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A year after the Tokyo National Art Center, the Mori Art Museum presented the extensive program "Sunshower: Contemporary Art of Southeast Asia from the 1980s to the Present", " The National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo (MOMAT) unveiled "Awakening: The Art Society Asia 1960s–1990s. "
These two projects lasted for years, and together, Japanese art institutions can perhaps be considered to recognize the growing importance of Asian art centers and the fact that China now has the second largest art market in the world.
While the current MOMAT show and last year's "Sunshower" shows overlap somewhat, the tone and purpose of the two surveys are quite different. Unlike the usual formats of large exhibitions, which strive to make their content more digestible by classifying it either chronologically or by theme, its organizers describe the "awakening" as being divided into three "propositions": "Structures of questioning ". "Artists and the city" and "Solidarity". These are subdivided into groups such as "Gender and Society" and "Body as Media".
Confused? You should be. Transnational collaboration between MOMAT raises many complex issues. the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Korea Art; the National Gallery Singapore and the Japan Foundation Asia Center, which hopefully will leave the exhibition with more questions than answers. Rather than wasting time trying to concoct an Asian collective identity, for example, we explore in a much more interesting way how disparate artists and groups develop localized responses to common problems.
In a section on artistic activism, we can see how the forms and images of socialist realism – the representation of work and the working class, the use of woodcuts, murals and so on. Posters and paintings from the United Artists Front of Thailand feature Thai soldiers, sports uniforms and weapons provided by the United States, enemies of the people. The large canvas of the Filipino artist Renato Habulan, "Fullness of Time", painted during the reign of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, represents a gathering of urban and agrarian workers observing the viewer with challenge. The red sky above them may symbolize the twilight of the Marcos era or the dawn of the popular uprising.
"Inaba White Hare" (1970/2012), a condensed video of the Japanese performance group Zero Jigen, presents more avant-garde (less overtly political) works in the exhibition. and the trippy "Eyes" by Rajendra Gour (1967), both comical and nightmarish.
Overall, "revivals" describe Asia as a boiling region (including Japan); its local identities, its culture and its communities threatened by modernism, capitalism and authoritarian regimes backed by the United States.
In this context, most of the objects on display can not be considered aesthetic objects, but rather as comments on the practice of art as a bourgeois pastime. Adele Tan, curator at the National Gallery Singapore, writes in her essay on the catalog of the exhibition on the problem of squaring between art and politics: we should "remove our fixation on the subject of art." art and consider it as secondary to the effects and affects what the artist can achieve despite the object.
Is Tokyo's artistic public going for it? When I attended the opening of the exhibition on a Friday night, there were only four or five visitors. The situation was the same when I went to see "Sunshower" at the National Art Center last year, but then I had the show for myself alone. Hope this lack of interest in Southeast Asian art is not a trend.
"Awakenings: Art in Asian Society from the 1960s to the 1990s" at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, is open until December 24; ¥ 1200. For more information, visit www.momat.go.jp/english.
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