Welcome to NOTEBOOK, a cultural guide to art, design and architecture, along with a resource of local news and information in English giving a realistic view of Tokyo and further afield.
05/26 — During a speech in Tokyo this week, South Korea’s Ambassador to Japan Yun Duk-min said his country is eager to join the G7 after joining last weekend’s summit as a guest country. Haruki Murakami won this year's Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in Spain, while 11 year-old Kunzaburo Yuno from Oita won a special prize at the Children's Nonfiction Literature Awards in Kitakyushu. And finally, a painting of victims who suffered the Minamata poisonings more than 6 decades ago has now been restored.
With Shunsuke Imai's painting exhibition titled “Skirt and Scene” taking place at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery near Hatsudai, we skirt from Shinjuku to Hatsudai and then beyond, taking note of sight and sounds from the local neighbourhood as we ride the local bus towards Shibuya.
Built by architect Takahiko Yanagisawa, responsible for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Koto-ku, Tokyo Opera City is more than just the 54-floor tall Tokyo Opera City Tower which alone contains the Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall otherwise known as Takemitsu Memorial Concert Hall, named after the composer Toru Takemitsu, who had originally acted as the project’s musical consultant but passed away before the hall was finished. The cultural complex a stone’s throw away from Shinjuku opened in 1997 and contains the Opera City Art Gallery. The entire building stacks like a series of building blocks and is overshadowed by the Shuto Expressway along the Kōshū Kaidō avenue, one of the oldest Edo-period routes through Japan, connecting all the way to Kyoto, bending as it does around Hatsudai.
Imai’s paintings are in good company amid the maddening stack of Hatsudai. They recall the French painter Daniel Buren (b.1938) heading out as he fly-posted works around the city in 1970 for Between Man and Matter - 10th Tokyo biennale. That said, both artists are vastly different.
Buren would paste alternating stripes of paper over billboards and advertisments found around Paris and then did the same again Tokyo — a détournement and artistic high-jacking of public space. His public works were ‘hung’ (or plastered) over existing advertising found around the metro stations of Paris. In Tokyo, the physical fabric of expressways and empty walls were ripe for the picking, and described his belief that art could exist anywhere and be boundless. The city was an exhibition without rules. Art, he said, was un-commodified, an unreciprocated event existing anywhere.
Imai takes a more tailored approach. In fact, he suggests as much in a short film playing within the gallery. If he had not become an artist, he would almost certainly have become a designer. Ideas reproduce, or at least mimic, the world outside the museum, ‘highjacking’ ideas of Buren working on top of the city outside as Imai reproduce works within, or at least indoors, with the Situationist eye of an Instagrammer. Or maybe that’s just me.
One point worth making is that the city makes its presence felt but it is one that requires you to experience it for yourself and head outside. Taking the No.66 due south from Tokyo Opera City and the Shuto Expressway will bring you to Shibuya in less than 15 minutes.
It is the same amount of time it takes to walk to Shinjuku. If walking is not that appealing you could take the the Keio New Line train towards Shinjuku.
Shunsuke Imai, Skirt and Scene at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (until June 18)
NOTEBOOK episodes are published 3 times a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We will add things here we couldn’t fit into each episode and use this space as somewhere to answer your questions when your here or thinking of visiting Japan.
It wont necessarily be chronological: we’ll dive back into previous episodes and expand on things that wouldn’t fit — you can only record so much.
We have recently been adding field recordings from different parts of the city, and different parts of the country, while interviews give us a chance to talk with other people on the places they might recommend (or not, for that matter).
And if you have an recommendations or requests, send an email (notebook.podcast@gmail.com) or voice message (speakpipe.com/notebook). Better still, Subscribe and add a comment below. Thanks for listening, thanks for reading, and feel free to use this as your NOTEBOOK.