<research> Japan (1)
Chisai researches contemporary art world. This article is around 2010 in Japan.
Until I came to Kyoto in 2012, I lived in Tokyo for about 20 years. Tokyo was a big city, and there were the most art museums in Asia at that time.
Around 2008 in Japan there was art Bubble, galleries opened every day. So I went there, met many artists and art people, wrote articles at weekly magazines, monthly magazines, and websites. But the bubble was just A BUBBLE. Suddenly it was over.
Additionally, in 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake (and Fukushima nuclear disaster) shocked Japan. The Japanese artists based on it and represented their artworks. However, Japanese museums and curators (who work in public) did not allow them to show them because such artworks might hurt the victims.
At that time, I was in a big project by writing the book "The 20th Century Art in Japan".
This book is about art history in Japan. As I wrote in <introduction> 2, Japanese art refers only to Tokyo. Almost Japanese art historian and critics always describe two things about “1980s”; (1) Illustration became fine art, it called “Japanese pop art” and (2) artists who live in Kansai (West Japan, Osaka and Kyoto) came to Tokyo, it called “Kansai New Wave”.
In 2011-2012, I was university lecturer in West Japan and the editor said to me “please write articles about Kansai artists”. Actually, I was still living in Tokyo, so I researched it in the library every time I went to Kansai. But there were/are few libraries and few places where I could/can read documents. Even if I found it, what was written was different depending on the book, “born in 1935” or “born in 1936”.
This book focuses on Japanese artists. In 2010. I was trained about “archive” at a national research center in Japan. So I can research and wrote the articles about eight artists; Bikky Sunazawa, Goro Kakei, Kenjiro Agatsuma, Keiji Uematsu, Kiichi Sumikawa, Kyubee Shimizu, Masayuki Nagare and Yoshio Kitatsuji. Do you know them? —- As you can see, Japanese contemporary art has no archives and is very biased.