Turns out the mayor was just ahead of his time. Today the Japanese art world has turned on to Asia. A large show of Asian oil paintings, organized by the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, is touring the country. A retrospective of Vietnamese painter Le Thanh Thu An recently concluded in Tokyo, where a major exhibit of Asian photography is planned for early 2000. The Fukuoka Art Museum has rebounded dramatically from its embarrassing start and this March opened the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the world’s first major institution of its kind, with a collection of 1,100 items. “Asian art has a depth and power that is new to the Japanese audience,” says Yasunaga, now director of the museum.
Japanese say other Asians often show a vivid sense of color, humor and social conscience that is lacking in their own artists. Sardonic portraits by Chinese painter Fang Lijun and poster installations by Korean Choi Jeonghwa poke fun at urban materialism with the same vitality that has fueled a recent fad for “Asian taste.” Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean-inspired clothing, furniture and accessory shops have swept Japan. Hong Kong and Taiwanese starlets have invaded Japanese TV and film, and music stores have installed “Asiapop” sections, opening the door to more serious arts. The Japanese had “almost completely ignored what’s being created in our neighborhood” since the Meiji restoration began opening Japan to the West in the 1860s, says art dealer Sueo Mitsuma, who set about to change that. For three summers he has brought young Vietnamese artists to his gallery in Tokyo.
Mitsuma’s gallery draws Japanese kids “willing to absorb everything new and cutting-edge.” The Fukuoka curators were floored when more than 800 people applied to volunteer at the new Asian museum; most were young women in love with Asian pop culture. “It was like art was the latest addition to their list of interesting Asian things,” says Masahiro Ushiroshoji, chief curator of the museum. “You see a lot of fun stuff here,” says college student Takako Kondo, marveling at cynical parodies of Mao posters by the Luo Brothers, three young artists from China.
Asian art is also a bargain in Japan, where the market for multimillion-dollar Monets is now dead. Once divided by conquest and war, Japan and its neighbors are now drawn together by the common burden of financial crisis. “Their art became more interesting [to us] as the artists’ urge to talk about what’s going on right now grew,” says Ushiroshoji. Images of bank notes, politicians and videogames aren’t uncommon in the collection.
Japan’s hottest Asian art connection is South Korea, which also surpassed Hawaii as the biggest destination for Japanese tourists this summer. Now Korean dealers are overtaking Americans and Europeans at the annual Tokyo International Contemporary Art Festival, which opens this week. So many Seoul galleries plan to show up that organizers are staging a Korean Art Festival on the side. There, Japanese and Korean scholars will host a panel discussion called “Asian Power: Beyond Modern Europe and the U.S.A.” It’s hard to paint the future in broader strokes than that.
