I was invited to a dinner last night at the Italian restaurant 'Bice', on the 47th floor of Jean Nouvel's Dentsu office tower in Shiodome. The famous Johnnie Walker and Fumio Nanjo, Director of Mori Art Museum, co-hosted a dinner for film-maker Isaac Julien, who was in Tokyo for meetings. The gathering ended up being a very nice start of year catching up session with several artists and curators who I had not seen in a while. I learned that Eriko Osaka (Chief curator, Contemporary Art Center, ART TOWER MITO) has left this position after thirteen years and has joined the Mori Museum. Kenji Kubota, also a curator at Mito for many years, left there too late last year and is currently working independently from Tokyo. My AIT founding colleague Yasu Nakamori was also there, back from PhD studies at Cornell for a short while. Yasu has also been curating various exhibitions in the US, and plans to return to Japan later this year. So, it seems that these past six months have seen considerable people shifting within the art scene in the Tokyo area - Yuko Hasegawa (formerly Kanazawa) is in Tokyo at MOT as is Fumihiko Sumitomo (formerly of ICC). This level of movement has perhaps not happened for a while. What is good is that the movements are complex - with inter-museum changes, but crucially also museum curators opting to operate outside the institutions, and thus boosting the limited number of independent operators in Tokyo. Interestingly there is perhaps also a generational aspect to all of this, with younger curators in their thirties initiating various new ways of working. I spoke with Mori Museum assistant curator Ken Kondo about the characteristics of this younger curatorial layer and how we seem to get on much better in an informal and relaxed way. This compared to twenty years ago, when I think a certain competitive edge prevailed and curators tended to be more isolated from one another. We spoke about the importance of meeting for drinks informally once in a while to exchange thoughts and information. It is probably these little actions which gradually create conditions for change.
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