Mori Art Museum: Out of Doubt

 

On Sunday afternoon I spent some time at the Mori Art Museum, viewing the 2013 Roppongi Crossing Show, Out of Doubt. The Roppongi Crossing show aims to examine trends in current Japanese art, and is held every three years. Much of the show was dark in nature, many works questioned social issues in interesting ways, and the aftermath of the 3/11 disaster was decidedly present. Above is the futuristic landscape of Roppongi Hills, where the museum is located, below the first work of the show, 1,000 Legs, Cultivating Fruits, by Kobayashi Fumiko.

 

 

One of my favorite works, Nonhuman Crossing, Kazama Sachiko.

 

 

The installation of daguerreotypes by Arai Takashi. The artist is currently working in daguerreotype, and in this installation combined images of Fukushima, Hiroshima, the Lucky Dragon Incident, and the Trinity Site in one room. The room was very dark with small lights on the daguerreotypes, but a Geiger counter clicked at the center, and then every few minutes lit up the extremely bright light that is seen in this photograph.

 

 

 The Niwa Yoshinori installation, Proposing to Hold up Karl Marx to the Japanese Communist Party, wherein the artist took Marx's image to local communist party offices and spoke with party members about ideology. This was a very interesting installation, and I wish I had been able to spend more time with the video works.

 

 

Yanagi Yukinori's Eurasia. The flags are made of colored dirt, and there are tiny tubes connecting each flag. Ants tunnel through the flags, creating fissures in the surface of the flag. 

 

 

Sasamoto Aki's Inner Ear installation. 

 

 

The Mori Museum is on the 53rd floor of Roppongi Hills, and includes a ticket to the observation deck on the 52nd floor. 

 

 

After viewing the exhibition, I attended a panel discussion on contemporary Japanese art with the curators of the show, one of the curators of the Japan pavilion at the Venice Bienniale, and a professor of modern and contemporary art. Some of the more interesting topics of conversation were the global events of 2011, the subsequent change in protest techniques and how this has impacted art and visual culture, the gesture and concept of "anachronistic resonance," and artist's awareness of the political futility of their own works.

 

 

Leaving the museum, Roppongi Hills from the base.

 

 

Louise Bourgeois' spider, a well-known landmark at Roppongi Hills.