The Japanese word chikaku, often translated as 'perception,' is a compound of two characters -chi or 'knowing' and kaku or 'sensing'. Chi has a logical meaning -in the way it is used to create the word chie or ‘wisdom.' Kaku is used to create the word kankaku or sense. The combining of the two -chi and kaku- results in the single word chikaku, a word that represents both thinking and feeling. Chikaku has always been a word that represents two different meanings.
This is the title of the exhibition that in its Spanish venue will be hosted exclusively in MARCO, Vigo. The exhibition analyses the development of Japanese art through the last fifty years by means of a selection of artworks by 16 artists belonging to different generations and with a particular focus on three concepts: the forms of perception, the sense of time, and the structures of memory.
Since the late nineteenth century, and after 300 years of isolation, Japan has embarked in an extremely rapid modernization race. The significant growth achieved during three key periods -the social reconstruction in the post-war years in the fifties, the rapid economic growth in the seventies and the revolution of the information technologies in the nineties- has turned it into an outstanding modernist country due to its economical power and technological development.
The speedy emergence of Japanese culture from its historical isolation has resulted in the birth of an extraordinarily different way of understanding existence. Contemporary Japanese art is created under the influence of modernization and technological progress. However, despite these dramatic changes, the Japanese still keep alive their own lifestyle with deep physical and cultural roots; the struggle between the world of traditional values and the world of the most futurist modernity can be seen in the artworks of the main Japanese artists.
The Western view on so fascinating and contradictory a country as Japan has traditionally been full of clichéd and even mythical images. Apart from commentaries on Japan's economic success and cultural differences at large, the truth is that our knowledge about other aspects of Japanese culture is more often than not fragmentary and determined by certain clichés.
From a conceptual point of view, this exhibition analyses the assumption that the different forms of international postmodernist perception, time and memory have their roots in Japan. It could be said that the particular circumstances in which the revolution of Japanese art took place, with constant polarizations, are now reflected in the conditions that, under the name of globalization, the world as a whole is nowadays facing.
While analysing these fundamental issues relating the evolution of Japanese art during the last fifty years, new dimensions of artistic activity are being explored. Thus, the exhibition aims to re-analyse Western aesthetic values, to reconsider the meaning of art in the twenty-first century and to identify new paths for Japanese art in the complex framework of contemporary life, taking into account above all the latest artistic transformations in communication and multimedia systems and the role of technological advances, more and more evident in our everyday life.
The period covered by the exhibition -from the fifties to the present date- includes a wide range of artworks, considered with the intention of identifying and establishing new relationships among different generations and creative fields: from historic photographers such as Taro Okamoto, Takuma Nakahira and Daido Moriyama, or young Motohiko Odani -whose spectacular installations recall remains abandoned in a post nuclear landscape-, to universally acknowledged Hiroshi Sugimoto -whose photographs explore time and memories in a very personal way-, Yayoi Kusama -whose artworks shock us because of their formal baroque style, so alien a priori to Japanese perception-, and Yutaka Sone, -who invents poetic places that do not even exist.
There are artists who reinterpret tradition, such as Rieko Hidaka -whose delicate paintings wed precision pencil drawing to the Nihonga Japanese painting tradition-, Yoshihiro Suda -a master in the Japanese woodcarving tradition, who meticulously reproduces life-size garden flora-, or Tetsuya Nakamura -whose refined large sculptures reproduce non-functional sinks and tubs lacquered with traditional Japanese flower patterns. On the other hand, Hiroyuki Moriwaki makes use of the latest technologies in a surprising way, creating "living" light objects that dim or shine as people approach, interactive behaviour shaped by a Japanese view of natural life. Miwa Yanagi also uses digital technologies to explore new dimensions of time and memory, but the results are completely different. Halfway between installation and performance, Emiko Kasahara examines the body and gender through her art.
The exhibition includes disparate videos as well. Takashi Ito has created a body of experimental film and video that draw the viewer into retinal labyrinths, and Vietnamese filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha, the only non-Japanese artist on this exhibition, shows us in her film The Fourth Dimension her own approach to this country and probes deep into Japanese daily life from perspectives far removed from any stereotypical view of Japan.
As for the installation, the display of the artworks in the hall has been carefully considered. The spatial distribution of the artworks has been designed for this occasion by architect Makoto Sei Watanabe, who has been given two roles at this exhibition: the role of exhibition architect who designs the exhibition, and the role of participating artist. In the text he wrote for the catalogue, Watanabe himself describes the solutions devised to maximize the visitors' perceptive powers. This has been achieved mainly by his intervention in the central panopticon:
"All I wanted was for all the exhibition rooms to be visible as the visitor looked around the space. I decided to depict a fake opening on these walls so that visitors could see a representation of the exhibition rooms that lay beyond. The trompe l'oeil treatment dilutes the presence of these walls and results in the emergence of a view that expands radially as in the original plan. The forgotten mechanism of the past -the mechanism of evoking chikaku- has now been revived".