Art Week Tokyo Selects: Reiko Tomii
Poetics of Resonances
Reiko Tomii
Curator Kenjiro Hosaka has based his presentation of Worlds in Balance: Art in Japan from the Postwar to the Present with the notion of balance and identified twelve genealogies each representing a distinct trait in contemporary Japanese art. His selections inspire me to seek certain resonances among works he has categorized into different genealogies. Most prominently, “lines” bring together Yutaka Hatta’s delicately mechanical evolution of circles and minimalist Kazuko Miyamoto’s quivering distribution of strings, calligrapher Yuichi Inoue’s obsessive verticality and Shimon Minamikawa’s seemingly nonchalant gestures. Broken lines erupt like lightening from cracks of Eiji Uematsu's clay plate.
“Light-hearted linear colors” unexpectedly pair Jiro Yoshihara’s mischievous strokes and O Jun’s equally playful doodling, Shiro Kuramata’s rigorous tower of transparent colors and Yuji Ueda’s uncanny materialist slips. “Bold spatiality” groups masterful Nankoku Hidai’s unexpectedly planar abstraction, globalist architect Arata Isozaki’s exploration of self-reflection, and cheeky Gutai descendant Norio Imai’s streamlined look of perforation. Both Sadamasa Motonaga and Lee Ufan present their signature forms though in “unfamiliar mediums” of photography and clay respectively. “An inimitable sense of morphological combination” is demonstrated by surrealist photographer Kiyoi Otsuji, versatile Gutai member Tsuruko Yamazaki, legendary Kishio Suga, and young Sen Takahashi. “Expansion of mediums” are devised in Taro Shinoda’s amazingly partitioned surface of a box-like canvas and Yoshihiko Ito’s kinetic zigzags made on a contact sheet.
Looking at these artists’ work in this ensemble manner, I came to appreciate the poetics of resonances that span more than half a century.
Courtesy of Misa Shin Gallery, photo by Takayuki Kaetsu
Reiko Tomii is an independent scholar and curator specializing in postwar Japanese art history. In 1988–92, she worked at the Center for International Contemporary Art (CICA), where her first project involved organizing a personal archive of Kusama Yayoi for CICA’s inaugural exhibition. Kusama’s first retrospective in the U.S. in 1989, for which Tomii collaborated with Alexandra Munroe, brought the Japanese artist back to New York and in retrospect launched Kusama’s ascendance to global super stardom. Since 1992, upon the closure of CICA, she has worked as independent scholar. Tomii collaborated with Munroe on the latter’s book published in conjunction with the exhibition Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky.
Curatorially, she worked with Queens Museum of Art in New York for Global Conceptualism, Tate Modern in London for Century City, and Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles for Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art, among many others. While widely published in the area of modern and contemporary Asian art, she has enjoyed working with younger and emerging scholars, and co-founded PoNJA-GenKon with Miwako Tezuka in 2003.
Tomii’s first monograph Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (MIT Press, 2016) received the 2017 Robert Motherwell Book Award and was turned into an exhibition Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s at Japan Society Gallery in New York in 2019. In 2020, she received the Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award from the Japanese government for cultural transmission and international exchange through postwar Japanese art history.
