misunderstanding, theater as a place of live meeting and organized communication of people. different ages. Projects dedicated to her by Toshika Okada and Akira Tanayama were brought to Vienna for several years in a row to one of the key European festivals of performing arts. There was nothing new in the transfer of documentary materials and personal stories to the stage by the end of the 2000s, but the curator of the Vienna Festival presented these projects to the public as an opportunity for live, point-to-point contact with another culture.

Another main line is working through the traumatic experience. For the Japanese, it is associated not with the Gulag or the Holocaust, but with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The theater refers to him constantly, but the most powerful statement about atomic explosions as the moment of the genesis of all modern Japanese culture still belongs to Takashi Murakami.

to the exhibition “Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture”

“Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture” is its name curatorial project shown in New York in 2005. "Little Boy" - "baby" in Russian - the name of one of the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. Collecting hundreds of manga comics from leading illustrators, distinctive vintage toys, merchandise inspired by famous anime from Godzilla to Hello Kitty, Murakami has pushed the concentration of cuteness - kawaii - to the limit in the museum space. In parallel, he launched a selection of animations in which central images there were pictures of explosions, bare earth, destroyed cities.

This opposition was the first major statement about the infantilization of Japanese culture as a way to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Now this conclusion seems already obvious. An academic study of kawaii by Inuhiko Yomota is built on it.

There are also later traumatic triggers. Of the most important - the events of March 11, 2011, the earthquake and tsunami that led to a major accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. At Festival/Tokyo-2018, a whole program of six performances was devoted to understanding the consequences of a natural and technological disaster; they also became the theme for one of the works presented at Solyanka. This example clearly shows that the arsenal critical methods Western and Japanese art is not fundamentally different. Haruyuki Ishii creates an installation of three television sets that loop through high-speed edited and looped footage from television programs about the earthquake.

“The work is made up of 111 videos that the artist watched every day in the news until the moment when everything he saw was no longer perceived as fiction,” the curators explain. "New Japan" is an expressive example of how art does not resist interpretation based on national myths, but at the same time critical eye finds that the same interpretation might be relevant for art of any origin. The curators talk about contemplation as the basis of the Japanese tradition, drawing on quotations from Lao Tzu. At the same time, as if leaving out of brackets that almost all modern Art focused on the “observer effect” (as the exhibition is called) - whether in the form of creating new contexts for the perception of familiar phenomena or in raising the question of the possibility of adequate perception as such.

Imagined Communities - another work by video artist Haruyuki Ishii

Game

However, one should not think that Japan of the 2010s is a concentration of progressiveness.

The habits of the good old traditionalism and love for orientalist exoticism have not yet been outlived. "The Theater of Virgins" is the title of a rather admiring article about the Japanese theater "Takarazuka" in the Russian conservative magazine "PTJ". Takarazuka appeared at the end of the 19th century as a business project to attract tourists to a remote city of the same name, which accidentally became the terminus of a private railway. Only plays in the theater unmarried girls, which, according to the owner of the railway, were supposed to lure male spectators to the city. Today, Takarazuka functions as an industry - with its own TV channel, dense concert program, even the local amusement park. But only unmarried girls still have the right to be in the troupe - let's hope they don't check for virginity at least.

However, Takarazuka pales in comparison to the Toji Deluxe club in Kyoto, which the Japanese also call theater. They show absolutely wild, judging by description New Yorker columnist Ian Buruma, striptease show: several naked girls on stage turn the demonstration of genitals into a public ritual.

Like many artistic practices, this show is based on ancient legends (with the help of a candle and a magnifying glass, the men from the audience could take turns exploring the “secrets of the mother goddess Amaterasu”), and the author himself was reminded of the noh tradition.

Search Western counterparts for "Takarazuki" and Toji we will leave it to the reader - it is not difficult to find them. We only note that a significant part of modern art is directed precisely at combating such practices of oppression - both Western and Japanese, ranging from superflat to butoh dance.

The post is advertising, but the impressions, text and photos are their own.

Contemporary art is difficult to judge or evaluate, as it initially takes itself beyond this possibility. It's good that there is Alexey Lifanov , who, although not a Japanese expert, understands art better than me. Who, if not Alexei, would help me understand what I saw?
Yes, the Japanese are strange people. Impressions from the exhibition on Gogol Boulevard.

The exhibits at the exhibition "Double Perspective" can be conditionally divided into three parts (according to the topics raised by the authors). The first is devoted to the individual and the state, the role of ideology in privacy, the dictate of society over the individual. The second theme is related: man and his influence on nature (and even within the framework of one exhibition various artists expressed diametrically opposed views. The third topic is purely Japanese and is dedicated to the ideology of "loli" and other ephebophilic things that flourish in Japanese society.

1. The works of Kenji Yanobe are implicated in post-apocalyptic aesthetics, while, it should be noted, without any "stalkerism". His work is very naive at the level of method. "Child of the Sun" is a large-scale and touching sculpture. What kind of person should be in order to resist the technogenic world - bold, resolute or direct and naive?

3. Continuation of the theme in an even more exaggeratedly naive style.

4. Motohiko Odani talks about puberty, sexuality and its psychology. Opposite this sculpture is a much more expressive video installation, but you need to see it with your own eyes.

5. Makoto Aida develops the theme. A bonsai tree with girlish heads is a hyperbolic symbol of perverted love. The symbolism is transparent and hardly needs explanation.

6. Another of his works "Pupils of the hara-kiri school". Graphically, it's simply amazing.

7. Continuation of the "children's" theme from Yoshimoto Naro. Children's faces and non-childish emotions.

8. Takahiro Iwasaki created a very conditional diorama of a certain city from all sorts of garbage. The aesthetics of the city, which is actually a garbage dump, is not a new idea, but interestingly implemented.

10. Paintings by Tadanori Yokoo - a collage of allusions, quotes and archetypes. At the same time, the coloring is simply amazing.

11. Yayoi Kusama turned to the existential aesthetics of being and non-being, creating a room where space breaks and falls apart.

12. Yasumasa Morimura made a parody of a parody. He depicts not Adolf Hitler at all, as it might seem, but Ginkel's Adenoid - a character from Chaplin's film "The Great Dictator". The rest of his works are already dedicated to the immediate rulers and dictators, but the essence is clear - the threat of a total ideology.

13. There are few spectators, but those that are are very enthusiastically discussing what they have seen. In general, it seems that visitors really like what is happening.

14. This is the head of George Bush. George Bush sings the US anthem. The idea is simple to understand - about the invasion of ideology and the state, even in the personal space of a person.

15. Rats-Pokemon. My favorite part.

16. Part of the exhibition - photographs. Sometimes interesting, sometimes too intimate to understand.

18. Photographs by Toshio Shibata. Here the idea of ​​the harmonious coexistence of man and nature is solved in the form of photographs, aesthetically much closer to abstraction than to realism - such a well-adjusted geometry and composition.

19. One of the greetings to Lenin.

In any case, the exhibitions were created to attend them live, and not to watch photo reports on blogs. Many works are completely impossible to evaluate in static and in the size of a screen photo. Therefore, it is better to go to the exhibition "Double Perspective" yourself.

The project partner, Sony, is holding a competition and raffling off a laptop and other prizes! If you go to the exhibition, be sure to take pictures of the exhibits and write your brief impressions. Share to enter the competition

There will be an exhibition of contemporary Japanese art "Double Perspective".

1. There are a lot of unusual things in Japanese contemporary art. For example, these paintings by Izumi Kato are made by hand, without using a brush.

2. At first glance, it may seem that these are ordinary light bulbs. But this is work with deep meaning dedicated to the 38th parallel, which separates North and South Korea.

3. Of course, in each work there is some deep meaning that does not lie on the surface, but even if you do not find it, you can simply admire, for example, the beauty of this skillfully made rose.

4. this is the work of Kenji Yanobe on how a person can survive the end of the world

6. This is his most famous work "Child of the Sun" created after the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

8. Makoto Aida "Bonsai Ai-chan"

9. this is also modern Japanese art

10. intersny project "Lenin is wanted in Moscow apartments". Yoshinori Niva searched the houses of Muscovites for preserved items related to the personality of Lenin. The strangest thing is that this was not done by a Russian, but by a Japanese.

14. By the way, stuffed real rats were used for this work.

15. These photos show people's fears

An interesting exhibition is going on in the Hermitage - Modern Art of Japan "MONO-NO AWARE. The Charm of Things".

To say that I am a fan of contemporary art - I can not. I like it better when there is something to look at (busy graphics, or arts and crafts, ethnos is my everything). Admiring the beauty of a pure concept is not always fun for me. (Malevich, sorry! I don't like Black Square!)

But today I got to this exhibition!

Precious, if you are in St. Petersburg, interested in art and have not been there yet, then the exhibition will be until February 9th! Go, because it's interesting!

Concepts convince me a little, as I wrote above. I somehow thought that in a year of visiting modern exhibitions, one or two objects seem funny to me at most. And many things do not touch me so much that I feel sorry for the time that I spent. But it is in any genre, in any art, the percentage of the ratio of talent and mediocrity, it's good if it's one in ten! But I liked this show.

Japanese creations were placed in the exhibition halls of the General Staff. The first installation that greets visitors is an incredible labyrinth filled with salt on the floor. Gray floor, white salt, incredibly neatly marked space, woven into one field. Big showroom, and a white ornament spread across the floor like some amazing loach. And you understand how temporary this art is. The exhibition will close, the maze will be swept away with a broom. I once watched the movie, "Little Buddha". And there, at the beginning, a Buddhist monk laid out a complex ornament from colored sand. And at the end of the film, the monk made a sharp movement with his brush and the titanic work dissipated in the wind. That was, then hop, and no. And it says, appreciate the beauty here and now, everything is fleeting. So this labyrinth of salt, it enters into a dialogue with you, you begin to answer the questions that he puts you in front of. The artist is Motoi Yamamoto.

Yes Yes! This is such a big maze, did you feel the scale?

The second object that captivates is the huge dome made of polyethylene and black resin by Yasuaki Onishi. Unusually decided space. On the black thinnest uneven threads of resin hangs, slightly moving, a dome .... or a mountain with a complex relief. When you go inside, you see a motley pattern of dots - places where the resin sticks. It's funny, as if the black rain is silently falling, and you are under the canopy.

How did this technique come about? Funny, right? But live it looks more "alive", the dome sways slightly from the breeze created by passing visitors. And there is a feeling of your interaction with the object. You can enter the "cave", see from the inside how it is!

But in order not to get the impression that everything was only black and white, I will post here a couple more photos of the composition, made from hoops connected together. Such colored funny plastic curls! And also, you can go through this room, inside the hoops, or you can look at everything from the outside.

These items are my favorite. Of course, soon conceptual contemporary art will become different, consonant with the new time. It will not return to the old, and will not remain as it is now. It will change. But in order to understand what was, where the stream was rushing and what and where it comes from, you need to know what is happening now. And do not shy away that nooo, the concept is not for me, but try to see it and evaluate it. There are few talents, as always, but they are there. And if the exhibits resonate, then all is not lost!!!