Creative East-West cosmopolitanism? The changing role of international mobility for young Japanese contemporary artists

As with other facets of social change, innovation and creativity explored in this volume-such as science and technology, education, cuisine, youth orientations, gender identities-the rise of distinctive new contemporary art from East Asia offers possibilities for exploring the interaction of the local, the national, the regional and the global, in a particular field of cultural production and from new world perspectives. My chapter offers another angle on the “transnational trajectories” in East Asia by considering the cross-border dynamics of Japanese modern and contemporary art-and particularly the international mobility of artists-as part of an Asian-led cultural globalization. It is widely accepted that the economic rise of Asia in recent decades has in effect produced an alternative Asian modernity (or modernities) that is capable of challenging American and European global hegemony, not only economically or politically, but also in terms of cultural production. In this, clearly, Japan was a leader (see, for example, Clammer 1997). Having absorbed the Western lessons of modernization in its emergence as a modern nation state in the early part of the twentieth century, and then as a global economic power from the 1960s onwards, in the 1970s and 1980s it began to produce innovative and distinctive variations on modern global culture that swept through both regional and global markets (Iwabuchi 2002, Moeran 2000). Japan became a globally visible producer of new culture, not only in terms of the wildly popular culture of anime (animated cartoons), manga (comics), tv and film, toys, electronic games, and brand characters-Godzilla, Pokemon, Hello Kitty, and all that (Allison 2006, Kelts 2006)-but also the “high culture” branches of, for example, contemporary design, catwalk fashion, and architecture (Japan Foundation 2008, Kawamura 2004, Koolhaas and Obrist 2011). Japan in effect patented a model of Asian modernity that, in the 1990s and 2000s, has become a path for others: pop culture from Hong Kong, K-Pop from Korea, Singapore or Taipei as creative cities and, above all, the rise of China. The production, consumption, and appreciation of contemporary art from Asia is another key index of this so-called “world class” modernity. In the 1990s and 2000s, indeed, it might be argued that contemporary art became the quintessential global high culture, a form of culture itself very characteristic of the era’s global capitalism. The globalization of contemporary art produced an apparently borderless global art world that stretched from the auction halls of New York and London, via the high art temples of MOMA, Tate and Pompidou, to the new museums of Istanbul and Dubai, and the biennials and art fairs of East Asia. In parallel with the deregulated markets and finance knocking down national borders, the free-spirited avant garde intellectual discourse of artists and art curators complimented perfectly the free-moving money of venture capitalists who bought the works or built the museums (Stallabrass 2004). Amidst a vast inflationary boom, contemporary art became the calling card for newly rich oligarchs in emerging economies everywhere, as well as the signature form of city branding for “global cities” the world over. It might even be argued-as captured beautifully in the ethnography of this world by Sarah Thornton (2008)-that contemporary art became a truly sublime form of the global, approaching a new religion for the secular, atheist, “post-modern” elites that followed and believed in it. Part of this story was an Asian art boom as the world discovered new Asian art and artists, a boom unquestionably centered on Chinese artists but which progressively involved many other sources of origin (Chiu and Genocchio 2010, Ciotti 2012, Philipsen 2008, Vine 2011). The presence of Asian artists on the global market and the curatorial and museum prestige which has been invested in their works, alongside the physical location of many huge global events (such as art fairs and auctions in Hong Kong, or biennials in Shanghai and Singapore), might be seen simply as affirming the rise of a truly de-centered, de-colonized contemporary world or global art sensibility; something that might be identified with the “cosmopolitan imagination” identified by recent critical social theory (Delanty 2009, Papastergiadis 2012). Western art history as a discipline has been very slow to question its own ethnocentric assumptions, but in the wake of this world art boom, there has been a veritable deluge of reflection in these terms on globalization in art theory (Harris 2011). This reflection was, of course, the back end of the post-colonial critique which swept across the humanities since the 1960s. Yet the self-styled “cosmopolitan” global art of the 1990s and 2000s was at the same so patently anchored in the economic liberalism of rampant global capitalism of that era (see also Kofman 2005). As the sublime, utopian form of these material global forces, contemporary art could-to echo the famous works of Hardt and Negri (2001, 2005)-in effect unify both “empire” and “multitude” in the critical discourses of the free-moving global curators who very self-consciously selected, promoted and put (extraordinary) value on the art from new, non-Western sources. The most fashionable Asian artists might slam global capitalism or evoke universal environmental ideals, but those selected for stardom on the global art market or museum circuit often looked very similar as they were presented for global consumption. Superstar new Asian artists such as the Chinese Ai Weiwei or the Indian Subodh Gupta were always positioned as liberal, cosmopolitan heroes, critiquing the forces of modernization sweeping their countries as well as their restrictive political regimes, yet producing very nationally specific icons and images of their home countries that could be easily packaged into simple sociological lessons about exotic (and sometimes still dangerous) locations to curious Western viewers and buyers. The cosmopolitanism of the new global art, and its selective presentation, may thus easily be questioned as a sophisticated new form of orientalism that was not challenging the global order anywhere near as radically as supposed. Behind the apparently free-flowing global circuit, for all the new Asian talent it could also be seen that the personnel powering this world-the institutional “art power” of top curators, dealers, collectors and art writers-were still as solidly as ever anchored in the usual Western hub locations (Quemin 2006). The story with global contemporary art in East Asia, though, is complicated by the positioning of Japan in this picture. Japanese artists were among the first to be presented as part of the “discovery” of world art in the late 1980s, a moment usually linked with the famous Magiciens de la Terre show, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin at the Pompidou, Paris in 1989 (McLean 2011). Yet although a vibrant commercial and conceptual contemporary art scene has continued to develop in Japan during the next two decades, Japanese contemporary artists have been surprisingly marginal to the Asian art boom in global art. This is a long and complex story, but it is largely because the Western global curators have been unable to get in to Japan and shape the contemporary art scene as they have in China. With one or two notable exceptions, then, Japanese artists have been neglected in global art history narratives of the 1990s and 2000s. The perfect evidence is the canonical handbook of modern Western art history, Art Since 1900, edited by the five ruling modern art historians of the East Coast Ivy League: Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and David Joselit (Foster et al. 2011). Only one Japanese contemporary artist since the 1960s is discussed. That artist is, of course, Takashi Murakami: Japan’s version of Ai Weiwei or Subodh Gupta, Japan’s only true global superstar artist since 1990, who is central to my story below. The dominant Western narrative is, to say the least, not a representative history from a Japanese point of view (Favell 2012).1 And despite all the talk about global art and cosmopolitan sensibilities, the “national” point of view is still very relevant here because it does not align with the global view. This in fact is also a peculiarly distinct feature of Japanese contemporary art in comparison to other Asian countries, whose art has been assimilated more easily into global art theories and narratives. At the same time, Japan’s relative neglect is also symptomatic of the Japanese art world’s long history of self-understanding and positioning in relation to Western modernity (Clark 1998). The story of Japanese modern and contemporary art in relation to transnational flows and mobilities indeed reveals an ambivalent globalization. It suggests that, in this field of cultural production at least, Japan has preserved a certain independence, less obviously dominated or colonized by global forces. And that by analyzing the international mobility of Japanese artists it is possible to chart the changing forms of both cosmopolitanism and nationhood in the ways their experiences have been expressed through artistic forms. The chapter proceeds as follows. In the first section, I take the story back to the historical pre-World War Two origins of modernist Japanese art, tracing the role of self-positioning in relation to Western modernity and the dynamics of international mobility and return in international Japanese artists’ careers. This introduces the notion of the gaisen ko-en (the “triumphant return performance”)- that is, the acclaim at home after perceived success on a tour abroad-which has hitherto always been thought necessary to cement a Japanese artist’s international (i.e. “world class”) reputation. Along the way, the story introduces a number of the most famous figures in Japanese modern and contemporary art from different periods in relation to our broader themes. These distinct generations can be thought of as cohorts who have varying interactions with their global and national contexts, thus revealing how forms of cosmopolitanism and nationhood have changed over time. It also lays a groundwork to understand the problematic evolution of the Japanese modern art tradition and art world institutions and assess the effects of their domination and resistance up to and through into the global art era from the late 1980s onwards. In the second main section, I shift to the younger “post-Bubble” or “zero zero generation” who came of age amidst the economic decline, social malaise and shattering disasters of Japan in the mid-to late 1990s. Their evaluation as emergent artists is not as yet settled-neither in Japan nor internationally. Japan in the 1990s and after experienced economic hardship and global contraction while the rest of the world, in particular the rest of Asia, was going through a development boom. I suggest that this disjuncture with world trends has caused important changes in the dynamics of influence and recognition on the part of these younger Japanese artists in a global context. While they have been largely ignored by the mainstream global art world, the need for the gaisen ko-en in their work is arguably being transcended. The argument is that the qualitative change of Japan from being a rising Asian power and alternate modernity to one pioneering forms of post-Bubble, post-growth society, has largely confounded dominant Western understandings of this new Asian culture. These understandings assume a modernizing developmental paradigm and create their narratives of artistic importance accordingly: essentially in terms of global market value and “political” art theoretical interest-and hence as a “challenge” to the West. But what works for China and India does not work for Japan. Rather, the new post-Bubble generation offers a different way of pinpointing how East Asian society and culture may interact with regional and global forces or embody the national and transnational in a post-growth future.