ABSTRACT
This chapter offers another angle on the “transnational trajectories” in East Asia by considering the cross-border dynamics of Japanese modern and contemporary art-and particularly the international mobility of artists-as part of an Asian-led cultural globalization. Japanese artists were among the first to be presented as part of the “discovery” of world art in the late 1980s. Yet although a vibrant commercial and conceptual contemporary art scene has continued to develop in Japan during the next two decades, Japanese contemporary artists have been surprisingly marginal to the Asian art boom in global art. This is a long and complex story, but it is largely because the Western global curators have been unable to get in to Japan and shape the contemporary art scene as they have in China or India. With one or two notable exceptions (e.g. Takashi Murakami) Japanese artists have been neglected in global art history narratives of the 1990s and 2000s. Part of this to do with the peculiarly distinct “national” feature of Japanese contemporary art in comparison to other Asian countries. At the same time, Japan’s relative neglect is also symptomatic of the Japanese art world’s long history of self-understanding and positioning in relation to Western modernity. Consequently, the story of Japanese modern and contemporary art in relation to transnational flows and mobilities reveals an ambivalent globalization. It suggests that, in this field of cultural production at least, Japan has preserved a certain independence, less obviously dominated by global forces. This chapter, by analyzing the international mobility of Japanese artists, charts the changing forms of both cosmopolitanism and nationhood in the ways the experiences of these artists have been expressed through artistic forms.
The chapter proceeds as follows. In the first section, I take the story back to the historical pre-World War Two origins of modernist Japanese art, tracing the role of self-positioning in relation to Western modernity and the dynamics of international mobility and return in international Japanese artists’ careers. This introduces the notion of the gaisen ko-en (the “triumphant return performance”)— that is, the acclaim at home after perceived success on a tour abroad-which has hitherto always been thought necessary to cement a Japanese artist’s international (i.e. “world class”) reputation. Along the way, the story introduces a number of the most famous figures in Japanese modern and contemporary art from different periods in relation to our broader themes. These distinct generations can be thought of as cohorts who have varying interactions with their global and national contexts, thus revealing how forms of cosmopolitanism and nationhood have changed over time. It also lays a groundwork to understand the problematic evolution of the Japanese modern art tradition and art world institutions and assess the effects of their domination and resistance up to and through into the global art era from the late 1980s onwards. In the second main section, I shift to the younger “post-Bubble” or “zero zero generation” who came of age amidst the economic decline, social malaise and shattering disasters of Japan in the mid-to late 1990s. Their evaluation as emergent artists is not as yet settled-neither in Japan nor internationally. Japan in the 1990s and after experienced economic hardship and global contraction while the rest of the world, in particular the rest of Asia, was going through a development boom. I suggest that this disjuncture with world trends has caused important changes in the dynamics of influence and recognition on the part of these younger Japanese artists in a global context. While they have been largely ignored by the mainstream global art world, the need for the gaisen ko-en in their work is arguably being transcended. The argument is that the qualitative change of Japan from being a rising Asian power and alternate modernity to one pioneering forms of post-Bubble, post-growth society, has largely confounded dominant Western understandings of this new Asian culture. These understandings assume a modernizing developmental paradigm and create their narratives of artistic importance accordingly: essentially in terms of global market value and “political” art theoretical interest-and hence as a “challenge” to the West. But what works for China and India does not work for Japan. Rather, the new post-Bubble generation offers a different way of pinpointing how East Asian society and culture may interact with regional and global forces or embody the national and transnational in a post-growth future. It is a rather different narrative to the one told about contemporary Chinese or Indian artists, as well as one comparatively free of the typical dominated passive-aggressive position of Japanese artists from previous generations. I illustrate my interpretation with a number of artists born in the mid-1970s who have all drawn diversely on both national themes and material sources and global, contemporary theoretical sensibilities (e.g. environmental sustainability and social therapy). While acutely aware of their origins and trajectories, they all have wide experience of travel and life in different Western global hubs. They are therefore fashioning convincingly cosmopolitan and Japanese contemporary art not least because the “global” or “cosmopolitan” influence of cities where they have lived and work, such as New York, London and Berlin, are all quite different.
