It is a sunny autumnal weekend in Okayama, a picturesque city 530 kilometres west of Tokyo. The town’s main attractions, the exquisite Okayama Korakuen – one of the most famous traditional gardens in Japan – and its rare black castle, the many-tiered keep of which overlooks the meandering Takahashi River, are thronged with street markets, brass bands, families and street performers in celebration of a festive holiday weekend.
As a bronze statue outside the main railway station attests, Okayama is famous as the home of Momotaro, a Samurai-period fable about a miraculous child who descends to Earth from heaven inside a giant peach.
After being discovered floating in a river, this “peach boy”, as he is known, is adopted by an elderly, childless couple and embarks on a series of adventures in the company of a talking dog, a monkey and a pheasant.
It is tempting to draw a link between the story of Momotaro's landing and Because Editorial is Costly (2016), Ryan Gander's highly-polished sculpture that appears to have crashed, ripping up the asphalt like a meteorite, into a small car park next to Okayama's old soy-sauce factory – but that would be a mistake.
Rather than being inspired by the local tale, Gander’s shining installation takes an original sculpture by renowned Belgian artist Georges Vantongerloo, one of the founders of the early 20th century De Stijl group, and transforms the Modernist icon using the aesthetics of an iPhone, while transporting the bloated result to present-day Japan.
The sculpture invites questions about what happens when art from one time and place is literally dropped into another. But as Gander admitted at the public event that accompanied the opening of the inaugural Okayama Art Summit, “the art didn’t really need to be here”.
The Okayama Art Summit, Japan’s newest international art show, opened on October 9 with the Artists talk, a discussion during which 19 of the show’s 30 exhibitors talked about their work, under the chairmanship of the show’s artistic director, the conceptual artist and one-time Freeze generation Young British Artist, Liam Gillick.
Held in the Okayama Prefectural Library, Artists talk was an illustration of the parallel universe that contemporary art often inhabits.
As families with small children and pensioners milled around the library and took tea in the cafe, artists such as 25-year-old Noah Barker, the youngest in the show; Ahmet Ögüt, who recently collaborated with Gillick as part of the eighth British Art Show; Angela Bulloch, who graduated from London’s Goldsmiths college a year after Gillick; and Michael Craig-Martin, a former tutor to them both, discussed their participation.
Speaking first, Gander suggested Because Editorial is Costly could be understood as referring to both the financial cost of having something edited as well as the emotional cost of it being edited. However, it is hard to avoid the idea that the work is a comment on the way art is now used as a vehicle for civic publicity, place branding and urban regeneration, not only in Okayama but globally.
If that is the case, then Gander's sculpture speaks eloquently to Gillick's overarching theme for the show, Development, and the many implications and connotations that word evokes.
“Right from the beginning, I wanted to do something that was related to a theme that I felt would be understandable here, but that was somewhat difficult, a little on the edge, which had a duality that was positive and negative at the same time,” Gillick later explained. “This city is a completely post-war city, everything you can see was built after 1945 because the whole place was destroyed, but the buildings are getting to an age where a decision has to be made about the next step.
“All the new buildings you see here are shopping malls, and I wanted to think about that, and so a lot of the buildings we’ve used are ones that they’ve decided to save.”
Those buildings include the library and Okayama Prefectural Government Offices – both of which were designed by Maekawa Kunio, one of Japan’s foremost Modernist architects, who studied under Le Corbusier in Paris – as well as humbler civic buildings such as the former Korakukan Tenjin School, which has been used as a store for emergency supplies since 2012.
Gillick's use of this space to exhibit works – including José León Cerrillo's multistorey Place Occupied by Zero... (2012), which echoes the abstraction and geometry of Soviet constructivism, and Anton Vidokle's 2015 film The Communist Revolution Was Caused By The Sun – affords the summit an institutional tone well-suited to its concern with development and progress.
Thanks to the slickness of the summit’s execution and the presence of significant works by artists such as Joan Jonas, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, the show already feels like a small but important addition to the international art circuit.
But other than shedding light on the ambitions of Okayama and the summit’s producer, a local businessman and avid art collector who already owns many of the works on display, the show reveals relatively little about the art scene in Japan.
It only features works by four Japanese artists. Of those, just one, 38-year-old Motoyuki Shitamichi, is originally from Okayama.
Torii is Shitamichi's investigations into the ghostly reminders of Japan's colonial past. It consists of photographs of surviving entry gates to Shinto shrines that were constructed in Japanese colonies at a time when Shintoism was the official state religion, and the Japanese government used shrines as a focus for nationalist and imperial propaganda.
Most of the temples – in the United States, Taiwan, Russia and China – were demolished, but in the examples Shitamichi recorded between 2006 and 2012, the entry gates, or torii, remain as what the artist describes as “treasures buried within the landscape”.
Shitamichi now lives and works in Nagoya, the home of one of Japan’s more established international art events, the Aichi Triennale, the third edition of which has just ended.
Based in three cities – Nagoya, Okazaki and Toyohashi – the 2016 Aichi Triennale, which operates on a budget similar to that of London’s Tate Modern, not only included a visual arts programme, with works by 119 artists from 38 countries, but also incorporated opera, film and performing arts.
The visual artists at this year’s Triennale were selected by a panel of international curators under the leadership of photographer and visual anthropologist Chihiro Minato.
They included 58 Japanese artists, as well as artists from the Middle East, including the UAE's Abdullah Al Saadi, from Khor Fakkan, whose work was on display in the Nagoya City Art Museum. As with the Okayama Art Summit, however, it was the insights provided by local artists – such as Tadashi Kanai and his Mirror of the Maraini Family: An Ethnologist in 20th-Century Japan – that proved most compelling.
Comprising filmed interviews, photographs, sketches and a diary, Mirror of the Maraini Family charts the wartime experiences of Italian writer, photographer, mountaineer and ethnographer Fosco Maraini, his wife Topazia and their three young daughters, who were imprisoned in Nagoya as civil internees between 1943 and 1945.
The author of pioneering travel books such as Secret Tibet and Meeting With Japan, Maraini had been appointed Reader in Italian at the University of Kyoto in 1941, but when he refused to give his support to Mussolini in 1943, the family was incarcerated in a concentration camp that stood just a few hundred metres from the site of what is now the Aichi Arts Center, the home of the Aichi Triennale.
With its depictions and recollections of fortitude and betrayal, hope and brutality, there is enough material in the story of the Maraini family to furnish a whole Triennale, but what is most remarkable is that such an exhibit was on show in the first place.
Here, in the work of artists such as Shitamichi and Kanai, and events such as the Okayama Summit and the Aichi Triennale, was evidence of a wider community that was willing to use art to confront some of the most chilling events from its recent past, while attempting to create something moving and meaningful in the process.
It was in these quiet and often overlooked instances that the shows’ most profound moments of honesty and beauty were to be found.
nleech@thenational.ae