Space for Your Future: Recombining the DNA of Art and Design
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan
‘Space for Your Future’ is a welcome return to form for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT), which for the last few years has been become known for its reliance on child-pleasing treats (Studio Ghibli, Disney animation) and rather unexacting solo shows (Shinro Ohtake, Yukihisa Isobe, Marlene Dumas). What’s been missing has been original, international group shows. Now the museum’s Chief Curator, Yuko Hasegawa makes amends and, considering she only moved to MOT in April 2006 (from the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa) she has done it with impressive speed. The only question is, has she tried to do too much at once?
At first glance, ‘Space for Your Future’ is a simple show. Noting that new technologies have made ‘crossovers and synergies between creative disciplines […] a trend in the first decade of the Twenty-first century’, Hasegawa and her team explain that they challenged ‘a group of Japanese (14, to be precise) and international (20) artists [to] give their visions of the future a spatial expression.’ Fair enough. And hence the inclusion of four architects makes perfect sense. If SANAA’s future involves an elegant, glass-encased, four-leaf-clover-shaped Flower House (2007), like the one realized here at 50% scale, then I want to be a part of it. Likewise, if Spanish group AMID* architecture (cero9)’s wild plans for an Immaterial Museum (2006) ever see the light of day, then I’ll be the first to plug myself in to their remote interface.
But I was even more pleased by the spatial visions from the artists proper. In Michael Lin’s room (Untitled, 2007) a large painting of flowers hangs on the far wall of an apparently white cube. It’s only after you cross its threshold that you realize the flowers don’t stop at the canvas; they continue in light pencil on the walls too, completely surrounding you in a faint, floral web. It’s art as seductive Venus Flytrap, ready to ensnare viewers too quick to assume that paintings must consist of just two-dimensions.
Keiichiro Adachi’s disco-in-a-phone booth (e.e.no.24, 2004) is also cunning: enter and you’re surrounded by mirrors. There’s a mirror ball hanging from above, and a pair of headphones too, which, when worn, complete the artist’s masterly hijack of your senses. In no time at all he has you foot-tapping, head-shaking and, I’m ashamed to admit, booty-shaking. But be warned: the mirrors are one-way, so your antics are being witnessed by other gawking gallery-goers. Not that you know about it. A case of iPoditus reductio ad absurdum, perhaps?
The exhibition’s coherence is stretched a little with the appearance of Noriyuki Tanaka’s ‘100 Erikas’ (2007), a series of portraits of a local celebrity in 100 different guises. How they amount to spatial expressions of the future is unclear, and the same goes for Olafur Eliasson’s Quadruple Suncooker Lamp (2005) and Barbara Visser’s video work, Actor and Liar (2003). Of course, all makes sense on rereading the exhibition’s blurb, which defines space to include the ‘physical and spiritual’. The only problem is that, once the floodgates are opened, the exhibition’s supposedly overarching narrative is diluted. I couldn’t help reverting to my default approach of interpreting each work as a discrete entity. But even that was fun. One happy discovery was Mikiko Minewaki’s recycled jewelry. Never before had I imagined that such an exquisite necklace could be cut from a car’s headlamp cover; or that a sliced section of lacquer bowl could become a bangle complete with ornamental flourish. Were they gorgeous? Yes. Spatial? Only as far as they’re welcome to some space in my future.
Edan Corkill
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