Day 25 in Japan: Our last full day



Thirty days ago today (well, it's still the 9th somewhere in the world) was our last full day in Japan. We spent a lot of it wandering the streets, browsing in shops of many kinds looking for presents for the home front, generally soaking up the feel of Tokyo in early autumn. Not as many people were carrying little towels to mop up the sweat as in our first days here. Children and young teenagers were wearing school uniforms. The metro seemed more crowded on our morning trip into the city.

Almost by accident we came across the National Art Centre, a huge, striking building that didn't rate a mention in any of the guidebooks we were relying on. There was a strange series of exhibitions in the main halls. Probably the finalists in a competition, or the equivalent of New South Wales's Art Express, sculptures filled three vast halls, placed so close together on the floor that it almost felt like picking one's way through a furniture auction house: yet many of the pieces could easily have dominated a whole room by themselves. Upstairs, however, was the pay-to-enter gallery, showing an exhibition of Chinese avant garde work. Having seen Mike Parr's section of the Sydney Biennale, I found the bits where, as the wall explanation said, the artists treated their bodies as meat, a little déjà vu. By contrast, I was totally there for Yang Zhenzhong's video installation, in which, on a series of large screens, person after person look at the camera and says, in their own language, 'I will die,' and then has the camera linger on their face for a moment. Someone YouTubed it at the Venice Biennale last year. The other strikingly memorable piece was Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's 'Home for the Aged', in which a roped-off area the size of our kitchen, dining room and back veranda combined is filled with bearded old men -- there's an Orthodox primate, a sheikh, a bemedalled and beribboned general, men of many different ethnic types -- in wheelchairs, moving around like automated, slow dodging cars. The postcard reassured us, with chilling effect: 'No actual corpses were used in the creation of this artwork.'



We formed the impression that most of the big department stores in Tokyo have a food section in the basement and a substantial art gallery on the top floor. Our very last gallery of the trip was the Mori Art Museum, just one floor down from the sky deck on the very top of the (I think) tallest building in Tokyo. The gallery had a big exhibition of Annette Messager's work, much oddly affectless abuse of stuffed toys and other innocent objects, which for the most part had me feeling as if I was visiting a museum of someone's nightmares. The thrill of the Mori was a room exhibiting a single work by a young Japanese artist, Araki Tamana. A tree apparently made of bees wax stands in a pool of melted wax, with small, images of animals, birds and people on the branches and in the pooled wax. The effect was magical.




Then we went up onto the sky deck and couldn't see Mount Fuji, but there was plenty else to look at, big and small, near and far.





What else to tell you? We decided to have a Japanese meal in Aota on our last night,and spent maybe half an hour wandering the streets looking for a restaurant, until we finally found one that looked OK, but I don't remember the meal!

Posted: Fri - October 10, 2008 at 08:09 AM           |

©