Element of surprise
To organise a successful exhibition, the curator must be flexible and open to change, Fumio Nanjo tells Madeline Gressel
Fumio Nanjo, director of the Mori Museum in Tokyo's Roppongi Hills, is the very definition of an internationally successful curator. He's enjoyed a long, illustrious career, studded with awards and accolades, and crowned by involvement in influential events such as the Singapore and Venice biennales.
However, Nanjo's first solo exhibition came close to being a disaster. While working for the Japan Foundation in 1982, he proposed a performance festival to celebrate the organisation's 10th anniversary. He invited some of his favourite contemporary artists, including German Fluxus figure Joseph Beuys. The foundation's CEO and exhibitors thought it was going to be a theatre performance, Nanjo recalls. "Nobody knew I was doing a contemporary art event."
Then Beuys pulled out of the festival, leaving Nanjo in the lurch. So he assembled a collection of groundbreaking international artists including Daniel Buren, Dan Graham and Giulio Paolini, and put on a show unlike anything Tokyo had ever seen. "Because of that exhibit," he says, "I became one of the main organisers in the Japanese contemporary art world."
This adaptability has served Nanjo well. He's come to see flexibility as the key to successful curating. "Curators are often taught that a good curator must be pure," he says. "But when you get into the real business, curators confront a lot of political and financial problems. When they are too pure, they have their 'right answer' before they've solved the problem. We should have an ideal of curation, but we must train curators to deal with practicalities. As I've confronted problems, I've become very flexible. To be too pure is to be weak."
Everything changes...even in terms of the existence of human beings. Maybe we will disappear one day. After the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, many people started to have this feeling - that nothing is eternal
Fumio Nanjo, curator
The latest exhibition curated by Nanjo, "Imminent Domain: Designing the Life of Tomorrow", now on show at the Asia Society Hong Kong, represents another step outside his comfort zone. He has gathered newly commissioned works from 12 of Hong Kong's most innovative local designers, ranging from product designer Michael Leung and architect William Lim to mixed-media artist Kingsley Ng, asking them to confront the question: "How will design define and shape our future?"