What Mori Art Museum can teach China about showing contemporary art
Yoshiko Mori talks about how she and her late husband began collecting new artists’ works to open Japan’s eyes to contemporary art, and explains novel ways museum in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills draws audiences
An Asian collector makes an astronomical bid for an important modern Western painting auctioned by Christie’s, securing a work that had never been in Asian hands. It is also the most money paid for the artist’s work.
No, this wasn’t last November when Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian paid US$170.4 million for Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu Couché. It was May 1990, when a Japanese businessman called Ryoei Saito paid US$82.5 million for Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr Gachet. The next evening, he paid US$78.1 million for Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette at a Sotheby’s sale.
Japanese collectors disrupted Western dominance of the modern and contemporary art market when they burst onto the scene in the 1980s, at the height of what was, in hindsight, an unsustainable bubble economy.
The strength of the yen, the easy availability of credit and soaring asset prices at home allowed many people like Saito, honorary chairman of Daishowa Paper Manufacturing, to acquire trophies such as artworks, golf courses and famous buildings such as New York’s Rockefeller Centre.
The bubble burst and Japan has yet to emerge from the “lost decades” of slow economic growth. In 1995, Mitsubishi Estate walked away from its stake in the Rockefeller Centre with losses. That same year, Saito was convicted of bribery and his company sank under a mountain of debt.
Japan’s economic woes and the rise of China have turned the spotlight away from collectors in Tokyo to those in Shanghai and Beijing. But a recent exhibition and symposium at the Hong Kong Arts Centre highlighted the dynamism of seven major Japanese collections and the zeal with which their owners promote their passion for new art through private museums.