State of the Art

A week of teaching is a little like swimming to the bottom of a body of water.  It always feels a little chancy, and when you hit the bottom you still have to come back up before you get a nice lungful of air.  In this analogy, the weekend is the air I breathe.  Back in January that body of water was Lake Michigan.  It took forever to make it to the bottom, and by then I wasn't sure if I'd be alive still when I broke the surface.  By contrast, my weeks now mostly feel like the deep end of the old Glenwood city pool - I'm down and back before I have time to worry.

I started last week a little worried about my lung capacity.  My school was holding a PYP training, and if I had attended it, I'd currently be on my eighth day of a twelve day stretch - a dive to the deepest point of the Mariana Trench.  Since I'd already had that particular training, I begged out of it and ended up doing a different kind of professional development - attending the Tokyo Art Fair.  Once upon a time (about five and a half years ago) I wrote about the UB Art Fair, and how underwhelmed it left me.  I cited the Brookside and Plaza art fairs that I used to go to back in my college days.  Since writing it, I've realized that those KC art fairs would be considered as quaint to some people in the art world as the UB Art Fair seemed to me.  To the high rollers of the art world, those local artists were selling their pottery and photos for chump change.  Those guys look to catch bigger fish.

High rollers, of course, have a bigger buy-in.  When I first read about the Tokyo Art Fair, I was a little shocked to see admission was 3,500 yen (although you could get in for 3,000 if you bought in advance).  This very nearly made me fold; Japan isn't a cheap place to live on a good day, and my expenses here are much higher than ever before, except for possibly in those bygone college days.  Then I found out about a late pass, where you could get in for 90 minutes on Friday night for a single coin (one that is worth about $5...be careful giving your spare change away here!)  My friend Sensei helped me buy it, and at 6:30 Friday night I was heading through the doors.

Those high rollers were looking for investment pieces, works by artists with a certain amount of name recognition.  I saw a few of them - some Kusama, a few pop artists, including Lichtenstein, I think, Hokusai - but I didn't really spend much time on those (okay, mayyybe I stood in front of the Hokusai prints for a few minutes wishing I could buy one, but c'mon.  Hokusai!).  What I was hoping to see at the Tokyo art fair was works by Japanese artists.  Of course, I'm always on the lookout for artists who use that otaku aesthetic in their work, but since I began my painting lessons (which I'll write about someday.  Really, I will) I've been particularly on the lookout for examples of Nihonga art.

The art fair didn't disappoint in that respect.  Not all of the paintings that I admired were painted with mineral pigments, of course.  Being the weeb that I am, I enjoyed seeing the approach that these artists took with traditional Japanese subjects, regardless of the media they worked in.  My favorite by far was Shiki Taira's LoveX2 Youkai Show.  As I walked past the Art Gallery Natsume stall, I was struck by her paintings of youkai, Japanese demons...and then I saw that in one of them they were fighting with a figure - executed in the traditional style of Japanese portraits, who was, nonetheless, very clearly Dracula.  It was totally subarashii.  If I were still living my Mongolian high life, I probably would have had to buy it, but I had to be content with the exhibition catalog she gave me (and no, I didn't realize she was the artist at the time, or I probably would have devolved into a blithering fangirl).

There were plenty that I was able to recognize as Nihonga, though.  Most of them had what I'll call the "Panda effect" on me.  A few years back, I had an awesome student whose work made the self-esteem of a decent percentage of the class shrivel up and die.  I truly believe that art is a skill, not just a talent, but it is challenging to stay motivated when you realize exactly how far ahead of you another artist is.  After some of the setbacks I've faced in my second Nihonga painting, that is how these artworks made me feel.  At the same time, I had to admire the technical skill that went into them, especially since I am learning how difficult it is to use mineral pigments, which made me even more determined to continue my studies and make some kickass art.

What can I say?  I'm a walking contradiction.

The art didn't stop on Friday night, though.  The fair had several other components, including a hotel taken hostage by art, 3331 Chiyoda, and an award exhibition.  A combined ticket to get you into all of them goes for 5,000 yen, which was still too rich for my blood.  Art In Park Hotel, though, has a free preview section, and I thought long and hard about going to see that as well, but in the end, I only had time for one art show before my painting lesson on Saturday, and there was only one possibility for that.

Later this week I'll be taking my tenth graders out to learn a little more about architecture.  The Venice Biennale has an architecture exhibition, and the Japanese Pavilion has made it's way to Gallery MA in Roppongi for a show.  We've specifically been studying linear perspective, since I don't have a lot of space for 3-D work in my classroom.  The works in EN: art of Nexus, combine small architectural models and computer generated designs, which makes a great contrast to the art we've been making.  Another thing that I loved about it was the fact that the architects had used real case studies as the point of departure for their works.  I think I have a tendency, in my teaching, to leave the project too open-ended, allowing my kids to make the things they want, rather than giving them a problem and asking them to find a solution.  This is a positive in some cases, but looking at these models and reading about the solutions the artists came up with made me realize their critical thinking skills would be more developed if I sometimes set a problem instead.

Although I tend to play off my desire to live in Japan as the great otaku dream, it's weekends like this that remind me there was a lot more to my decision than that.  There are so many things that I can experience here as an artist and a teacher that even with my challenges it's more than worth it.