reviews roppongi crossing 2007
roppongi Crossing 2007:
Future BeAts in JApAnese
ContemporAry Art
Mori Art MuseuM, tokyo
13 october – 14 JAnuAry
Roppongi Crossing is a series of exhibitions at
the Mori Museum showcasing the health of
the present Japanese art scene. Three years
after its first staging, a chaotic, packed, noisy
and mazy exhibition with 57 artists, Roppongi
Crossing 2007 presents 36 artists from a
wide range of disciplines, including painting,
sculpture, photography, design, video, manga,
games, doll-making and bathhouse-mural
painting. The new curatorial team, Kazuo
Amano, Natsumi Araki, Naoki Sato and Noi
Sawaragi, was organised to include specialists
in art and design.
Cross-genre exhibitions such as these
pose problems for participants working in
different fields. Some, on being selected,
become ambitious to do ‘art’ installation
pieces. Although these artists are appreciated
in their own fields, they are no longer vivid
or exciting in the museum context. As Noi
Sawaragi says in the audio guide: “For them,
showing at the museum is like playing an ‘away’
game of football.” So this time the curators
revised the approach to the idea of ‘crossing’,
and crossings of various types are juxtaposed
here. In 2004 the ‘all-stars’ of Japanese art
and design were simply lined up. In 2007 the focus is on the interdisciplinary crossing in each individual’s work.
Roppongi Crossing 2007: Future Beats
in Japanese Contemporary Culture,
Those selected already work across several fields and have strong ideas on how to make a show; as the crossing 2007 (installation view).
has already occurred in each work. And this time, young emerging artists were selected alongside longstanding
photo: kioku keizo
courtesy Mori Art Museum, tokyo
veterans.
Chu Enoki, known for his outstanding street performances and in non-gallery sites in the 1970s, and
adored by artists born in the 60s such as Takashi Murakami and Kenji Yanobe, shows a massive futuristic
cityscape created from numerous spires of scrap metal, ground down and engraved by the artist who worked,
until his retirement, as a metal engineer. This cunning ‘craftiness’ can also be seen in artists of other generations.
Yoshiou Sakagishi’s palm sized ceramics are made through an elaborate process of accumulating drops of
clay slip and the imaginary world of animals and flowers portrayed in Etsuko Fukaya’s miniature etchings are a
product of sophisticated technique. There’s a gap of two decades between Enoki, Sakagishi and Fukaya, but
their attitude to pursuing aesthetics through their chosen technique is common. Emerging artist Kohei Nawa’s
gigantic Styrofoam sculpture and Kengo Kito’s rotating colourful and fun wind chandelier also shows the artists’
interest in materials and colours. In the end, this exhibition traces the historical roots of Japanese contemporary
art also recalls the time when art and design were considered one and the same, not divided as they were later
by Western culture in the nineteenth century.
This show is carefully constructed and succeeds in presenting us with a certain emerging sense
of Japanese art today, however, one big regret is that the bugs and noises have all been ironed out in the
exhibition. All mischievous artists from the different genres have been tamed and all are exhibited comfortably
in a white cube. I suspect many visitors will miss the chaos of the first “Crossing” exhibition that showed the art
scene to be full of and passion and energy. This is a nice show, but a little bit too quiet to call itself “future beats”.
Chiaki Sakaguchi
129 Artreview
JAN_REVIEWS.indd 129 4/12/07 15:41:25
Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142