The lower gallery surveys five projects — four houses and the Boyd Art Center (1996–99). Each house, including the Marie Short House (1974–75) that Murcutt purchased and renovated in 1980, is shown with succinct text, photos, sketches, drawings and an ingenious presentation of a sectional model cantilevered from suspended clear acrylic on which the section drawing has been etched — a unique combination of drawing and model that helps non-architects to ‘read’ the drawings. This room allows easy comparison of the projects and the development of common typologies and strategies—the use of the split plan (bathrooms, kitchens and storage on one side of a corridor and the living, dining and sleeping spaces on the other), opaque walls versus large windows, and the use of commonplace materials such as wood, brick, and corrugated steel.

The upper gallery exhibits only drawings, reinforcing Murcutt’s declaration that recently he has quit building models and now only develops projects by drawing. This move comes after years of experience and learning to understand the space of drawing and its built consequence. Consequently walls are lined with sketches and working drawings — a rarity in most architecture exhibitions—of the Walsh House, Marie Short / Murcutt House, and the Murcutt-Lewin House. There are also tables with sketchbooks and sets of working drawings of the Boyd Art Center and the Magney, Marika-Alderton, and Simpson-Lee Houses, as well as the two accompanying monographs — one of drawings and one of photos, to leisurely review.

Additionally two revealing documentary videos, one in each gallery space, show biographical material, examine buildings and interview people from Murcutt’s long and somewhat quiet career. In one, Murcutt, awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2002, defends his most common accusation of not designing large buildings by challenging his critics to “do a decent little building.” The exhibition indeed shows many decent little buildings. His projects are reminders of how easily building orientation, passive solar for heating and lighting, operable windows and walls for ventilation, and water collecting cisterns can provide simple environmentally friendly living conditions.

However, with Murcutt’s growing list of public projects — visitor centers, museums, galleries, hotels, restaurants and wineries — it is dismaying to see so many old, albeit iconic, residential projects. Of the seven projects, only the Walsh House (2001–05) and the Murcutt-Lewin House and Studio (2000–03) are of this century and two are Murcutt’s own homes. There is disappointingly no reference to more recent work or works-in-progress.

Murcutt, a solo practitioner for his entire career, proclaims architecture as a process of discovery that allows people to perceive what is around them. The bilingual (Japanese-English) “Thinking Drawing, Working Drawing” allows visitors to easily compare projects through a systematic presentation of common format of text, sketch, drawing. Visitors discover the nuances that make each building uniquely responsive to its site, program and client—revealing Murcutt’s buildings as finely tuned machines in their own wildernesses.

Why? Well, if you haven’t been to the Star Gallery that might be because it’s in Beijing. And if you haven’t seen Iida’s work, that could be because she has spent many of the last ten years as living in Beijing, at first as student and now as a practicing artist.

Though still relatively few, Iida is one of a growing number of Japanese artists based in China, in an increasingly international scene of art practitioners (not simply galleries or buyers) coming from overseas to study and/or practice their art in Beijing, Shanghai and other major cities. Many recently arrived artists have followed the boom or bubble of the Chinese art-market in the last three to four years; some staying on after completing one of the artist-in-residence programs now offered by a handful of galleries or museums. On the other hand, some artists like Iida are becoming integral parts of the local scene, with its increasingly global reputation.

Iida first came to China for a short trip in 1993, returning early the next year to study. She eventually entered the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing, the equivalent of Tokyo’s University of the Arts,² and graduated with a BFA in painting in 1999. Briefly returning to Japan, she organized a couple of small solo exhibitions, such as her 2006 show at Youkobo Art Space. This was the fruit of a year-long study trip to Korea under a Pola Art Foundation scholarship, which first allowed her to develop some of the themes that find greater articulation in the more recent series shown at the Star Gallery. After her time in Korea, she returned to Beijing to complete the three-year MFA program in painting at CAFA, completed in 2007, and remains based in Beijing.

“An Uneasy Journey through Asia” is a series of artworks drawing on Iida’s concerns toward the recent and ongoing changes in East Asian countries. Specifically, the artist draws on her time spent in Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan presenting stylized scenes, usually of life in the major cities. Each of these places is on the one hand generically ‘Asian’ and yet most are expressed using specific visual references with localized significance: a betel nut vendor in Taiwan, an assortment of panchan on a low-set table in a Korean diner, a display of plastic petrified food one sees in front of many a Japanese restaurant…

This aspect of Iida’s work, addressing her subject at the level of everyday life in major cities, is significantly different to identifying representative cultural icons – despite some occasional overlap. In interviews, Iida has discussed her habit of wandering around and taking photos, especially through Beijing streets. She is drawn to the city life seen through shop and café windows; to electric signage, old arcades, karaoke rooms, tiny noodle shops or the large round tables of banquet-style Chinese restaurants. She often depicts areas considered old or rundown, like Tokyo’s shitamachi, where the recent buzz of crowds lingers in an atmosphere somewhere between the renaissance of nostalgia and the oblivion of ‘re-development’.

Iida’s paintings are box-like constructions. The base image is acrylic on canvas, above which a separate layer of thick, clear acrylic sheeting, is fixed leaving a space of an inch or two in between. Iida often applies either more paint or commercially available adhesive floral sheeting to the transparent ‘surface’, obscuring parts of the underlying canvas image. By using material references to parts of her subject, such as the pre-fabricated floral sheeting, the surface of Iida’s images takes on the quality of the shop-fronts and street-signage to which she is drawn. The space between the clear surface and the actual canvas suggests not only shop-fronts, but also the camera screens and windows through which this ‘uneasy journey’ has been observed by the artist, and now viewers. Consciously or not, this construction recreates the act of looking through, from ‘outside’ — as an outsider? — underlining a dual, inside/out subjectivity, while questioning the very possibility of maintaining a strict dualistic distinction.

Unlike some of Iida’s earlier work, nearly all of the images in this series depict actual places, drawn from the artist’s experiences. Yet Iida’s consistent simplicity and taste for non-descript places makes it difficult to distinguish between one place and another. On one level this can lead to a subtle ‘pan-Asian’ sentiment being read into her work, as suggested in some of the exhibition catalogue essays for example. Yet such readings downplay the personal aspects of this “uneasy journey”, in favour of identifying a grander narrative of Asian solidarity, or some kind of dubious ‘essentially’ Asian experience. In a separate interview, Iida clearly indicated her concerns for what she feels is a cultural degradation or crises amidst an ongoing confrontation between Japanese or [East] ‘Asian’ culture and “the West”. However, the visual ambiguity between the images in this series seems to reflect the artist’s interrogation of this ‘imagined community’ of Asia, based on personal journeys, through which she has challenged her own assumptions, as well as those of the grand narratives.

In Fuji-san (2008) for example, a picture of Mt. Fuji – an iconic symbol of Japan – hangs on the wall of a sparse diner. This would seem to locate the picture firmly in ‘Japanese’ space. Yet the table settings, white ceramics and fluorescent thermoses (usually filled with boiling water) all suggest a typical inexpensive Chinese diner. A picture of Mt Fuji on the wall of a cheap diner in China? A Chinese restaurant in Japan, perhaps? And if it were - would that make this image of ‘Asia’ any more ‘accurate’? Such are the questions lying beyond the banality of identifying culturally specific iconographies. Instead, Iida uses a refined palette of details with personal and local significance which, despite the bright colours and seemingly muted hum of her encased pictures, speaks strongly about the contemporary “ugliness” ³ of everyday life.

Although quite rightly translated as “uneasy”, it is interesting to consider the ‘bu an (Chn.) / fu an (Jpn.)’ of Iida’s title in terms of ‘unsettling’ or ‘uncanny’. Much of the aesthetic that fascinates this artist has developed during the 70s, 80s, and 90s – boom periods for Japan, Korea and China, respectively. In many instances the shop-fittings, hybrid fashions, neon signage and makeshift designs were quick, interim affairs and have since been renovated or ‘upgraded’. For a generation or two that grew up amidst this rapid economic and urban development, there is a kind of nostalgia surrounding areas of cities such as Beijing, Seoul or Tokyo, which are relatively recent, but have become rundown while other areas of the city are being re-developed have been developed. Though they are old parts of the city, yet they are seldom considered culturally or historically significant.

Iida’s work is indicative of a larger trend in many recent developments in the Japanese art scene. It should be noted that many Japanese artists are also active in other major cities like New York, London or Berlin, for the proximity of these cities to the market, collectors, a vibrant gallery network and major schools. Alongside this phenomena, one mustn’t forget the significance of Tokyo’s new art-fair — 101Tokyo — with its specifically international and contemporary approach; as well as the recent opening of both ‘Mizuma & One’ and ‘Y++’ [y double plus] in Beijing, run by the Tokyo-based Mizuma Gallery and Wada Fine Arts respectively. For her part, Iida made it clear that her choice was not merely professional but also a reaction to certain limits she feels confronted with in Japan. Whether such sentiments underlie other such outwardly mobile shifts in the Japanese scene remains conjecture, however considered together they certainly indicate that various strata within current Japanese art — students, practicing artists, galleries and collectors — are increasingly willing to look beyond the assumed boundaries of ‘Japanese art’. Watch this space…

—

¹ Iida Yuko’s ‘An Uneasy Journey through Asia’, original Chinese title 亜州不安之旅, was held at the Star Gallery, Chinese name, 星空間, located in the 798 art district of Beijing, from June 1 – 26, 2008. See www.stargallery.cn for gallery details.
² This is the English name of Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku, recently changed from ‘Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music’. In Chinese CAFA is 中央美術学院.
³ Iida specifically uses the Chinese word 難看 nankan, which can be rendered as ‘ugly’, in addition to 不安, to refer to rapid, often ill-considered urban developments that are commonplace in cities such as Beijing. In a recorded interview, June 2008.

The 12-film competition line-up also includes first-time appearances from Jordan (Amin Matalqa’s Captain Abu Raed), the Lebanon (Philippe Aractingi’s Under The Bombs) and Estonia (Ilmar Raag’s The Class – see full line-up below).

The Grand Prize carries a trophy and cash reward of $92,930 (Y10m), sponsored by Sony. Awards for Best Director ($18,560, Y2m), Best Screenplay ($9,280, Y1m) and two Special Jury Prizes are also given out.

This year’s jury is headed by Austrian film producer Danny Krausz, joined by Korean director Hong Sang-soo, Argentinean cinematographer Ricardo De Angelis, Closed Note producer Morio Amagi and Japanese screenwriter Masako Imai (Helen The Baby Fox).

Other categories include the digital shorts competition and the Camera Crayon children’s programme. This year continues the D-Contents Market, where directors pitch projects to potential producers. Two former Skip City short film participants, Izuru Kumasaka (Berlin 2008 prize winner for Asyl - Park And Love Hotel) and Masaya Kakehi (Accuracy Of Death) will give talks.

Last year’s Grand Prize winner was Climates directed by Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan, awarded Best Director at this year’s Cannes for Three Monkeys, reportedly funded in part by Ceylan’s Skip City prize money.

Other winners have included 2006’s Lease Wife, directed by Lu Xuechang, UK title Me and You and Everyone We Know and Sundance audience award winner Brothers (both 2005), and Danish film Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself.

Skip City runs from July 19 to 27 in Saitama Prefecture’s Kawaguchi City, neighbouring Tokyo.

Skip City Competition Titles:

Captain Abu Raed (Amin Matalqa, Jordan/USA)

Under The Bombs (Philippe Aractingi, Lebanon)

Egoist – Lotti Latrous (Stephan Anspichler, Germany/Switzerland)

Red Ants (Stephan Carpiaux, Luxembourg/Belgium/France)

Waiting For The Sun (Yoko Narahashi, Japan)

Arranged (Stephan Schaefer & Diane Crespo, US)

The Class (Ilmar Raag, Estonia)

Echo (Anders Morgenthaler, Denmark)

Listening To Gabriel (Jose Enrique March, Spain)

Lino (Jean Louis Milesi, France)

Thei-go King And His Son (Zhou Wei, China)

Concrete Pillow (Fatih Haciosmanoglum, Turkey)

Many Bauhaus exhibitions focus on one designer, or one genre (furniture, architecture or graphics) or focus only on one historical chronology. Typical monographic exhibitions are informational and occasionally inspirational, but are seldom provocative and fail to describe a larger social setting or implication. The current exhibit “BAUHAUS experience, dessau” avoids these pitfalls and exhibits the work of the Bauhaus in a refreshing and holistic manner. Although the wall text is in Japanese, the labels for individual works are in both Japanese and English.

As the exhibition poster advertises, one gets what one would expect upon entering the gallery – a series of works by the masters: Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Marcel Breuer, Josef Albers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Not much new here.

However, the second floor changes the convention, and it becomes fitting that the University Art Museum & Chinretsukan Gallery at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music is the venue for the retrospective “BAUHAUS experience, dessau.” Befitting a university setting, work is divided by each masters’ coursework: material studies are collected under Albers’ course, color studies under Kandinsky, and architecture under Gropius. But rather than works by the masters, the work shown is primarily that of students, giving a full representation of the work of the Bauhaus the school. One excellent student was Karl Marx, not to be confused the political writer, who showed good painting skills, hand drawings, and color studies. The student work even includes a beam structural analysis with a precision in graphics, equations, and hand lettering that is a well-crafted design in itself.

Following a recent trend in full-sized replicas, there is a full-scale room of the Director’s Office (1926) as designed by Hinnerk Scheper, whose other work graces the exhibition with color plans and isometrics. Director’s Office deftly shows materials, furniture and use of color, but the room fails to give a lived-in reality – no strewn papers on the desk, no mismatched heights and colors in the bookshelves, no framed works on the walls. Nonetheless we are presented with a masterful control of spatial organization and proportion hard to grasp from the usual historical grainy black and white photographs that accompany publications and exhibitions, this one included.

One aspect that is often overlooked in Bauhaus exhibits, which may be due in part to the temporal aspect, is the performative. Thus the crown jewel of “BAUHAUS experience, dessau” is the work of Oskar Schlemmer. His workshops taught students to explore their bodies in space, using their body’s resistance, proportion, and mobility. His workshops were not a theoretical discourse contained in dusty tomes and sparkling manifestos, but were contained in the reality of experience, which was true of much of the work of the Bauhaus. The culmination of these workshops is shown in film and video recordings of Schlemmer’s performances, including a video of a 1993 restaging of his body-space studies.

Plagued by politics, both internal and external, the school was continually in flux under three directors at three locations at various times. Walter Gropius founded the school in 1919 in Weimar and led the school until 1927. However in 1925 the school moved to Dessau and in 1927 changed hands to Hannes Meyer, who was fired in 1930 amidst political radicalism and sexual scandals– never a dull moment. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe then became director, and the school moved to Berlin in 1932. In 1933 the Nazi regime disbanded the school with many constituents fleeing to England, North America and Israel.

The Bauhaus’ influence permeates art, architecture, interior design, industrial design, graphic design and typography (the crispness of Herbert Bayer and company’s graphic design for the school) – providing a discourse between various fields, and continuing Wagner’s idea of the gesamtkunstwerk (synthesis of art forms). While the Bauhaus’ influence today may seem to repose only in the slick stylings of Ikea, design boutiques and expensive design districts, it did have its basis in something more profound. The Bauhaus was a school and a school of thought that instigated a radical exploration of materials, form and space, and ultimately experience. Experience it yourself.

Bondage, specifically using rope (known as kinbaku in Japanese) is not only seen as a tool for sadomasochistic play, but like tea ceremonies and other such cultural traditions involving complex techniques and aesthetic rules, kinbaku’s intricate way of rendering the tied body immobile is also considered an art form of sorts. What immediately comes to mind at first glance of Hamaguchi’s paintings are Nobuyoshi Araki’s photography series featuring Japanese women in vivid kimonos (and less) staring at the camera, almost expressionless, in various – at times painful or embarrassing – kinbaku poses. Here, however, in contrast to the sultry but almost passive-looking girls in Araki’s portraits, Hamaguchi’s blondes are seductive – almost aggressively so.

The girls (whom, although not identical, all resemble the stereotype of the all-American cheerleader) smile and tease, as if enjoying not only the act of being tied up and the gaze of the viewer, but the power that comes with it. Hamaguchi does not seem to expect viewers to project their fantasies onto the vulnerable female, but instead presents women who actively use their bodies and sexuality to enact and seduce. The rope becomes not a restriction, but a vehicle. The tone is mirrored in a small mound of cardboard boxes stacked in the corner of the room, plastered with advertisements for phone sex and prostitution featuring naked girls in suggestive poses — notably, most of these have been taken from Western magazines and newspapers. The female body is simultaneously empowered and commoditized, marveled at and abused.

It is not clear whether it is the very notion of this aggressive sexuality that Hamaguchi is critical of, or specifically that of the “foreign female”, but in any case the paintings reveal Hamaguchi’s suspicion for his subjects. The girls’ eyes at times glow red or green amidst their ominous backdrop of muddy blues, reds and greys, making them look almost monstrous or other-worldly. He also introduces the notion of censorship in the way that he conscientiously blurs out the genitals, much like how they are censored in explicit photographs and videos. Usually such mozaiku cover the underlying image of genitals. Here, however, the genitals do not even exist in the first place; rather they have been substituted by the connoted “nothingness” of the blur.

As if “cleansing” the images of their evil sins, each painting has been covered with black sutra. The juxtaposition of the somber black Japanese kanji with the tied up blonde girls peering behind them creates a potent image of condemnation. Simultaneously, the mixing of the Caucasian girls and Japanese elements leaves a strange aftertaste; the kimonos and uniforms that the girls wear can only maintain their sexual connotations through the historic and cultural significance placed on them, and can only be activated when somebody from that very culture adorns them. Thus, the subtlety of demure Japanese eroticism is lost on these blondes, however whether Hamaguchi goes as far as placing blame on a Westernized sexuality or female role infiltrating Japanese culture is hard to tell. In any case, this intricate play of seduction, power, and condemnation in this series makes it a unique and confronting exhibition, from which no doubt every viewer will take home a different opinion.

Note: This exhibition is only open on Saturdays

Click here to see this work installed at Art@Agnes.

The technology of digital printing gives these pieces a purity of color and a crispness of edge that would not be possible in any other medium. Edwards cleverly separates the image from the whiteness of the paper background by using subtle cream-colored ink to color the “sky.” In his world, as in much of Tokyo, architecture is delineated only by colorful signage and the sky serves simply as a pale backdrop to the action below.

Like Edwards’ digital prints, the large-scale paintings in the gallery’s main space appear abstract, forming dark camouflage-like patterns. But again closer attention is repaid as each canvas reveals a detailed cityscape rendered in strips of color that could be boulevards, empty lots, or parks. Multi-scaled grids suggest buildings of varying heights and typologies.

In fact these paintings present multiple views of the same cityscape. All of them were executed as variations upon the theme of another, larger painting that has occupied Edwards’ time for the past year: a monumental work called The Triumph of Democracy. Commissioned for a corporate lobby in Washington D.C., Edwards’ home base, the painting depicts a single view of an imaginary metropolis that he and his studio assistants have painstakingly constructed using computer software.

Understandably, Edwards was eager to explore his digital city in the additional views exhibited here. In an email he wrote, “to create [The Triumph of Democracy] I constructed a virtual city […] and the space had a reality to it beyond the limits of the virtual camera I used for the composition. So I had a real desire to see what this city would look like from different angles. Because of the complexity of the architecture that I create, it’s not possible to see all of these buildings at the same time in the virtual space. The city exists as a hypothetical first, as a grouping of simple blocks, and only after a camera is fixed can the hard work of implementing the scene begin. Each building must be loaded then rendered separately. These images are then pieced together in Photoshop.”

For the pieces in this show, Edwards used a similar technique to construct birds’ eye views of his capital. The resulting images show fragmented high-rises, busy streets and flashing lights set against a textured backdrop of asphalt gray.

Edwards’ one-man show here in Tokyo coincides with the group show “Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes” at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, where his paintings are on display alongside several architectural projects. It makes sense given the undeniably spatial implications of his work.

“People often ask me if I trained to be an architect because my work is so much about cities and architecture,” Edwards says. “But I really came to it from the ground up, first as an ordinary observer of my suburban and urban surroundings and later through my own research of architectural history. I think that I have architecture in my bones because I’m by nature a utopian and I believe in problem solving. At the same time I can see what a letdown almost all utopian architecture can be. So much of my work is about that disconnect between the hope and aspirations of the plans on the one hand and the almost inevitable failure of those plans on the other.”

With almost no copy, the pieces, mostly advertising posters but also magazine covers and package designs, are, well, graphic. Compared to today’s emphasis on information and cleverness these examples of days gone by seem to lean closer to art than advertising. Though to be fair to the contemporary era, it is unlikely that a retrospective of Japanese turn-of-the-millennium graphic design would reflect the cacophonic reality that is the Tokyo subway.

The exhibition does, however, begin with a selection of posters taken from a public context, primarily ads for household products. Here we can see the half-century-old graphic rendition of the pleasure of a cold beer, the ease of a pre-shrunk blouse, and the pictorial imaginings of a modern, international lifestyle circa 1950 — a delightful vocabulary of refrigerators, sausages, and parrots.

More than a few well-known brands, such as Asahi Beer and Meiji Chocolate, exemplify the anticipated tension between traditional and modern in postwar, occupied Japan. There is plenty of cardinal red and indigo but even more sunny yellow and sky blue, and while characters haven’t taken over yet, some of those Meiji ads are damn cute. Note to advertisers: invest in talented artists and ensure that your brand gets additional visibility at future design retrospectives.

Next, the exhibit delves more into the world of graphic design itself, with a look at different contexts (like designs for cultural activities) and media (like wrapping paper and book covers). While technique is not a major topic, a brief display of the tools of the time serves as a greater reminder than the designs themselves of how the times have changed. And speaking of times, as the accompanying text explains, the 1950s was a time of real growth in the demand for graphic designers, as the transition into an era of increasing consumer products led to, as in the West, an increase in the number of advertisements and packages to be designed.

The exhibition also demonstrates that graphic designers have long been recognized in Japan, which made me wonder to what extent this has shored up Japan’s position as an international star in the field today. A section covers the “Graphic 55″ exhibition, held in 1955 at the Takashimaya department store in Nihombashi. This exhibition within an exhibition features the works of eight leading designers of the day, and along with another selection of award-winning works from the Japanese Ad Artists’ Club, presents a neat context for the retrospectively arranged works in the opening section.

Should you finish the exhibition wondering what a collection of current designs might look like, the Printing Museum’s response to that is the 2008 edition of the Graphic Trial. This 3rd edition of the annual invitation of four noteworthy designers to experiment technically around a theme, in this case “execution of beauty,” with both their final works and works in progress on display in a separate (free!) gallery.

Curated by Mami Kataoka, senior curator at the Mori Art Museum, the two-room show gives objects a movement and life as they travel from conception to execution to dismantling. They exist not as static objects, but as objects that serve as a record for an entire history and carry with them a plotted out future.

This story can be seen in the pile of mail by the door. The piece is called All The Best, and came with the instruction that “all mail sent to the gallery for the duration of the exhibition be left unopened by the door.” Toshie Fukasaku at Wako seemed only mildly disturbed that she wouldn’t be able to check their mail until July 19th when the show closes. Beier and Lund’s work uses audience members as their medium, relying on their imagination and curiosity to grasp the life of a piece. All the Best exists in the audience’s imagination: Given that a considerable pile of mail had already built up on the exhibition’s opening day, imagine poor Fukasaku-san catching up on a month’s worth (See here for an ongoing report on the growth of this work).

Nina Beier and Marie Lund, both Danish, met at the Royal College of Art in London and begun collaborating in 2004. Their first book, Plans for Other Days, was a quirky set of instructional photographs created and realized with classmates from the Royal College of Art and published by Booth-Clibborn in 2005. Beier’s white blonde mane is omnipresent in the photographs, tied to the branches of a tree, or taking plants out for a walk. Now it is short and curly and she is always smiling. Lund appears less frequently in the book. In one photograph her hair is combed over her face. She is slight and attentive, choosing words carefully in her clear British accent.

Kataoka met Beier and Lund at Art Basel and included them in her show “Laughing in a Foreign Language”, held at the Hayward Gallery in London earlier this year. Kataoka was drawn to the “subtle humor in their objects and video pieces.” But says that while she loves group shows as well as solo shows, curating a group exhibition is “like a big storm, like having a date with thirty people at the same time.” When she was asked to curate a show at Wako, Kataoka immediately thought of Beier and Lund. She says she was interested in putting the collective nature of their work into a Japanese context, because “Japanese people are known as people who look at each other for how to behave.” She says she “thought it would be really interesting to bring them to Japan and let them do whatever they like.”

“Whatever they like” comes in the form of ten pieces, nine of which are being shown for the first time in Tokyo, after being conceptualized in a two-month residency at Tokyo Wonder Site. Beier and Lund drew on feelings of separation they felt in Japan, both being distant from their homes and more importantly, distant from Japanese society. The work on show at Wako isn’t a Japanese version of their what they would normally produce, but they were, Lund says, “quite indirectly inspired” by Japan. The pieces are imbued with a “sense of distance,” that came from their “persistent feeling of being an outsider, not completely understanding what it was that we were looking at.” She explains this “distance between understanding and meaning,” as central to their work.

This distance is expressed in The Archives (World Peace). A quick glance might give you the impression that these mismatched frames are empty, but in fact they contain posters that have been carefully folded horizontally in two, so that you cannot see the image. Faintly, one can see the outline of political statements. Beier and Lund found peace posters that form invisible alliances—Finland supporting peace in Chile, Cuba for Korea, and so on. It had been their intent to create a political piece while in Japan, but struck by the difference in the Japanese way of expressing compared to their Danish extroversion, they came up with The Archives.

It was this separation between what is said and what is meant that fascinated Beier and Lund. Beier says that through looking at the work of Mono-ha in Japan they saw that “the material surface of things had such a strong presence, but that the content was excised from things.” For History makes a Young Man Old, Beier and Lund bought a clear crystal ball from a Tokyo shop and rolled it through Yoyogi Park on an hour and a half journey that ended at Wako in Shinjuku. The ball is thoroughly scratched all over, impossible to see through. Again, the process behind the making is what fascinates Beier and Lund. Their objects have a past and future, often with explicit instructions for the buyers of such works. In their dice piece 42, Beier and Lund threw seven dice each, the faces of which added up to forty-two. Any prospective buyers who wish to install this work in their home must agree to roll the dice themselves until the faces add up to forty-two. Kataoka explains this particular work as being a “record of what they do,” an object representing an entire process insisting to the viewer that their work is never “finished. The piece continues to change after the show’s closing.

Beier and Lund say that their work is always created out of a moment of inspiration, which then turns into months of conversations and questioning, honing and defending the work to each other. When asked if their collaboration helps them push each other or support each other, both answered quickly, “Push.” Their work is thoughtful and drawn from the legacy of many artists from the 1960s. Kataoka mentions Yoko Ono’s instruction paintings, Lawrence Weiner and Vito Acconci. All three reference Mono-ha repeatedly, saying that they were inspired by their focus on materiality.

They reference the surrealist “exquisite corpse” exercises in which participants fold up a piece of paper, draw part of an image or story and then hands it over to the next person to continue; the independent creations come together as an odd, jointly-constructed image or story that is only revealed in its entirety at the end. Beier and Lund said they created an exquisite corpse with color, painting on sections of paper before folding it and handing it to each other. Beier says, “We never saw the whole thing, just folded it in and in and in.”

In a way this is what the process of the entire show was like. Beier says that they came to Kataoka with “bad little sketches and collages.” However, Kataoka trusted them completely, saying, “I don’t give guidelines to any artists”. Kataoka could see that they were constantly in dialogue and was excited to see what would emerge from it.

While creating their pieces, the two showed in Korea and are already due to show at the ICA, Tate Modern and Gallery One One One in London. They have also been commissioned to show in Italy and in Vienna. For the exhibition at Gallery One One One they plan to start with a solo show of their own work before replacing their pieces one by one with conceptually related pieces by artists they admire, resulting in an unfixed, composite exhibition that metamorphoses according to their curatorial vision.

While Kataoka says that “curating a show is like throwing a single stone into the big ocean of Tokyo,” she emphasizes the relevance and applicability of their work to a Japanese audience. She sees this kind of instructional art and participatory art as being increasingly important, because it pushes the boundaries of the Japanese audience’s understanding of conceptual art. Kataoka sees this show as a natural extension of her own goals of the last ten years, to become “more interested in the role of art and the role of ideas in society,” and take fresh new directions in the conversation.

Beier and Lund say that they are always interested in “intervening with a given situation [or object] and seeing how things will move onward.” Through their collaboration, these three women are intervening with the Japanese art world, injecting process into static objects, humor into every day situations, and adding to a conversation-in-progress between society and art.

Divided into ten sections, or ten “gardens”, the show brings together a diverse collection of work whose relation to the overall garden theme is at times somewhat tenuous. With titles like “The Evening Garden” , “The Documented garden” or “The Garden that Reaches for the Sky”, it gradually becomes apparent that the interpretation of the “garden” in art can be described to encompass, well… almost anything. Nevertheless, such versatility is also the exhibition’s strength, and visitors can encounter work in a diverse range of media from all over the globe, from the early Taisho period through to the present day. The artists featured make for an engaging group show, but at times the juxtaposition of twentieth century icons like Matisse with comparatively obscure artists of today gives the exhibition a disjointed or awkward feel.

The first gallery, the “Grotesque Garden”, is a dimly lit room, with its walls covered in a hand-painted black and white pattern of columns, rosettes and vines — reminiscent of a rococo-style hall. On closer inspection, gargoyles, pop culture characters and cog-driven machinery lurch out. This well tended garden’s absorbing ambience seemed to promise more spatial curiosities, however, what followed was a sobering return to a more conservative gallery space.

This second room, consisting of ink works and watercolours by Michisei Kono (1895-1950), includes framed images depicting rural landscapes, pussy willows and finely rendered studies of oak leaves. The following two sections, titled “Garden of the Studio” and “Garden in the Palm of the Hand”, featured works from the late Meiji, through the Taisho into the early Showa period. Of particular historical worth are works by the Taisho period oil painter, Torao Makino, and a series of magazine issues featuring prints related to the Shin Hanga movement of the early 20th Century that had revitalized wood-block printing and ukiyo-e painting traditions.

The “Evening Garden” and the “Enclosed Garden”, covering the period from 1940 to 1950, continued a more literal approach to the garden theme. Here, with the various works in oil, pencil and woodcut by Makino and a series of illustrative lithographs by Henri Matisse, references to nature, plant life and floral themes are featured prominently.

The last four “gardens” showcase contemporary works spanning the last thirty years. The first thing one notices is the disproportionately large number of works by Tadayoshi Nakabayashi — a veritable miniature retrospective in itself. Nevertheless, his work does fit well with the room’s concept of a “Documented Garden”. A series of fascinating semi-abstract, largely colourless aquatint etchings depicting dead leaves, twigs and other fallen, decaying matter make for a truly engaging display.

The exhibition then took an interesting turn with Benoit Broisat’s ghostly computer animated video projection Bonneville. Bonneville presents a series of silent 3D animations set in a snowy, deserted European castle town where the buildings, seemingly constructed of paper, sway and concertina to create an eerie, passive dystopia.

The ensuing display of abstract, neo-pointillist work by Satoshi Uchiumi demands attention. His bright and airy but meticulous and well-worked paintings beautifully coalesce with the garden concept, it is no wonder they feature prominently in the exhibition’s promotional material. His large green tinted canvas titled Below Colours conveys the feeling of being in the shelter of a great tree, whilst his whimsical but intensively constructed Great Chilio Cosmos is a universe in itself, composed of hundreds of small square allotments of colour.

Yoshiro Suda’s Gerbera stands as an interesting spatial epilogue to the exhibition. This single, contemplative flower, stood on its head on a shelf in the midst a large, empty white room, is a reminder that even the most modest frivolities can redefine a space.

In the end the strength of this exhibition seemed to reside in the way that each section represented a different approach to productivity and aesthetics in art, whether in a traditional, modern or contemporary sense. More particularly, it reveals how concepts of space, form and beauty can be ever-changing and transient. In the work alone I didn’t feel the garden theme was necessarily that apparent but what was apparent was perhaps that it was a meditation on utopia or paradise; the binding element that unfies all the participating artists is their desire to cultivate their respective visions, be it actual or metaphysical. Every piece of work represents the artists’ attempts to place themselves in a context with their environment, either through their own intervention or invention. Such acts are in essence the nature of the creative spirit and the human desire to carve out its own Eden.