No sooner had Tokyo Gendai thrown open the doors to the VIP preview of its second edition on Thursday than ARTnews Top 200 Collector Takeo Obayashi could be seen admiring a striking Robert Longo drawing of a tiger at the booth of Pace Gallery, and collecting couple Shunji and Asako Oketa were wandering through the booth of Blum. They weren’t the only machers on hand. Also making the rounds were the likes of Yoshiko Mori, chairperson of the Mori Art Museum; Jenny Wang, head of the Fosun Foundation; Simian Wang, founder of the Simian Foundation; and many others. The fair, in other words, opened on a high note. The extent to which that will translate into sales is best measured in ARTnews’s report tomorrow, as the fair continues through Sunday. In the meantime, here is a roundup of some particularly compelling booths.
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Taka Ishii
Image Credit: Sarah Douglas/ARTnews The display at Tokyo-based Taka Ishii flouts all the rules of exhibition design and is a total knockout. Works on paper by 15 gallery artists are arranged across all three walls of the space in a straight line, their frames kissing. With no air between them, you’d expect the artworks to blur together, but instead each one stands out, a perfect foil to its neighbors. The march of pieces ends in a smidgeon of negative space rounded out by a single unframed work: A white sheet of paper on which Mario García Torres, who currently has a show in the gallery’s Tokyo space, has left his handprints in printer toner ink, so that it appears as if he is holding up the sheet. The whole arrangement looks so right, it would be no surprise if some enlightened collector decided to swoop up the whole thing and place it, for instance, in a bedroom, above an unadorned bed. If I had to pick a favorite, it would have to be the paintings of delicate petal shapes by Tomoo Gokita, but it would be with a certain hesitation. Like people you only encounter in a group, it’s hard to tell what they would be like alone.
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Shiro Tsujimura at Imura Art Gallery
Image Credit: Sarah Douglas/ARTnews Display also plays a strong role over at the booth of Kyoto-based Imura Art Gallery, where the focus is squarely on ceramics by Shiro Tsujimura, a Japanese artist in his early 80s who was trained in a Zen temple before turning to pottery. The booth is dominated by tall plinths holding Shiro’s tea bowls, the plinths placed so closely together that there is not really enough room to circulate among them, and so a crowd of admirers built up at the front edge of the space, like gawkers at a celebrity. And the vessels are certainly gawk-worthy: each of them delicately limned in a rust color against beige. Over in one corner of the booth was a group of other ceramic vessels, ones that look like they started out as vases and were spun on the wheel so as to balloon into spheres. Placed together these large green bulbs—each around the size of a beach ball—looked like a mound of moss. Everything about this booth was delightful, and the ceramics, it’s worth saying, were selling like hotcakes.
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Danful Yang at Spurs Gallery
Image Credit: Sarah Douglas/ARTnews Being a sucker for what you might call trompe l’oeil materials—artworks that look like they are made of one thing but are actually made of another—I was so taken by the cluster of pieces by Chinese artist Danful Yang at Beijing’s Spurs Gallery that I can’t tell you what was going on in the rest of the booth. Collectively titled “Packing Me Softly,” these were wall-mounted sculptures, none of them much bigger than a football, that looked exactly like ordinary packages you’d receive in the mail, with addresses scribbled on shipping forms and lots of other labels affixed to them. Except they were made not of cardboard, but of hand embroidery on canvas. None of this was visible unless you got up quite close, and it all could have come off as a gimmick, or as too precious. But they didn’t, there being something compelling about the contrast between the immense care the artist has taken with each piece and the lack of care with which such packages are generally treated: dropped onto trucks, mailroom floors, doorsteps. Imagine one of these displayed on your entryway table: no one would ever again come in without smiling.
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Yusake Asai at Anomaly
Image Credit: Sarah Douglas/ARTnews If from afar the solo show of Yusuke Asai, a Japanese artist in his 40s, at the booth of Shinagawa’s Anomaly gallery looks dull—just swirls of muddy colors—it is because the artworks are made primarily of, well, mud. To be more precise, soil, as well as other unusual materials like coffee mixed in with paint. And the closer you get to his paintings, the more you begin to appreciate their complexity—and their beauty. In these dizzying compositions are figures, flowers, footprints, animals. If you went to the fair preview afterparty around the corner at the Yokohama Museum of Art, you would know that Asai is having quite the moment: an enormous painting is displayed there in a show of its very own, a recent acquisition for the museum. Asai made that painting, titled To The Forest of All Living Things with the help of volunteers, who collected soil from different areas around Yokohama. He’s had solo shows in numerous museums in Japan recently, as well as one 10 years ago in the US, at the Rice University Art Gallery in Houston, Texas. More captivating to this viewer than the paintings, however, are Asai’s ceramics. In the booth, there is a large one in the shape of a fox-like creature emerging from a vessel. Surrounding it are tiny animal figures, none of them taller than a playing card, all of them wide-eyed, forever surprised at something.
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TENGAone at Kaikai Kiki
Image Credit: Sarah Douglas/ARTnews John Baldessari famously said that for an artist being at an art fair, where your work is being traded, was like seeing your parents have sex. Perhaps one way to avoid the discomfort of such a primal scene is to keep busy. So would seem to be the approach of the Tokyo-based street artist known as TENGAone, who was finishing a painting right in front of fairgoers’ eyes at the booth of Kaikai Kiki. Regardless of what you think of his artwork—a painting of a floppy-eared anime-style creature—there is much to unpack in the idea of would-be collectors observing the artist at work. It taps into the fetishism of the studio, romanticized notions of the starving artist toiling away in his garret. Having started making graffiti at age 14, TENGAone is immune to all of that, seemingly at ease working in public—and, not surprisingly for an artist who has collaborated with Takashi Murakami, seemingly comfortable with the commerce aspect, too.
