The traveling exhibit “Neoteny Japan” stems from what curators Mayumi Uchida and Yayoi Kojima describe as “the current landscapes of youngster’s hearts.” The show consists of panoply artworks assembled from the personal collection of psychiatrist Ryutaro Takahashi. Dr. Takahashi was first impressed by Yayoi Kusama’s experimental artworks in the 1960s and began acquiring artworks for his office in the early 1990s. Once he started buying contemporary art he got addicted and began collecting substantial artworks while Japan’s economic bubble was deflating in the late 1990s. He became an early scout in the rising genre of art that was springing up from anime, manga, and kawaii subcultures. With his new space that opened in Hibya this spring Takahashi sets a new standard for the role of private collectors in contemporary Japanese art.
The title “Neoteny” refers to the juvenile characteristics of Japanese society, eloquently described by Takeo Doi nearly forty years ago, that has more recently blossomed in the popularity of otaku fantasies. Childlike emotions are captured by many of the artists in the current exhibition, occasionally reaching an animal-like presence that reveals to the acute visitor the subconscious layers of the human psyche. The arrangement of the artworks lacks a clean narration; like the mind itself, it is a compendium of dream-like reality held together with liminal thoughts.
The Ueno Royal Museum overflows with curiosities of the mind assembled in a way that only a social psychiatrist could. The show may be misinterpreted as a survey of contemporary Japanese art since 1990, but it is more useful to think of the works as a collection of works inspired by the personal tastes and interests of Takahashi himself. In summary, art that springs from and feeds the psyche. Thus the current show moves fluidly in and out of phantasmagoric streams of consciousness, reading more as a form of visual therapy rather than a statement on the condition of Japanese art.
James Jack
James Jack