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  • A metaphor for cities of the future
  • Ephemera and the public nature of the city
  • Darkness is the appeal of a city
  • Depicting the future of Shibuya

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Introduction

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Future City Shibuya: Bringing Ephemera to Spaces is an exhibition that takes as its theme a city that is changing due to a massive, once-in-a-century redevelopment effort.
Along with pointed criticism, the works by 6 artists of various generations delve into questions about the state of the inscrutable city of Shibuya. What these artists have in common is the view that the disappearing chaos and darkness may in fact be a beautiful and necessary function of cities.

ARTISTS
  • Kazumi Kurigami

  • Harumi Yamaguchi

  • Naoya Hatakeyama

  • Sachiko Kazama

  • Naoki Ishikawa

  • Kotao Tomozawa

Dialogue

This exhibition was triggered by curator Takayo Iida encountering SHIBUYA! The Graduate Students of Harvard Think about Shibuya in Ten Years, a book coauthored by architectural curator Kayoko Ota. With Shibuya as its nexus, this conversation between the two on art and architecture will present hope for the future and provide hints for interpreting the exhibition.

  • Takayo Iida

    b.1956 in Tokyo
    −Independent curator, planning and curating exhibitions at art museums worldwide
    THE SHOTO MUSEUM OF ART Deputy Director (2022〜2023), Director, Sgùrr Dearg Institute for Sociology of the Arts(2018〜 ), Board Member of Mori Art Museum Tokyo(2005〜2018), Chief Curator, Aomori Museum of Art (2011-2014), Lecturer, Global Security Research Institute, Keio University(2011〜2015), Professor, Research Center of Arts, Kyoto University of Art and Design (2005-2014), Curator, “Art and Science” project committee, Koishikawa Annex, The University Museum, University of Tokyo (2003−2005), Guest Curator, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain Hiroshi Sugimoto (2004 ) , Tadanori Yokoo(2006), Artistic Director ,COMME des GARÇONS, Art Space “ Six “ (2009-2011):Yayoi Kusama, David Lynch, Daido Moriyama, Tatsuo Miyajima, Takuma Nakahira, Tadanori Yokoo), Artistic Director, Dojima River Biennale 2019 “Archives of Civilization and Savagery”

  • Kayoko Ota

    Kayoko Ota is an architectural curator and editor. She was a steering member of the Japan Urban Research Initiative at Harvard University Graduate School of Design (2020-24) and curator for the CCA c/o Tokyo program at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (2018-21). She served the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014 as commissioner, AMO-OMA in Rotterdam as curator (2002-12), and the Domus magazine as vice editor and editorial board member (2004-06). Her editorial works include Shibuya! (2018) and Project Japan: Metabolism Talks… (2011). She received the Architectural Institute of Japan’s Award for Cultural Achievement in 2022.

1 : A metaphor for cities of the future

Why are
companies
marketing
the town
of
Shibuya?

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Iida

You were originally against the redevelopment of Shibuya, weren’t you?

Ota

This is true of people of our generation and older.

Iida

When I was a child in the early 1960s, it wasn’t yet really functioning as a town or community. There were prefab buildings, disabled veterans, and a department store called Shirokiya in the area where the bus terminal is now. Yet, during the recent development work when the Tokyu flagship store was demolished and we could see the sky, I realized “I’ve seen this somewhere before.” It somehow brought back memories of my childhood. I’ve been watching Shibuya change in real time for nearly sixty years now. When I joined The Shoto Museum of Art a few years ago, I wanted to mount an exhibition on the theme of “Shibuya.” But at the time, I couldn’t come up with an angle to address the question of “Why Shibuya now?” However, when I read the book that you put together, SHIBUYA! The Graduate Students of Harvard Think about Shibuya in Ten Years, I found it very interesting. The book really took me by surprise, talking about Shibuya being redeveloped using methods not found in other cities. It seemed to me that rather than simply being about Shibuya, the book treats Shibuya as a metaphor for the cities of the future. The book is extremely important to this exhibition in terms of thinking about the relationship between cities and architecture, and the relationship to art. So my first step was to meet with you.

Ota

In 2012, I returned to Japan after living abroad for a long time, and I started a job teaching Harvard graduate students who come to Japan. At the time, I experienced culture shock and there were many times when I found myself wondering, “What the heck?” One of my questions was, “Why are companies marketing a town like Shibuya?” At the time, when you rode the Tokyu Den-en-toshi railway line, there were posters everywhere that said things like, “Entertainment City, Shibuya!” At first, I didn’t get it. And why entertainment? So I decided to look into this with my students. The Harvard students found the Shibuya area interesting, but they felt uneasy about the approach behind such a massive redevelopment. Transformations like this happen in large cities around the world but when big capital owns wide swathes of a city, redevelopment turns roads, vacant lots, and public spaces into private property. At a glance, it may seem cleaner and more convenient than before, but in reality, it becomes a space that is full of constraints. What surprised the students most is the lack of an opposition movement against this large-scale redevelopment. Furthermore, the government doesn’t seem to have a long-term vision for urban development, instead leaving it entirely up to the developers. In New York, for example, the government oversees the public aspects of an area, creating mechanisms to ensure that “spaces created for the public" function properly and for protecting diversity and tolerance there. In Tokyo, developers are allowed to carry out large redevelopment projects by promising to city authorities that they will create public spaces. However, in many cases it is doubtful whether there is much tolerance and whether the spaces actually turn out as proposed. I think that we need to question this when it comes to Shibuya, as well. The city of Shibuya still retains its unique allure. Before this disappears, I think that we should discuss how conceptualize and carry out redevelopment.

2 : Ephemera and the public nature of the city

Shibuya
allows change to
occur over time

Iida

Shibuya used to be a place where art wasn’t authoritarian, and where spontaneously emerging cultures—subcultures—were expressed very freely and without restraint.Even if they emanated from commercial capital—entities like Parco and Seibu—there was leeway and freedom. In this exhibition, I would like to trace the changes that have occurred in Shibuya. With the help of Illustrator Harumi Yamaguchi and photographer Kazumi Kurigami, who have been working since the 1970s, I want to evoke the feeling and atmosphere of the time. Kurigami is eighty-eight years old—he saw the prewar landscape, experienced the war, and witnessed Tokyo rise from the ruins after the war. I would like to show our visitors the path that he has followed in his approach to Shibuya over the years. The title of this exhibition is “Ephemera” (fleeting, momentary) and I want to show that recording ephemera is one of the roles of art.

Ota

Shibuya allows change to occur over time. I remember how street dancers used to come at dusk to practice at Mitake Park near the train station. They were very talented, drawing crowds watch them, and they would dance with even more enthusiasm. There used to be similar scenes at Miyashita Park, where each day, the park could be used freely after a certain time. Young people found a space for themselves, and over time they found ways to take full advantage of it. It was interesting, and it was specific to Shibuya. But when there is redevelopment on a massive scale, everything becomes controlled space, and the magic of a place that has developed over time vanishes in an instant. Talk about diversity and tolerance also fades into the background.

Iida

I think of a town as a place where people generate a kind of dynamic force from within the community. That’s why restrictions on people gathering are outrageous. It’s true that the people who gather on Halloween have bad manners and can be a nuisance. But this kind of energy is just another part of the city’s vitality. It’s easy to impose restrictions, but they don’t get us anywhere. When Seibu and Tokyu came to invest in the area in the 1970s, machizukuri, or neighborhood-making, was at the very foundation of their thinking. Rather than simply pursuing sales at their stores, they seemed to have also focused on machizukuri.

Ota

At a time when all of Japan was sinking after the bubble economy, easing restrictions on large redevelopment projects in Tokyo—starting with Shibuya—was an economic policy devised in 2002 to somehow shore things back up. The government created “Urban Renaissance Urgent Redevelopment Areas,” deregulated zones where it became possible to execute redevelopment projects on a scale that was previously impossible. Now, developers are competing over the scale and height of their buildings, and wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated due to urban development. The result may be that the affluent will congregate in city centers. However, the “have-nots”—young people, the elderly, and the socially vulnerable—are getting poorer and being driven to the periphery. Unfortunately, I don’t think that the Tokyo city government has a vision for creating a city that can be shared fairly by everyone. To change the situation, it’s important to share this message at the grass roots level. This exhibition is extremely significant in that respect.

3 : Darkness is the appeal of a city

If we expel the world
of the mundane,
the town
stops being a town

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Iida

Photographer Ishikawa Naoki, one of the artists featured in this exhibition, took photos of an empty Shibuya when he couldn’t go anywhere else because of the pandemic. The rodents that normally stay out of sight had come out onto the streets of a Shibuya that looked like an uninhabited ghost town. Brown rats and roof rats apparently interbred, resulting in supersize rats running rampant through Shibuya. This shows that our lives are part of a natural environment, even in a city. Also in the exhibition, Sachiko Kazama presents a large-format woodblock print that takes the famous Shibuya scramble crossing as its motif. It is a work that depicts the theme of mutual surveillance. By putting numbers on the backs of people going about the city, and incorporating elements referring to the suppression of free speech during the war, the piece critically depicts the state of a city that is becoming increasingly bland.

Ota

Both of them are exceptionally pointed. After all, art is what makes us understand in an instant something that we hadn’t noticed before because it couldn’t be put into words.

Iida

They make us think about the value and meaning of the dark and shadowy areas. When we were young, Shibuya wasn’t a place where we were allowed to go just for fun, and our mothers especially admonished us against going to Hyakkendana (a narrow street lined with shops, restaurants, and bars). When I finally mustered up the courage to go there, I saw people drinking in the middle of the day and it looked like a red-light district. Even as a child I found it horrifying. But there’s a certain kind of darkness to a city. If you categorize things as either ritual or mundane, the world of the mundane world is more important. If we continue to expel it, the town stops being a town.

Ota

It has many layers, and when you peel them off one by one, a different aspect emerges. That is the allure of the city. But redevelopment brings air conditioning that works and bright lighting that chases away the darkness. This may feel pleasant for a while, but if we don’t talk about these things we’ll forget what we have lost. There used to be a nightlife district in front of Shibuya station that was lined with red lanterns. I remember young architects actively going to these bawdy places. I think that it’s very unfortunate that we hear little from architects and urban design professionals about redevelopment. When Roppongi Hills was being built, some mid-tier architects publicly voiced various objections, but that was the last of it. Maybe they’re keeping quiet because they feel that there’s nothing they can do about the redevelopment. But they should be able to point out the problems and propose solutions in the way that only such professionals can.

Iida

The same thing could be said about artists. During the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, in a parody of the government’s policy efforts to hide all the dirty places, Hi-Red Center (artists Jiro Takamatsu, Genpei Akasegawa, and Natsuyuki Nakanishi) organized a team wearing white coats for a cleaning event that they dubbed “Be Clean! Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropolitan Area.” But today artists seem to have given up on attempts to call out the actions of authorities. Feeling a sense of despair, but unwilling to attack head on, the question is how to express ourselves while avoiding confrontation. That’s what it means to be an artist today.

4 : Depicting the future of Shibuya

Work together to
gain freedom
for our towns
and communities

Ota

The obscure places and voids that exist in a city are places where we can feel at ease and places where we can feel at home, even when we are alone. I think that in a sense, this largesse is the true joy of being in a city. It’s true that in the past, private companies created places that are useful to people, even if it was just part of a marketing strategy. So I don’t completely reject the endeavors of major companies. But I think that people should still have the freedom and ability to use these places on their own without becoming consumers. It’s dangerous to be in a situation where we have unthinkingly ceded our rights and aspirations to the state, to the Metropolitan Government, and to big corporations. In regional areas, finding ways to increase the appeal of cities is a pressing issue, and in some places the public and private sectors are working together to try things that don’t exist in Tokyo. Because of the dire situation in some areas—their declining and aging populations—they are willing to bring in mid-tier and young architects who rarely get a chance in Tokyo. And these initiatives have produced some results that are ahead of their time. On the other hand, in Tokyo, large developers and construction companies dominate the design work. I hope that mid-tier and young architects who have had success in other regions will somehow break into Tokyo, putting their new methods and ideas into practice here.

Iida

When bombed-out Tokyo started to rise from the ashes after WWII, we forged ahead in the knowledge that we had to boost economic power as efficiently as possible. Our fathers worked hard to buy houses and cars, but today’s young people are okay with sharing. Their priorities are not the same as those driven by the aspirations of the postwar period. As a result, our towns and communities are changing, too. The same is true of the art world, and I have high expectations for the next generation. I see a nascent movement to usher in some reforms and freedoms.

Ota

Japanese artists are now subject to critique on the international stage, and while this is harsh in some respects, in other respects it is more liberating. Perhaps Japanese artists will begin to express themselves within a more international context in the future?

Iida

Kotao Tomozawa, the youngest artist showing work in this exhibition, was born in 1999. While she has become a star in Japan, the danger is that she could become merely a domestic artist. This is why I would like to take the Gyre exhibition on tour overseas, and we’re starting to talk with potential collaborators. Personally, I’d like to take this “experiment” from a limited space within a commercial building and display it in a space that is a few times larger in an art museum overseas.

Ota

The architect Fumihiko Maki, who passed away in June of this year, wrote that we must never forget that urban spaces are not just for throngs of people; they should also be places where we can find peace and inspiration even when we are alone. Maki was from the generation that was charged with creating the new postwar society, and he devoted himself to creating rich urban spaces with a sense of social responsibility and passion. Similarly, the young architects of today are in their own way tackling the issue of how to rebuild society in the wake of the Tohoku Earthquake. What I would like to see in them is an eagerness to change the very systems of society, and a hunger to expand the possibilities of architecture. To that end, it should be beneficial to interact with people working in a variety of genres, including art. All of these things are necessary if we are to work together to gain freedom for our towns and communities.

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Future City Shibuya: Bringing Ephemera to Spaces

Venue
GYRE GALLERY, GYRE 3F, 5-10–1 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
Contact
Navi Dial 0570-05-6990 (11:00am-6:00pm)
Organizers
GYRE GALLERY and Sgùrr Dearg Institute for Sociology of the Arts
Curator
Takayo Iida
(Director of the Sgùrr Dearg Institute for Sociology of the Arts)
Public relations
HiRAO INC
PRESS CONTACT
HiRAO INC|#608 1-11-11 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
T/03-5771-8808|F/03-5410-8858 Contact:Seiichiro Mifune mifune@hirao-inc.com
Cooperation
Canon Marketing Japan Inc. / CAMEL / Takahashi Ryutaro Collection / NANZUKA / PARCO / MUJIN-TO Production / SUNNYES / KNOW NUKES TOKYO + Tatsuya Kim / Hidenori Watanave (The University of Tokyo) / Tatsujiro Suzuki (Nagasaki University) / STYLY, Inc.
Exhibit Cooperation
Reiko Ishikawa
Special Cooperation
Kayoko Ota (Harvard University Graduate School of Design Special Researcher)
Dates
October 17 to November 29, 2024
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ARTISTS
  • Kazumi Kurigami

    Lonesome Day Blues

    profile

    Born in Hokkaido in 1936, Kurigami graduated from the Tokyo College of Photography in 1961. He began working as a freelance photographer in 1965, and developed one of the broadest lens-based practices in Japan, including many TV commercial projects, working primarily in the fields of fashion and advertising. He created the poster for the 1968 Osaka Expo along with Shigeo Fukuda, and he received the 21st ADC Award in 1977. Kazumi Kurigami Photographs – CRUSH (Hara Museum); Kurigami Kazumi: Portrait of a Moment (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum); PORTRAIT (Gallery 916); Lonesome Day Blues (Canon Gallery S); and April (Taka Ishii gallery). Directed the 2008 movie, Gelatin Silver, Love.

  • Harumi Yamaguchi

    Marbles Woman

    profile

    Born in Matsue City, Yamaguchi graduated with a degree in oil painting from the Tokyo University of the Arts. After working in the design room at Seibu Department Store’s advertising department, she became a freelance illustrator, producing ads for PARCO, a facility with a theater, cinema, museum, restaurants, and apparel shops. She started painting the female figure using airbrushes in 1972, and immediately became an iconic artist of the era.

  • Naoya Hatakeyama

    Underground

    profile

    Hatakeyama was born in Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture in 1958. In 1984, after completing his master's degree at the University of Tsukuba, School of Art and Design, he was picked up by Seibu Saison Group’s in-house ad agency, SPN. When he began working in video production there, his boss, Hideki Izumi, asked him to direct a documentary film on Joseph Beuys' visit to Japan. The resulting 60-minute video work, Joseph Beuys in Japan, was subsequently screened around the world. In the same year, Peyotl Kobo produced and published Ein Dokument: 1984 Joseph Beuys in Japan, a boxed set containing video recordings and a book with the transcripts of all the lectures he gave during his stay in Japan, attracting much attention. Hatakeyama is currently a professor at the Graduate School of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts (scheduled to retire in March 2025). Recent major exhibitions include Natural Stories (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) in 2011–2012; Cloven Landscape (Sendai Mediatheque) in 2017; and Naoya Hatakeyama – Excavating the Future City (Minneapolis Institute of Art) in 2018.|Photo : ©buerofuerkunstdokumentation

  • Sachiko Kazama

    Nonhuman Crossing

    profile

    Born in 1972, Kazama lives in Tokyo. She received a graduate degree in printmaking from Musashino Art University in 1996. She explores the past to find the roots of contemporary phenomena, creating mainly black and white woodblock prints with portentous dark clouds hanging over the future. Her woodblock prints incorporate a variety of motifs into a single, nonsensical manga-like image, and although she only uses a single color—black—she experiments with various forms of expression, such as using shades of light and dark, to skillfully express risqué themes through sharp lines etched with her carving knives. Her works can be found in the collections of museums inside and outside of Japan, including National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Mori Art Museum, Yokohama Museum of Art, National Museum of Art, Osaka; Museum of Modern Art (New York); and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (Australia). She was the recipient of the 1st Tokyo Contemporary Art Award (2019) and was selected as a finalist for the Nissan Art Award 2020 (2020). Recent major exhibitions include 24th Biennale of Sydney (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2024); Reborn-Art Festival—Altruism and Fluidity (Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, 2021); Tokyo Contemporary Art Award 2019-2021 Exhibition—Sachiko Kazama: Magic Mountain (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2021); and Sachiko Kazama Concrete Suite (Kurobe City Art Museum, 2019).|Photo : Yoko Asakai

  • Naoki Ishikawa

    STREETS ARE MINE

    profile

    Ishikawa was born in Tokyo in 1977 and received his Ph.D. from Tokyo University of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts. With interests in anthropology, folklore, and other fields, he continues to show his works even as he travels everywhere, including remote areas and major cities. In 2008, he received the Photographic Society of Japan's Newcomer's Award and the Kodansha Publication Culture Award for New Dimension (AKAAKA Art Publishing Inc.) and Polar (Little more Co., Ltd.). In 2011 he won the Domon Ken Award for Corona (Seidosha). In 2020 he received the Photographic Society of Japan's Lifetime Achievement Award for Everest (CCC Media House) and Marebito (Shogakukan). In 2023 he received the Higashikawa Awards Special Photographer Award and in 2024 he received a Medal with Dark Blue Ribbon (Medals of Honor awarded by the Emperor of Japan). His many books include The Last Adventurer (Shueisha) and Chijō ni seiza o tsukuru [Creating a constellation on Earth] (Shinchosha). Major solo exhibitions include Vette di luce. Naoki Ishikawa sulle Alpi Orobie, Accademia Carrara (Italy, 2023); Japonésia, Japan House São Paulo, The Oscar Niemeyer Museum (Brazil, 2020–2021); Capturing the Map of Light on This Planet; Art Tower Mito, Niigata City Art Museum, Ichihara Lakeside Museum, The Museum of Art Kochi, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (2016–2019).

  • kotao Tomozawa

    slime

    profile

    Tomozawa was born in Bordeaux, France in 1999. She paints unique portraits that combine slime-like materials and organic motifs. Although her compositions are simple, her realistic expression of the texture, translucency, and softness of the materials leave a strong impression on the viewer. She is studying oil painting in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Tokyo University of the Arts. She was awarded the Kume Prize in 2019 and the Ueno Geiyu Prize in 2021. Recent solo exhibitions include INSPIRER (Tokyo International Gallery, Tokyo, 2022); SPIRALE (Parco Museum Tokyo, Tokyo, 2022); Monochrome (Foam Contemporary, Tokyo, 2022); caché (tagboat, Tokyo, 2021); and Pomme dʼamour (Mograg gallery, Tokyo, 2020). Group exhibitions include Everything but... (Tokyo International Gallery, 2021).