Japanese Art Exhibition: A Rare Find : LACMA curator Howard Fox scoured Japan for art he finds ‘radical and unique in the world’

Despite its vibrant Japanese community, Los Angeles has not seen a major exhibition of contemporary art from Japan in living memory. At one time such an oversight might have been explicable, if not forgivable. For years, nobody was certain if the nation produced new art that could be called either Japanese or contemporary. The rare exhibitions that appeared in the States tended to evidence an art so derivative of Western models--and often selected because it was derivative--that there seemed to be nothing Japanese about it except a little gold leaf to recall the folding screens of the Momoyama period. Evidence reinforced the old-fashioned American prejudice that all the Japanese could really do was make cheap knock-offs of our stuff.

Howard Fox, the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts curator of contemporary art, is fairly incensed about the way the occasional U.S. shows selected copy-cat work, calling the practice “An act of colonialism, an abrogation of responsibility. This culture puts high value on originality. Not looking for it in Japanese art is a mockery.”

Starting today, Fox and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will try to fix that when they unveil “A Primal Spirit,” a major effort devoted to the work of 10 Japanese sculptors virtually unknown on these shores. If the show (which runs until Aug. 26) turned out to be a raving turkey it would still be significant as part of an ever-widening trend toward attaching art to the social, economic and political issues of the day. Glasnost in the Soviet Union immediately brought Russian art to the States. You can bet there is a Polish show on the way after events in Warsaw.

Occidental art lovers have long doted on traditional Japanese art, from its popular woodblock prints to spectacular armored helmets and rock gardens. Today, everyone is curious about Japan because it is an economic superpower and goggled by its ability to produce mass-market gewgaws of almost spooky perfection. But people like Fox who are interested in visual culture have found cold comfort in scanning American art magazines and journals for news of Japanese contemporary art.

“They catch on quickly to trends in Germany or Italy because Europe is attached to the commercial loop,” he says of the system of dealers, collectors, galleries, museums and critics in the European-American axis. But Japan is out of it. Thus when he was invited in 1987 by Tokyo’s Hara Museum to act as guest curator for a traveling exhibition of Japanese art, he found little in print to guide him. He made a two-week reconnaissance mission to Japan and found the scene quite unlike the well-oiled Euro-American system. Artists were scattered and few had established studios to visit.

Fox found that Japan, roughly the size of California, has about 600 museums, but they tend to be rigidly conservative and, excepting the Hara, exhibit little beyond lackluster annual roundups of the art of the moment. Sounds like the old LACMA surveys back in the ‘50s.

Fox was forced to break new ground. Talking to every Japanese artnik he could find, he discovered virtually the only way to piece together a picture of the amorphous phenomenon. He left his card everywhere, soliciting catalogues from museum survey and rental-gallery exhibitions and he launched word-of-mouth solicitations for slides and biographies. Curating is not all glamour.

Today he thinks the art he finally culled for “A Primal Spirit” after four years of research is, “radical and unique in the world.”

He chose sculpture because he found striking affinities between otherwise unrelated Japanese artists plying that trade. “I went with an open mind. The show suggested itself to me. Sculpture was the form that was compelling, insistent and persistent. Only two of the 10 artists included have dawning international reputations, Toshikasu Endo and Tadashi Kawamata.” Few of the others have shown outside Japan and none knew of the existence of all the others. Fox says he avoided learning too much of established local reputations in order to keep an open mind. In short, “A Primal Spirit” is his baby.

He says there is good painting being done in Japan but other off-the-record curatorial opinion calls it “vapid.” He says there is enough markedly different work being done “for a dozen other shows,” but he was fascinated by the combination of indigenous aesthetic and international reach in these works.

“There is some controversy over there suggesting I’ve created a new segregation, a new japonisme ,” Fox said, referring to an old Western habit of appreciating Japanese art as something quaint and exotic.

The other day he took time from installing the exhibition to talk about it, and he brought along two participating artists, Kawamata and Takamasa Kuniyasu, who had arrived early to supervise their complicated site-specific installations. The pair turned out to refreshingly subvert any sort of stereotype anyone might be tempted to apply to this art other than certain shared traditional Japanese attitudes, such as a sense of oneness with nature.

Kawamata, 37, was born in Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido. In 1987 he was included in Germany’s prestigious “Documenta” and the Sao Paulo Bienal. He is a self-avowed realist. Kuniyasu, 33, is also from Hokkaido but met Kawamata for the first time here. Never shown previously outside the Orient, he is best decribed as a mystic.

The artists seemed to politely disagree on most questions raised. I say seemed to because the circumstances warranted the presence of two translators. Sometimes, the four consulted for minutes on a question only to come up with a one paragraph answer that didn’t seem to address the original inquiry.

Everyone did agree that contemporary art in Japan is in a vibrant infancy that is invisible to an indifferent Japanese public. There are virtually no collectors of contemporary art. And due to the traditional Japanese desire for consensus and deference to others’ personal honor, criticism is, with rare exceptions, favorable.

Japan certainly has dealers who trade in expensive high-powered art, witness those who have paid millions for Impressionist paintings at New York auctions. But such investment-style dealers have little to do with contemporary art. Tokyo boasts about 200 art galleries that display it, but they are for-rent spaces. In the West, such galleries are seen as vanity operations no self-respecting artist would use; in Japan, that’s the way it works. Spaces are rented by the week and artists must take care of everything from announcements to vernissage and sales, when there are any, according to the sculptors.

Kawamata, who has an athletic presence, said: “It’s easy to become an artist in Japan but hard to survive unless you have money. Recognition comes hard but your chances for it go up with age.”

Kuniyasu, bespectacled, willowy and thoughtful, added: “In the West recognition moves up like an escalator. In Japan it’s more like a freight elevator.”

Fox found the climate for contemporary art in Japan comparable to New York in the 1940s, when Abstract Expressionism was an underground phenomenon, tiny, inbred and obscure.

Kawamata said: “Abstract Expressionism came after America was victorious in World War II and became a huge economic power. Now Japan has a big economy.”

“Abstract Expressionism had its own revolutionary situation and was devoted to the international world,” said Kuniyasu. “Now 45 years after the end of the war the Japanese are getting to notice their own identity. We’re getting self-confident about our originality.”

That self-confidence comes with an awareness that their best chance for recognition is to achieve it first on the international scene and then hope for some respect at home. For them, Isamu Noguchi, although Japanese-American, is something of a model. He eventually gained reknown that bracketed the world from Paris to Tokyo. The cosmopolitan Kawamata smokes Gauloises.

Kawamata has no desire to make what he calls “souvenir style” art. “I don’t walk in the countryside with the idea of making ‘Japanese’ art although people may see something Japanese in the work. We are not talking Buddhism or Shintoism here. My art comes from a more industrial situation, from the kind of control and artificiality you find in the city. I am looking for connections. Japan has always been in contact with other countries. Our problem is to chose from the information that comes to us from outside and thus to choose our identity. Of course Japanese are different from Russians or Americans but they all sleep, eat and make love. I am looking for those kinds of basic connections.”

He selected the bridge across the museum’s central court as the armature for his wood-plank work-in-progress. It starts inside the galleries and works its way across the span.

Although Kawamata studied painting in college and admired Jasper Johns, he soon discovered he was more interested in arranging space. Some observers find some affinity between his work and that of Christo, the great wrapper of bridges and canyons. But Kawamata says he is more interested in connecting indoors with out and extending his work from the confines of the art world into the sphere of ordinary people and events. He likes the social interaction with the real world and with people who assist in the projects.

He always works with the same material--lengths of raw lumber--so “I won’t have to think about it.” He wants to be “submissive” to the material, an idea that looms large among these artists. As the artist in the exhibition who uses chemical reaction to create his shapes, they want to cooperate with their work rather than try to dominate it as they feel Western artists do. Kawamata once compared his lengths of lumber to cancer cells--either benign or malignant--arranging themselves into various systems and rhythms in the body. He finds them analogous to the systems and rhythms of great cities.

Meantime, Kuniyasu was constructing an environment of lovely smelling pine logs to fill up a large gallery in the Anderson building. It’s a version of a work permanently installed in Japan’s northern Aomori prefecture which incorporates a real tree with its seasonal changes.

He says the Japanese question is, “Not pertinent to my work. Something Japanese may come out in it because I was born in Japan but the question is too logical, too Western. I want to pull some essence from the universe, something not logical but biological.”

Kuniyasu’s work demands the kind of simple, repetitive physical labor most people find tedious. He says humble work liberates and calms him, leading him beyond his individual ego to a deeper and more authentic inner self and to a sense of joy in creation. Sounds very Zen.

He says that if he could find words to express his message there would be no need to make the work. Similarly, Kawamata says he does the work for himself and has no dreams for it other than to eventually find “my own position.”

Fox points out that Western art tends to produce art as separate objects that are a kind of metaphor for occidental individualism. By contrast he thinks this Japanese art reaches out to link with nature and the cosmos. “The effort in this exhibition,” he said, “is not to categorize, define or separate but to allow us to connect with something else.”