Nobody can accuse the good folks at the Mori Art Museum of slacking off: the hoopla surrounding Takashi Murakami’s ‘The 500 Arhats’ has barely subsided, but the Roppongi Hills facility is already showing an equally ambitious spectacle in its stead. The 2016 edition of ‘Roppongi Crossing’, Mori’s triennial survey of Japanese contemporary art, is subtitled ‘My Body, Your Voice’ and was put together by four curators from Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.
On display are works from 20 artist groups in a variety of media, including video, illustration and photography – not to mention Nile Koetting's electrical current display, which would have been right up Nikola Tesla’s alley. If the press release is to be believed, this year’s eclectic selection deals with the relationship between ‘the physical body and information, as well as the state of communication in today’s world’. Aiming to get to the bottom of it all, we recently checked out the press opening of ‘My Body, Your Voice’.
After taking in some cutting-edge but rather serious art, Nao Nishihara’s unselfconscious piece ‘Bling Bling’ hits us like a breath of fresh air. Its centrepiece is a ramshackle contraption, preoccupied with the task of hauling up black, sausage-like objects on a conveyor belt moving at the most lethargic speed possible. As the objects tumble and turn their way up the belt, the machinery produces a deep groaning sound, which sounds as if its sluggish customers are moaning in protest of their arduous endeavour.
When they finally reach the top, the objects slide down a green tarpaulin sheet in what appeared to be a momentary state of glee that defied their lifelessness, only to be pulled back onto the conveyor belt for a rerun of their odyssean journey. It's impossible not to see some humour in this seemingly pointless vicious cycle. Nishihara himself occasionally joins the wailing symphony playing strange musical instruments – needless to say – of his own invention. We'll go ahead and label this the birth of a new musical and artistic genre.
Another highlight of the exhibition is Kazuhiro Nomura’s installation-come-performance piece ‘Altar of Laughter’. When we enter the large white-washed room supposedly containing the work, the space seems empty save for two tiny pillars. These stick out like sore thumbs on the ground, with a large rectangle delineating some kind of boundary around them. After the room is quickly lined with curious journalists, we're each given two small cups containing buttons of all shapes and colours, and are instructed to throw their contents inside the rectangle.
The objective is to land a button on the flat pinnacle of the pillars, no bigger than the button itself. Though this is near impossible, the point of the work soon becomes clear. While more than eager members of the press are busy trying a variety of throwing techniques, all in vain – most (if not all) exceeding the two-cup limit – the rectangular emptiness has turned into a canvas on which we unwittingly spew out an abstract expressionist composition. For once, the critic has become the artist.
Photos by Keisuke Tanigawa