ESSAY

Letter From Honshu

First published by Art Monthly, February 2017

A mechanical colossus stands guard over Tokyo Bay. Glimpsed against a backdrop of glittering high-rise city blocks, the 1:1 scale statue of Mobile Suit Gundam (Japan’s fictional space-travelling robot mascot) is a fearsome sight in the early evening light, its visor defiantly reflecting the expansive waters of the greater Pacific. I had journeyed to see this monumental work of public art on the recommendation of Tokyo-based artist and writer Catherine Harrington, and certainly wasn’t prepared for the composite of nested complexities it embodied. Located atop the concrete plaza-scape of Odaiba – one of many islands erected in the mid 19th century to defend Edo against foreign intruders – the modular body of this fantastic entity spoke not only of the military capacity and aspiration for space travel that had been complicated by the restrictions of a postwar constitution forged in 1947, but also the common tendency for Japanese pop-cultural exports to blur amid the assumptions and anxieties of the techno-orientalist imagination. To this day, Western cultural expectations commonly figure Japan as a strange hybrid of mysterious traditions enhanced by hyper-technological modernity – a presumption I found myself guilty of, as I ambled around the statue’s feet, trying to capture the most atmospheric photo of Mount Fuji receding behind the pulsing megalopolis.

In her great essay ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’, curator Dawn Chan outlines the difficulties of what might be termed ‘asia-futurism’, and the ways that a myth of an Asia hard-wired for futurity and underscored by images of ‘cities in hyperdrive and sleep-deprived gamers’ might filter back into Japanese conceptions of the self. She notes Jean Baudrillard’s poorly phrased observation that an accelerated transition to modernity had led the country to transform the power of feudalism into weightlessness, thus turning itself into ‘a satellite of the planet Earth’, before suggesting that asia-futurism might reclaim its agency, perhaps, by forging counterfactual worlds in which ‘techno-cliché trappings’ might be recast towards ‘more generative ends’, circumscribing locales beyond the limitations of an externally projected future.

My journey through Honshu last autumn led me to a series of exhibitions at major institutions across Japan’s central island that appeared to be concerned with just such explorations of futurity and speculation. Despite its comedically bland title, ‘The Universe and Art’ at Mori Art Museum, Roppongi, Tokyo, presented an overwhelmingly vast and scrupulously sourced survey show that sought to explore cross-cultural interest in the cosmos. Located on the 56th floor of one of Tokyo’s most iconic high-rise buildings, the show’s organisers need some preliminary praise for the sheer logistical wizardry it must have taken to install an exhibition in the clouds, an obviously appropriate place for such galaxy-oriented reflections.

Vertiginous heights aside, the show was exhilarating for the huge leaps it made between ancient, religious and scientific artefacts and the work of contemporary artists. The few steps separating the finely painted Tibetan Yamantāka Mandala (17th-18th century) – structured to demonstrate a specifically Buddhist cosmology of compartmentalised heavens and cloud-borne deities – from Mariko Mori’s ethereal fibreglass sculpture Ekpyrotic String II, 2014, brought centuries-old mystical teachings into relevant contact with the dynamical objects currently postulated by superstring theory. Wolfgang Tillmans’s named and unnamed galaxies, ESO, 2016, a body of work commissioned specially for this exhibition, documented the seemingly immeasurable labour of mapping distant star systems through the humble interfaces of computer screens belonging to astronomers at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, unremarkable photographs that made the enormity of such exploratory endeavours visible through the indistinguishable likeness of stars to single pixels.

The strange occurrence of the ‘hollow ship’, an unexplained event of 1803 in which a mysterious vessel drifted ashore along the coast of Hitachi Province lined with cryptic writings and ferrying an unidentifiable passenger, was represented here by numerous Edo-period newspaper articles and hand-drawn illustrations, a popular folk-precursor to the ‘unidentified flying object’. The fact that such oddities may occur as archetypal events across cultures was the focus of a series of works by Laurent Grasso, whose series of ‘ancient aliens’ employed authentic maquettes and altar-pieces-turned-evidence to hint that religion might be the result of inter-dimensional contact. Tokyo-based collective Teamlab’s Crows Are Chased And The Chasing Crows Are Destined To Be Chased As Well, Blossoming On Collision, 2016, used admittedly impressive digital animations to generate an ultimately saccharine and crudely emotive vision of astral travel which fell something short of creating the same sense of limitless possibility that could be observed in a series of modest proposals for kinetic audio-visual interfaces developed as part of an exciting programme for KIBO, the Japanese Experiment Module on the International Space Station, on display nearby.

Travelling north to Kanazawa, a primarily industrial harbour city on the North Coast, I called into the 21st Century Museum, an institution that appeared to share the architecturally zen-like composure of the DT Suzuki archive nearby. Here, a one-year project by Danish collective Superflex entitled The Liquid State brought raw materials such as asphalt, kombucha bacteria and even the microorganisms borne on visitors’ breath into the gallery to demonstrate slow processes of collapse, cultivation and fermentation. An alleged attempt to materially elucidate the relationships the museum might have with its community, the slow, unobtrusive matter-of-factness of these resources seemed to underscore the necessity for the museum to remain a place of unquantified, understated, and self-justified contemplation.

At Hiroshima MOCA, ‘The World Is Strange!’ brought the work of two painters-turned-graphic artists under sustained scrutiny in a genuinely inspiring show that mapped the dialogue between academic painting and formal innovation in sequential art. Tiger Tateishi (1941-1998) and Yuichi Yokoyama, both known painters but renowned comic-book artists, subvert pop-cultural tropes into a critical ‘psychedoolia’ that demands patience and the willingness to learn their oddball graphic languages. In a country where the comic book is revered, it seemed fitting that Yokoyama’s crazy schematisations of hyper-regulated alien transit systems and Tateishi’s metamorphic entities were receiving such institutional validation. Given that their images have the tendency to draw readers into prolonged periods of near-meditational concentration, I wondered whether the necessarily timeless interstices of asia-futurism might ultimately be found within their pages.