In the Empire of signs, his book of meditative essays on Japan, Roland Barthes wrote of the difficulty of capturing the essence of Japan. He imagines or, as he puts it, "entertains" 'the idea of an unheard-of symbolic system, one altogether detatched from our own'. Barthes found in Japan that everything was mobile and nothing could be grasped. (This was for him, I assume, exhilarating.) He concluded that, among the overwhelming myriads of signs from many cultures that bombard the viewer in a modern Japanese city, there is a fissure (a slender thread of light) which is specifically Japanese that he is able to recognise. The problem with isolating art from its culture is that, in the context of Western art in a gallery such as this, it is even more difficult to distinguish the Japanese from the Western.
Japanese artists may choose to be trained in two separate and distinct tradition – the Japanese or the Western. In the Japanese (nihonga) they learn the rigorous styles, traditional subjects and methods of Japanese art. They make art which looks, and is, self-contained, unconcerned with the West. Western art (yoga) is taught in universities and colleges and is based on the French Beaux Arts methods. Young artists learn to draw from plaster casts and to construct paintings whose models are usually Impressionist.
Contemporary art is made by artists who have understood modernism (in the sense of artistic developments in Europe and the USA in the twentieth century). Their work concerns itself both with the recent developments in art and the real world in which it is made. Japanese con emporary art is often concerned with the natural world (relating it to traditional art), but most recently with the extraordinary cities of Japan.
The art in this exhibition is made by artists living in the Japanese metropolises.