Surely it's time the international art world toasted the magnificent cultural conceits of Keiichi Ikemizu, who built a pyramid of logs on top of a mountain to capture a 'thunder demon', then waited a decade for lightning to strike. Ikemizu once walked from Kyoto to Osaka with a dozen sheep in a bid to challenge the boundaries between performer and spectator.
While celebrating great eccentrics and visionaries, the critics may also recognise the Zen-like fortitude of Yoshio Yoshimura, who has been holed up in a small mountain village for years, painstakingly drawing photographic reproductions of newspapers with thin pencils. 'This would not be possible without deep and well-balanced breathing,' an introduction to Yoshimura's work helpfully explains.
Japan has produced its fair share of po-faced and unimaginative modern art, but you will not find much of it at the Roppongi Crossing exhibition, which opened at the Mori Art Museum last week. The second in a series of one-stop guides to the best of contemporary Japanese visual culture (the first was in 2004), you'll struggle to find a richer, warmer or wackier celebration of creative talent, despite the absence of some of Japan's best-known names.
The 36 artists/groups include the 70-year-old Ikemizu, who has been grappling with weighty political and artistic themes since the 1960s, to fresher faces such as Iichiro Tanaka, who just wants to make you laugh with his wry re-appropriations of everyday props.
'We felt it would be too easy to resort to the hackneyed approach of discovering newness by picking only young artists,' says curator Natsumi Araki. 'We were also keen to revisit the revolutionary and innovative work of late career artists.'
The guiding principle of the show, says its introduction, was to select work with 'an energy and influence that spreads beyond the confines of conventional artistic categories'. Araki says Roppongi Crossing, which is also the name of a Tokyo landmark close to the Mori, is an opportunity to observe the Japanese art scene as it unfolds. 'The first exhibition was a sort of festival or celebration. This time we've tried to condense the work down, and show where Japanese art might be going.'
Hence the subtitle: Future Beats in Japanese Contemporary Art.
