At the turn on the new millennium, when Japan was still suffering the grave effects of the burst bubble and budgets for the arts had been cut to near oblivion, a man named Yusaku Imamura was asked to advise the financially ruined Tokyo Metropolitan Government on what their cultural policy should be.
A forward thinker whose charisma has helped him to push radical ideas within Japan’s rigid policy structure for many years now, he told them to stop focusing on museums or commercial bodies for the arts. What Japan needed, he said, was to build a platform for young artists, because at the time the only option for someone fresh out of art school wanting to show their work was to rent a commercial gallery space for upwards of $US3000 a week.
“I told them what was missing was a body,” he recalls. “Japan had a big head – with research institutions and museums – and it had feet to run with, in the form of commercial funding for the arts; but there was no point adding head or feet when there was no body, no base structure for supporting emerging artists at the start of the careers.”
With virtually no budget to work with, Imamura and the then-Tokyo Governor, Shintaro Ishihara, turned the large corridor of the City Hall into a space for young artists to show their work to new audiences for free; it was called Tokyo Wonder Wall and continues to this day under the direction of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.
That was 2000, and nine years down the track Mr. Imamura – whose background is in architecture – has found himself director of the ever-expanding Tokyo Wonder Site, which now has three venues across Tokyo. With the Hongo site established in 2001 as a site for showcasing emerging artists, the second TWS site was opened in Shibuya three years later with more of a focus on international or mid-career artists, and in 2006 the Aoyama premises were opened in an abandoned university building which had been empty for two years.
This became the site for the residency programs (which are open not just to visual artists but to performers, musicians, writers, designers, researchers and curators from Japan and around the world) and artist studios, currently only open to the public on designated open days or for occasional special performances, workshops and events.
Mr. Imamura is in the unique position of not only being in charge of Tokyo Wonder Site but also being Counsellor on Special Issues to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, and his ideas have always extended far beyond just fostering experimentation in the arts. His sights are on the city of Tokyo as a whole, and he continues to work closely with local communities to shape the future of their metropolis.
One of the biggest themes that come up in conversation with him is the need to bring art away from the galleries and museums, and into public city spaces. In a similar spirit to the initial Tokyo Wonder Wall project at the City Hall, in 2005 Tokyo Wonder Site worked with the local government and a major department store to set up Shinjuku Art Infinity. At the intersection of Shinjuku-dori and Meiji-dori, one of the busiest shopping strips in Tokyo, 70 metres of wall that ran along the scaffolding of a construction site was turned into a constantly evolving display of work by emerging artists for a period of three years.
Clearly Imamura’s ideas about the city are completely integrated with the way he runs Tokyo Wonder Site. He even talks about TWS with the metaphor of city planning: “I always say when I am trying to explain or justify our activities to people that Tokyo Wonder Site is the civil engineer, not the architect. We build roads to facilitate movement and plazas to provide meeting places, rather than the final destination.” With the focus on ideas, experimentation and exchange rather than tangible results, he has had a few hurdles to cross in convincing people that what TWS is doing is worthwhile. “To use another analogy,” he says, “I tell them we are not about getting the flower, we’re about planting the seed.”
But that’s not to say there hasn’t been a consistent array of early flowers to be found amongst the germination. A glance over the plethora of artists who have had their work shown at Tokyo Wonder Site gives and idea of the breadth and standard of ideas that are developed there, and the organisation is structured to provide continued support at various stages of an artist’s career, rather than just a one-off chance to have a studio space or hold an exhibition. For example, many artists who have work included in the open-application TWS-Emerging program at the Hongo site then go on to do a residency at the Aoyama premises and/or hold a larger show at the Shibuya site somewhere down the track.
Tokyo Wonder Site Hongo
Another recurring theme for Imamura is the importance of exchange and collaboration in all areas. “Japanese people are often too shy to team up and join forces,” he says, “but I think collaboration is the most important keyword in this era.”
Indeed, much of the success of Tokyo Wonder Site is to be attributed to the way the organisation has worked with everybody from young artists to local communities, government bodies, the corporate sector and foreign embassies to create new networks and meeting points.
Tokyo, as we know, is a city without a single centre, and Imamura is currently working on connecting its various disparate creative clusters through cross collaborations and co productions. “I want to turns points into lines and lines into a surface,” he says. “There are so many interesting small scale things happening in Tokyo, and I feel that if we facilitate more cross overs, even more interesting things will happen.”
The first four images are from the young photographer Shintaro Yamanaka’s beautifully displayed show, Marginal Images, at TWS Hongo in October 2009. Showing simultaneously were two other Japanese artists in their 20s; Azusa Saito, who paints fluffy sheepish friends on wood with her deft and delicate touch, and Kei Kaiya who also works with wood, carving impossibly fine formations which appear to hover above the ground weightlessly (see above).