This debut Japanese solo show from Chicago-born Theaster Gates takes place at one of Tokyo’s most prestigious art venues. Gates’s rise to prominence is very much part of the art world’s increasing recognition of the voices of African-American and other non-white communities. A truly multi-disciplinary creative – focused primarily on sculpture and ceramics but also working in architecture, music, performance, fashion and design – Gates strives to preserve and promote Black culture via projects as large as a Chicago initiative that has transformed over 40 abandoned buildings into public art spaces.
Also key to Gates’s vision, and a central theme of this show, is the influence that Japanese cultural and craft traditions have had on the artist over the past two decades. From initially travelling to Japan in 2004 to study ceramics, encounters and explorations over the subsequent decades have led Gates to formulate 'Afro-Mingei'. This is a creative ideology inspired by Gates’s identification of a spirit of resistance shared by Afro-American culture and Japan’s Mingei folk crafts movement. It imagines Black aesthetics and Japanese craft philosophies coming together in our globalised era to form a future hybrid culture.
This exhibition explores the Afro-Mingei concept through installations including a revolving, mirror-surfaced 'iceberg' that pays homage to Chicago house music, and an endlessly reverberating church organ. There are also works utilising materials as disparate as Japanese incense and firefighters’ hoses, ceramics and sculptures from both Gates and fellow US and Japanese artists, and much more.
The exhibition closes early at 5pm on Tuesday (except August 13).
