For over 250 years Japan was completely shut off from the rest of the world whilst under the military dictatorship of Tokugawa Shogunate. 2009 marks 150 years since the country first opened up to foreign trade at the Port of Yokohama, and the City of Yokohama has been using the anniversary to implement various new urban development initiatives under its Creative City Yokohama initiative.
Over the last decade this urban renewal project that is under the guidance of several different local government bodies (including the “Yokohama Creativity Centre”) has made Yokohama, a historical port city just 40 minutes out of Tokyo, home to some of Japan’s most exciting cultural events and young artistic communities.
While Yokohama’s cultural appeal had previously come primarily from the Yokohama Museum of Art as well as several theatres and concert halls, it was not considered to have much creative output of its own, nor did it provide any support for young artists.
From the outset, Creative City Yokohama had an agenda to increase local arts related activities, attract creative industries and tourism, exploit the city’s existing cultural resources, promote social interaction in the city space and preserve the city’s architectural legacy by finding ways to revitalise its historic buildings.
The most significant thing to come out of the ongoing project has been BankART1929, a contemporary art organisation and school that initially opened in 2004 with the support of the local government in two abandoned city bank buildings and is now enjoying a new base in the enormous defunct warehouse of the Japanese shipping company NYK (see last image below), with several offshoot facilities around town.
Rooftop Paradise at BankART1929. Photo by Kazuto Imura.
Kamakura Sumiko, Associate professor of Tokyo University of the Arts and one of the advisers for Creative City Yokohama in the early stages, recalled in a public talk earlier this year that the establishment of BankART was less about encouraging appreciation of the arts than about improving the overall quality of life in the city, and making it more attractive to visitors.
“’Arts for art’s sake’, that conceited slogan coined at the end of the 19th century, encapsulated the prevalent wish for a breakdown in social mores,” he said. “Art was not considered as having a social function, or of having any value other than its intrinsic worth. Our hope, on the other hand, was that the arts and culture should play a more active role in society, and that society should be more art-like.”
Rather than existing as something separate to daily life in the city, BankART was to be focused on integrating contemporary art with the local communities and wider society. Some of their earliest shows included Food and Contemporary Art and Art and Natural Disasters, making evident their desire to incorporate things from all facets of life into contemporary art. An integral part of their set up is also their fantastic café/bar space on the ground floor, which boasts an impressive program of events and where drinks are super cheap and the doors are open late into the night, ensuring they cater to a local clientele rather than just tourists.
Besides BankART, other points of interest in Yokohama include Steep Slope Studios an interesting new space offering many artist residencies, and ZAIM which is located in a converted historic building downtown and plays host to workshops, performances, exhibitions, lectures and other cultural events.
At the more grassroots end of things, the Voin Pahoin collective have been opening their apartment to the public once a month for the last few years, providing a different artist each time with a “one day residency” where they can do whatever they want with the domestic space. With an emphasis on eating, drinking and social interaction, their hospitable makeshift salon has become a cornerstone for the local arts community.
Meanwhile, The City of Yokohama recently embarked on an extensive urban renewal project in the notorious black-market and red-light district of Koganecho, which has now been completely transformed into a cluster of affordable artist studios, gallery spaces and the like. The area is also home to the much loved Shichoshitsu (meaning ‘listening booth’), a café/bar where visitors are free to explore the broad music collection comprising over 10,000 albums, and enjoy regular live performances and screenings.
With the third Yokohama Triennale having taken place late last year, and the city is now also playing host to a new major festival called CREAM, which confirms the people of Yokohama’s unique skill at instigating innovative new uses of existing city spaces. With BankART1929 and the Shinko Pier forming the main venues, the art and media festival is spread around with various satellite exhibitions taking place in the aforementioned Koganecho district, and even the polar bear house of the city zoo (see my review of the festival here).
As if taking cue from Charles Landry’s argument in The Creative City that medium sized cities are better placed than metropolises to use their cultural assets to create new opportunities, Yokohama – which for many years was considered little more than a dormitory city for Tokyo – has used its existing assets in intelligent and innovative ways to establish itself as one of Japan’s most exciting new hubs for contemporary art.
SHIMURABROS. and Taro Izumi’s mixed-media installation at the Polar Bear House in the Nogeyama Zoological Garden for CREAM 2009.
[...] But despite the Fujihata controversy, the problems with the scattered venues and the wishy-washyness of the overarching “Deep Images” theme, the range of artists and standard of works (with several highlights listed below) make CREAM a worthwhile daytrip out of Tokyo. Perhaps it is just better to consider it as a series of exhibitions rather than an overarching festival with some connecting idea behind it, and to use it as an excuse to get aquatinted with the city of Yokohama, one of Japan’s most interesting new hubs for contemporary art. (More on Yokohama Creative City here.) [...]
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