Strange Elements: Australian Art in Tokyo

Last year Australian artists were the honoured guests in two major exhibitions in Tokyo. This year it is Sydney’s turn to host the Japanese.

In a major marketing coup, The University of Melbourne’s Asialink helped initiate two exhibitions in Tokyo featuring Australian artists in time to coincide with the massive Yokohama Triennial, assuring that a global audience would be exposed to some powerful representations of Australian art.

By all appearances the two shows blended Australian and Japanese artists surprisingly effortlessly. Trace Elements, which was held at the Tokyo Opera City Gallery, will open this Wednesday at Sydney’s Performance Space. Diorama of the City: between Site and Space, which showed at the Tokyo Wonder Site gallery, will open on March 13 at Artspace.

Both shows were distinctly cross-cultural. Trace Elements was co-curated by Bec Dean from Sydney’s Performance Space and Shihoko Iida from Tokyo Opera City while was co-curated by Reuben Keehan from Artspace, Sydney, and Hisako Hara of Wonder Site.

As part of the Diorama of the City project the three Sydney-based artists – Alex Gawronski, Tim Silver and Gail Priest – undertook a six-week residency at Tokyo Wonder Site to create their works. All of the Australian artists in Trace Elements also visited Tokyo and encountered different experiences. Philip Brophy is an old hand at negotiating Tokyo’s myriad cultural mores and has written on Japanese culture for many years. However for Jane Burton it was her first encounter with Tokyo and she admits to a degree of culture shock. The other Australian artists in Trace Elements were Alex Davies, Genevieve Grieves and Sophie Kahn.

In brilliant timing, Keehan nudged the dates so that Diorama of the City opened in Tokyo the night after the Yokohama Vernissage, assuring that a number of international curators and critics would be in attendance. It was a serious coup for the Australians.

The director of Asialink’s arts program, Alison Carroll, says that the coup began well before the timely connection with Yokohama. Tokyo Opera City Gallery and Wonder Site are two of the hottest galleries in Tokyo, she says.

“The issues for me are much more about the Japanese and Australian curators working together so seamlessly – the fact they are young, groovy, part of the world, and the artists’ experience is brought along on that understanding and willingness to engage,” she says. “It wouldn’t happen without that understanding.”

Asialink have been financially assisted by the Australia Japan Foundation for these projects, with the direct result that the Australian artists were given a chance to interact with their Japanese counterparts and receive responses to their work. “Japanese feedback is cryptic,” says Philip Brophy. “But always illuminating.”

Trace Elements achieves a powerful sense of the uncanny, from Kazuna Taguchi’s strangely melancholy portraits to Alex Davies installation in which the viewer was ‘stalked’ by other viewers; from Teiji Furuhashi’s immersive video installation to the more contemplative works of Genevieve Grieves and Jane Burton. Arguably the most powerful work in the show was Philip Brophy’s Evaporated Music, a series of “re-made” pop videos that achieve something of the air of The Exorcist.

“The curatorial concept of Trace Elements in my view remains tied to the curators’ early discussions about ‘ghost’ effects and traces in photo-media,” says Brophy. “I think this is an especially strong vein within Japanese cultural configuration – one entirely devoid of the Judeo-Christian implications of ‘ghosts’ and the dead.”

“These sorts of inter-cultural curatorial projects are great when they come about through curatorial dialogue rather than merely being ambassadorial exchanges between countries,” he says.

For Jane Burton it was her first foray to Tokyo and she proclaims herself “addicted.”

“The curators at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery were very professional, polite, friendly and gracious,” she says. “Their approach to the installation and related events around the exhibition was incredibly organized and precise in planning. The curators were very committed and respectful of the artists’ vision and installation requirements.”

“I think the curatorial concept of Trace Elements is well expressed through the work of the selected Japanese and Australian photo-media artists,” says Burton. “There was a beautiful and spooky counterpoint between an ether-like ghostly trace of things lost, things unstable, half-seen, shifting; and the heavier experience of human beings struggling with mortality, with morbidity, with death. This was expressed through a diversity of photo mediums that channeled these ghosts and captured the weight of human existence.”

Sophie Kahn also enjoyed being included in Trace Elements. “Obviously it’s a broad span, but there were a number of resonances with my own work I enjoyed,” she says. “The woman staging her own disappearances in Chie Matsui’s videos, the sensuality of Jane Burton’s work, and the analogue kind of magic in Shiga Lieko’s installation. I also liked that Seiichi Furuya’s installation addressed loss and memory in a more direct way and left the other artists to allude to it. I know he has expressed frustration with artists flirting with the aesthetics of death, whereas this is still something I’m young and naive enough to find interesting, so I enjoyed that tension!”

Asialink, which was established in 1990 to promote cross fertilisation of cultures throughout Asia, has been promoting Australian art and culture in Japan for many years now. With the clear success of Trace Elements and Diorama of the City, and the canny timing of coinciding the events with the Yokohama Triennial, their quest is coming to fruition.

Ashley Crawford visited Tokyo courtesy of Asialink.