The Economist January 15th 2022 71
Books & artsArtinJapan
By the people, for the people
A
cosmonaut satfor most of the winter
on a platform at KazusaMurakami sta
tion in Chiba, a rural Japanese prefecture
next to Tokyo. As they waited for trains, lo
cal grandmothers would chat with the
inanimate installation, the work of the
Russian artist Leonid Tishkov. Visitors to
an abandoned clothing factory in the near
by village of Ushiku found a multimedia
labyrinth assembled by the Japanese artist
Nakazaki Toru, using objects and memo
ries retrieved from the site: old sewing
machines, mannequins draped in fabric
samples and recorded interviews with the
family that once ran the place. These were
two of over 90 pieces created for a triennial
festival known as Ichihara Art x Mix, held
in the Ichihara area of Chiba in late 2021.
Abroad, Japan’s bestknown contempo
rary art is the mangainflected work of
painters such as Murakami Takashi, whose
colourful flowers feature on Louis Vuitton
bags and in Billie Eilish’s music videos. In
side the country, however, social and com
munitycentred art, often in the form of
festivals in rural areas, is the dominant
trend. Kitagawa Fram, the art director
behind the Ichihara event, organises four
other big ones in as many prefectures. The
EchigoTsumari triennale draws more than
half a million people, about the same as the
Venice biennale; they wander across 760
square kilometres of remote villages in
Niigata prefecture, in search of sculptures
and installations hidden in fields, forests
and old buildings. A million people flock to
the remote “art islands” of Japan’s Inland
Sea for the Setouchi triennale.
Hundreds of other smaller art events
are held each year under the banner of “re
gional revitalisation”. This strain of art
grapples with the key challenges facing
Japan (and, increasingly, much of the de
veloped world): an ageing, shrinking pop
ulation; hollowedout regions; the climate
catastrophe. The works make use of the
new spaces and resources that those forces
have spawned, such as abandoned build
ings and idle elderly residents. As Adrian
Favell, a sociologist and art critic, writes:
“The leading edge of the contemporary can
be found in collective community works.”
In Japanese, such efforts are known
as ato purojekuto(from the English “artproject”). “We call it a ‘project’ because it is
not an ‘artwork’,” says Tomii Reiko, an art
historian. The ato purojekutoare by nature
collaborative endeavours without a single
author. Many include pieces of public art
or sculpture, but the “project” is what hap
pens around them: workshops and other
initiatives that prioritise communication
and engagement with communities. “The
process is more important than the out
come,” explains Mori Yoshitaka of Tokyo
University of the Arts. In short, the artists
create links not between elements of a
composition, but between people.
The ato purojekutohave their roots in
Japanese avantgarde collectives of the
196 0s. They have parallels abroad in what
Grant Kester, an American art historian,
calls “socially engaged art”. But the ato pu-
rojekutoare a distinct form that responds
to particular socioeconomic conditions.
Some operate in big cities, such as 3331 Arts
Chiyoda, an art space in a former high
school in northeast Tokyo that hosts
everything from exhibits of experimental
sound art, to disasterprevention round
tables, to wheatgrowing workshops. Ma
ny others unfold far from the bright lights.
The case of EchigoTsumari has been
“pivotal”, says Kumakura Sumiko, also of
Tokyo University of the Arts. The region is
a conservative enclave in the mountains of
central Japan, filled with derelict homes,
rice paddies and old people—objectively, a
terrible place to host a contemporaryart
festival. When it started in 2000, many arty
observers wondered who would bother toCHIBA
In a bold reappraisal of what art can do—and whom it is for—festivals bring the
work into the Japanese countryside
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