On Saturday I braved the freezing winds sweeping Tokyo to take in an exhibition at the new National Center for Modern Art in Roppongi. I even discovered that you can now access the striking building directly, through an artfully designed underpass from Nogizaka station.
The exhibition was a retrospective of the turn-of-the-century artist, Taikan Yokoyama, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death. His pictures were painted in the traditional nihonga style on long scrolls, hanging on rich brocades or embossed on golden screens.
They are beautiful, but as sometimes happens in Japan the slowly-shuffling crowds in the exhibition hall were just so painful, it drained any joy out of the whole thing. There were just so many people there. I hadn’t realised the artist was so famous. Every glass case was surrounded by an impenetrable band of ambling provinicials, many wearing the headset self-tour sets, and I ended up quickly skimming over most of the pictures in the gallery, and checking them out in postcard form at the giftshop.
The building itself though, as always, was very impressive, with late afternoon sun shining through the wavy glass facade, onto the towering concrete columns, topped with cafes. Great.
I saw that they have another exhibition coming up: the works of the acclaimed (but unpronounceable) Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye.
Kngwarreye, who died in 1996, was a remarkable figure. She is often claimed to have been a creative genius. Which is remarkable given that she only started to paint in her late 70s. She had lived her whole life in Utopia, a tiny outpost in the blistering Western deserts, which in the 1980s improbably blossomed into a vital centre for Aboriginal art. Her abstract, colorful works were much-coveted by collectors, breaking sales records. She was the first Aboriginal artist to sell a painting for over a million US dollars. The money, controversially, was ploughed almost entirely back into her extended family and community, where it was shared. At one point ashe was buying a car a week for her relatives and singlehandedly providing for half the town. She died with little money herself, leading to accusations that she had been exploited both by white art dealers and by her own community, although others argued back that this was to misunderstand the sharing nature of Aboriginal culture, with its emphasis on group ownership of resources.
Regardless, Kngwarreye is remembered today as one of Australia’s greatest artists. In fact, advocates of Aboriginal art often compare her to a contemporary Picasso. It is claimed that in time, her work will be remembered as some of the greatest and most significant of any artist in the Twentieth century, anywhere. But seeing as art is so subjective, and modern art even more difficult for the average person to interpret, and Aboriginal modern art doubly so, who really knows?
National Center for Modern Art: http://www.nact.jp/
