1. On the Second Kochi-Muziris Biennale: Whorled Explorations

By Cara Manes

Kochi was our first stop on what was, for everyone on this leg of the trip, our first visit to India. We arrived in the major port city of Kochi, in the southwestern region of Kerala, in the middle of the night, and then shuffled into our hotel beds for a few precious hours of rest before venturing into the southern Indian sun toward the main site of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Whorled Explorations, the biennial’s second edition, was organized by Jitish Kallat, an internationally esteemed contemporary artist based in Mumbai. Appointed by the biennial’s Artistic Advisory Committee, Kallat was tasked with envisioning a show that “responds to the environment that hosts it,” according to the accompanying exhibition catalogue. Indeed, since its founding in 2012, the biennial’s mission has been to “draw from the rich tradition and public action and public engagement in Kerala . . . and build a new aesthetic that interrogates both the past and the present.”

Past and present certainly converge in the city of Kochi, where sixteenth-century Portuguese churches are intermingled with spice markets and restaurants on streets filled with auto-rickshaws and goats vying for the right of way. The biennial integrated seamlessly into this dialectical space. Kallat built a conceptual framework for the exhibition around an investigation of oppositional forces, as he explained when we met with him in Dubai a few days before our visit. In his curatorial essay for the catalogue, he cites two historic currents from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries that informed his thinking—the maritime explorations of the Age of Discovery and the astronomical propositions made by the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. By examining the location’s history, he aimed to “reflect back or forth in time to understand the present” and to “interlace the bygone with the imminent, the terrestrial with the celestial.” Toward that end, he selected a wide range of works by ninety-five artists from thirty countries that speaks broadly to these themes. He organized the works into installations in eight venues across the city, each one a heterogeneous presentation. Free of any chronological, geographical, or medium-specific constraints, Kallat employed a seemingly more intuitive curatorial logic to create a host of unique, generative juxtapositions. Throughout the exhibition, however, a general leitmotif was discernable: Kallat seemed to gravitate toward work involving globes, compasses, maps, telescopes, and star charts—tools for plotting a course through space and time.

Encapsulating Kallat’s point of view and setting a tone for experiencing the biennial through this lens, Powers of Ten, a well-known 1977 film by Charles and Ray Eames, is the exhibition’s opening work. In it, a camera zooms out at a rate of one power of ten every ten seconds, and then back in at the same rate, so that the pictured image first expands incrementally from human to cosmic scale and then contracts in the same manner. The work is installed at the biennial’s main site, Aspinwall House, the sea-facing compound of offices, residences, and warehouses built for a nineteenth-century British trading company. The physical space itself unfolds as a series of successive rooms in loosely adjoining buildings surrounding a central courtyard, each roughly devoted to one artist or project. Other highlights from this venue include Francesco Clemente’s Pepper Tent, a giant tent painted with scenes inspired by the artist’s travels around the world, and the crowd-pleasing Descension by the well-known Indian artist Anish Kapoor, an abyss-like whirlpool cut into the existing floor, which serves as a literal illustration of the thematic “whorl” of the exhibition’s title.

Interspersed among large site-specific installations by internationally renowned artists such as these were many smaller-scale works by younger artists. Installed in an interstitial space at Aspinwall House, American artist Tara Kelton’s video work depicts a laptop screen placed against the open door at the end of a commuter train in Bangalore that is live streaming video feed from a camera placed at the front of the train, suggesting the sensation of simultaneous time travel. One of the greatest discoveries for me was the work of Kerala-born artist Unnikrishnan C. At twenty-three, he was the youngest artist to participate in the biennial. For his project, installed in the show’s Pepper House venue, he spent two months in Kochi (a few hours from his hometown) recording his observations of daily life in the city by painting figures, objects, symbols, and simple scenes onto individual bricks and arranging them into a site-specific “brick wall diary,” as he has described his project. Unnikrishnan seems to be developing a unique visual language that blends the personal and universal; I look forward to seeing more from him!

2. Notes on CAMP at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum

By Jennifer Tobias

Representing the MoMA Library during the March 2015 C-MAP trip to Dubai, Sharjah, Mumbai, and Delhi, I was most taken by the fascinating institution known as the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (DBDL), its revival by Tasneem Zakaria Mehta (Managing Trustee, Honorary Director, and MoMA International Council member), and the current installation by CAMP, a self-described studio organized in 2007 by Shaina Anand (filmmaker), Sanjay Bhangar (software programmer), and Ashok Sukumaran (architect). Visiting with Mehta and two CAMPers on site helped me to grasp a particular segment of the installation—The Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” Exhibition—as a compelling historiographic palimpsest.

As a self-aware de- and reconstruction of a colonial museum, the DBDL is a fertile setting for a meta-exhibition. A striking Victorian structure in the heart of Mumbai, constructed in response to the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, the DBDL opened in 1872 as the Victoria and Albert Museum, Bombay. By the late 1990s the museum was neglected, but Mehta organized an innovative public-private partnership to restore and revitalize the institution, which reopened in 2008. In addition to the structure itself, two salient Raj-era aspects of the institution that survive today are the collection of “Indian manufactures” and model-filled displays presenting a history of Mumbai.

Mehta conceived of artist involvement as a key element of the revived mission. Noting that the collection was originally built with little interest in individual makers, her approach today is to “bring artists back to the center” through enlightened management of the legacy collection, building a contemporary collection, and—most relevant here—a stimulating series of interventions. In this framework, artists (especially alumnae of the related Sir J. J. School of Art) conceive installations that engage the space and the collections, often addressing local culture in light of both the colonial legacy and contemporary social issues.

CAMP’s series of installations, titled As If – III Country of the Sea, brings together segments of the group’s multi-year project examining maritime culture proximal to the western Indian Ocean. The Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” segment revisits an installation first realized in 2011 at Lalit Kala Academi in Delhi.That project deconstructed an eponymous 2010 exhibition and symposium (and later a book) organized in the Gujarat port town of Mandvi. The exhibit, initiated by a local historical society, was composed largely of digital reproductions of artifacts held by UK archives as well as private collections, with the reproductions licensed for the duration of the show. Scholars from around the world participated in the symposium, and the show traveled to other sites in Gujarat.

The installation at DBDL constitutes primarily photos of photos of photos. For example, a photograph of a photograph of the annotated checklist (left, top) shows a cryptic and apparently damning list of the show’s organizers. In another example (left, middle), a photo of a photo of primary-source documents, which are held by what is presumably a Gujarati hand, is annotated with the oblique, “Not just Word of Mouth but Slide of Hand On a replica Gujerati navigation log dated 1644.” In a clearer example (left, bottom), a photo of a colonial map of Gujarat is updated with present-day claims by British Gas. Although it’s difficult to do a close reading at this remove, CAMP’s argument is clear: they object to the use of colonial spoils licensed back to its subjects, and they charge that limiting local informants to a caste of Hindu seafarers failed to account for the diversity of the colonial period and the present.

As an art-making strategy, Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” is an excellent foil for CAMP’s more critical (if less edited) larger project about contemporary maritime culture in the region. Where the original show featured aura-deprived reproductions of colonial spoils, CAMP’s larger project counters with a barrage of ostensibly collaborative contemporary media (radio, cell phone data, video, shipping records) and extended (if coy) interpretive texts. If the Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” show can be criticized as unreflective colonial nostalgia, CAMP’s work errs in the other direction: it is anthropological in its thoroughness and reluctance to draw explicit conclusions.

I conclude that this is precisely the point of the Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” : to engender critical thinking about the historiographic endeavor. Experiencing this in person, in the DBDL context, and from the C-MAP perspective, was a wonderful object lesson.

3. Studio Visits in Mumbai and Delhi

By Sarah Lookofsky

In Mumbai we met the artist Shilpa Gupta in her studio. She gave us an overview of her diverse practice, particularly her most recent works. I was especially struck by the site specificity of her practice, since I had previously understood her work, which I had encountered in European museum contexts, as abstract and conceptual. Upon speaking with her about her most recent pieces, it was clear that most of her practice is deeply invested in the Indian context, particular the deep scars of partition that persist in the present. For instance, she spoke of a recent untitled body of work (2013–14) that addresses the Chitmahals, the Bangladeshi minority enclaves in India and vice versa—sites where 51,000 people effectively live within a hostile nation. Gupta’s presentation made me ponder two important phenomena that impact the global circuits of contemporary art: on the one hand, it is often the more metaphorical and conceptual works that circulate internationally and, on the other, works that have a local specificity take on a more metaphorical meaning once they leave local audiences and their frameworks of reference behind.

In Amar Kanwar’s New Delhi studio, among other topics, the documentary filmmaker discussed his forays into what could be described as narrowcasting (as opposed to broadcasting to the widest possible audience): screening his films directly to the people who are depicted in them and most affected by them in turn. He has put very considerable investments of time and funds into a continued presence in the remote Indian locales on which his films have focused. For Lightning Testimonies (2007), the site of filming and later screening was the state of Assam; and, for The Sovereign Forest (2012–), a place of continued display was established in Odisha. This direct involvement importantly exists alongside Kanwar’s ongoing screening and exhibiting within both cinematic and artistic contexts, making his practice a unique example of one that engages activism and art at the same time. Kanwar was very insistent that he does not see a contradiction or problem in inhabiting these multiple contexts, and thus different spheres of comprehension, at once, arguing that the problems his works engage—whether sexual violence or economic disenfranchisement, to name just two important examples—are of the broadest consequence.

As our conversation was closing, Kanwar mentioned something that has stuck with me: once he has documented something or completed a film, he is always deeply preoccupied with what he experienced in the moment of shooting but, nevertheless, did not manage to record. This insight struck me as profound in the context of a world that is evermore mediated. Despite our increasing capacity to record everything, there is still so much, for better or worse, that will continue to elude capture.

4. TRANSFIGURATIONS: The Sculpture of Mrinalini Mukherjee

On the flight home from Dubai, I couldn’t stop thinking about Mrinalini Mukherjee. For me, a jam-packed trip always creates a collection of lingering afterimages—Dayanita Singh’s collection of “museums” installed in her studio; the brightly colored boats in the Sharjah Creek, which we followed to find Michael Joo’s installation; the gently turning forms of the wind garden that Haegue Yang had installed in a small courtyard in Sharjah’s Heritage District—and occasionally an image that’s insistent, refusing to fade, staying at the front of my mind until I can get back to the library and start digging up more.

Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949–2015) was a leading sculptor of her generation in India. However, her work wasn’t widely exhibited internationally, and so for me, the monographic exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, organized by Peter Nagy, was revelatory. I had seen three intriguing examples in the Gwangju Biennial last fall, installed there with photographs by Lionel Wendt, but this show covered it all. Her practice comprised an in-depth material experimentation and relied primarily on dyed hemp fibers for nearly five decades, before she turned to embrace ceramics and later bronze. Her works simultaneously suggest figurative and botanical forms, arising from both nature and modernist strategies, capable of both structure and formlessness.

As a student at the University of Baroda, Mukherjee was exposed to the pedagogical philosophy of K. G. Subramanyan, which embraced equally craft and “high art” techniques and strategies. This intersection can often be a thorny one, difficult to navigate, and it is one of the topics that’s touched on in the current exhibition Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from The Collection. Mukherjee addressed this issue head-on in a 1994 interview, noting, “In India the arts have always existed alongside each other, at different levels of sophistication. India has an enormous wealth of craft, and I believe in an integrated approach to art and craft, so I enjoy working with the linguistics developed by the practice of craft. It is through my relationship to my material that I would like to reach out and align myself with the values which exist within the ambit of contemporary sculpture.” (“An Interview with Mrinalini Mukherjee.” In Mrinalini Mukherjee: Sculpture, 11. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1994.)

5. Beom Kim at the Sharjah Biennial 12

By Laura Hoptman

Beom Kim (Korean, born 1963 in Seoul; lives and works in Seoul) is a conceptual artist who has used many mediums including, most notably, drawing and video to display his particular kind of dry humor, which is delivered with words, figurative drawings done in a childlike style, and multimedia installations. A central figure in the contemporary art community of Seoul for the past twenty years, Kim has become increasingly well-known internationally in the last decade. I first saw his work in the Istanbul Biennial in 2003, but it has subsequently been included in the 2005 Venice Biennial, in a one-artist exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which traveled to Redcat in Los Angeles, and in a number of surveys of contemporary Korean art. One of his best-known works is a small installation called A Rock That Was Taught It Was a Bird in which a video of the artist lecturing a stone on avian transformation plays on a screen located within a facsimile of the set in the video.

A selection of Kim’s drawings and a single-channel video work were on display at the Sharjah Biennial 12, as was a group of Kim’s works that was notably different from any work by him that I had seen before. A cycle of thirteen paintings that the artist began creating in 2008, it was collectively entitled Untitled (Intimate Suffering). Extremely simple, even austere, the series consists of shaped canvases in a variety of sizes that are covered in rough, sepia-colored linen. Some have minimal interventions in black that resemble readable symbols like a dash or a cross. These paintings were displayed in several galleries at the Sharjah Art Museum. The last canvas in the series, Untitled (Intimate Suffering #13) was created specifically for the biennial and hung at the SAF Art Space. It consists of a sixteen-foot-high canvas that has been systematically covered with black crosses so that the whole creates a kind of maze-like pattern that causes, when looked at, what Bridget Riley has famously called a “visual tickle.” The elegant simplicity of this group of paintings is a surprising turn for an artist known neither for his minimalist aesthetic nor for his work in this medium. In fact, this work is less connected to Kim’s oeuvre of humorous, mildly absurdist multimedia installations than it is to the history of Korean avant-garde art and, specifically, the work of the Dansaekhwa group, who began exhibiting in the late 1960s. The name Dansaekhwa, which means “monochrome,” refers to artists who were experimenting with the idea of the non-metaphoric painting/object in which space is expressed through concrete, non-illusionistic means that might include staining the surface of the canvas or punching holes in it, or replacing canvas with more porous materials like burlap or paper. In his Sharjah canvases, Kim deliberately places himself in a Korean avant-garde context, one that belies the more generic lingua franca of the Biennial-type installation for which he is best known. This statement of allegiance, clearly abetted by the curator’s choice to represent Kim in this startling way, is visually stimulating, but also exemplary of a personal politics and a point of view. The paintings as paintings are beautiful, and the gesture, as a conceptual move in a varied career, is as bold as it is moving.

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Day 1

Keio University Art Center and Archives

By Michelle Elligott

Great to see the Sogetsu ephemera collections at the Keio University Art Center. The Sogetsu materials dovetail nicely with pieces we have (including great Akiyama Kuniharu material) in the Museum’s Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives. The unique materials (like the letters in the Takiguchi Shuzo Papers) were wonderful.

Materials at the Keio University Art Center and Archives

By Michelle Elligott, Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy Lim

Roundtable at Tokyo University of the Arts

Organized by Kobata Kazue, the roundtable at the Tokyo University of the Arts started with Kobata’s introduction on performance and perfomativity in Japanese art in the 1960s. She screened 8mm film footage of Hijikata Tatsumi’s performance Revolt of the Flesh, and spoke about the activities of the Ankoku Butoh movement. Kobata raised an interesting point regarding the relation of painting and performance in 1960s Japanese art.

I was particularly struck by the work of Tadasu Takamine (born in 1968, lives and works in Kyoto), who was a member of a radical performance group Dumb Type. Tadasu is a very interesting artist with radical video and performance practices dealing mainly with politics and sexuality. During the roundtable, the artist screened his controversial video piece Kimura-san (1998), featuring footage of the artist providing sexual relief for a disabled friend, as well as the performance he did during his residency in New York of exchanging clothes at flea markets in the East Village in 1993. He is well-known for his video God Bless America, shown at the Venice Biennale in 2003. For eighteen days, Tadasu and his female partner lived in an entirely red room, filming themselves as they worked, ate, slept, and had sex. In the resulting time-lapse footage, we see them kick and punch a sculpture into being: a giant head, resembling George W. Bush, which continually sings God Bless America.

Roundtable at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music

By Nancy Lim

Day 2

Meeting with Hisano Atsuko of the Saison Foundation

Founded in 1987, the Saison Foundation is one of the leading organizations providing grants to contemporary theater and dance groups from Japan and abroad, offering residency and studios for rehearsal. Its origins are in Studio 200, an experimental artistic space from the 1980s that was situated in the Ikebuko department store. The white box of Studio 200 hosted performances by Hijikata, Teshigawara Saburo (an important figure in contemporary dance during the ’80s), and concerts by rock groups from Korea and China.

The Saison Foundation, with Hisano Atsuko

By Nancy Lim

Chim↑Pom: Not Just Provocations

By Doryun Chong

I used to feel unsure as to where this young group’s provocations were headed. In the wake of the disasters in Tohoku in 2011, and seeing their courageous series of projects and performances, I’m beginning to think that they really have a sense of purpose and mission—trying to shake the art scene and even the wider society, which perhaps have grown too comfortable and complacent after many decades of stability and prosperity. http://chimpom.jp/

Meeting Chim↑Pom

By Christopher Y. Lew

Chim↑Pom presented an overview of their work, which includes projects from their solo show Real Times, made in response to the March 11 disaster at Fukushima. It’s amazing how quickly they reacted. They made a powerful series of videos and actions: they collaborated with local youths in Soma City, raised a flag in dangerous proximity to the Daiichi plant, and made a polemical intervention in Taro Okamoto’s mural in Shibuya train station.

A Visit to MUJIN-TO Production’s Gallery

By Nancy Lim

Mori Art Museum

By Nancy Lim

“METABOLISM” Exhibition at Mori Art Museum

Visit to the Mori Art Museum and the exhibition METABOLISM: The City of the Future. Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present Day Japan. Very extensive exhibition about the most widely known modern architectural movement to have emerged in Japan in the 1960s. Meeting with Mami Kataoka, the museum’s chief curator, after a walkthrough.

Kudos to the “METABOLISM” Team!

By Doryun Chong

I think we were blown away by the depth of the scholarship, impeccable installation, and of course, the richness of the subject itself. Kudos to the Mori!

Dinner with Minemura Toshiyaki, Hirasawa Go, and Hayashi Mihchio

By Nancy Lim

Film Critic Hirasawa Go’s Shinjuku Night Tour

By Doryun Chong, Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy Lim

Day 3

A Visit to the Hara Museum

By Doryun Chong, Michelle Elligott

Utterly delightful: loud, semi-naked cabbage throwing and water spitting

By Sarah Suzuki

We Are BANANA!!

By Banana Gakuen Theater Company

Hello Guys!! We are BANANA!! from Tokyo made in Dangerous JAPAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!

Thanks for your LOVE to BANANA.

Ecstatic Critique?

By Doryun Chong

There are about 40 to 50 performers, split equally between men and women on a stage that’s barely big enough to hold all of them. But somehow, they manage to jump up and down and around, dancing and singing like a giant boyband or girlband-cum-cheer squad en masse in constantly changing formations for over an hour! It’s also like Billy Blanks’ Taebo or one of those extreme, military-style workouts. We were overwhelmed by the constant sensory overload, including some of those sweat-drenched actors running into the audience. The director, Nikaido Toco, who later joins the troupe on the stage, was incredible too. She sounded like Kim Carnes screaming at the top of her lungs while doing all those moves in perfect sync with her actors. In the midst of this madness, there’s actually something serious and a complexity there. Sonically and visually, they reproduce a struggle of the sensory overload of Japanese mass media, where any meaningful message is impossible to hear unless you can project even louder over that noise. Maybe their performances are an ecstatic critique of the uniformity that they at the same time wear and abuse in school uniform.

Day 4

National Museum of Art, Osaka

By Michelle Elligott

Two highlights of the National Museum of Art, Osaka, included a Shiraga Kazuo painting dedicated to Michel Tapié and a wild, surrealistic Tiger Tateishi painting depicting a samurai, the KKK, Mao, and a crawling child. (We all agreed Doryun should include it in his Tokyo exhibition!)

Breaker Project

By Nancy Lim

Breaker Project

By Nancy Lim

Breaker Project is a cultural organization that started in 2003. Based in Osaka, it supports a variety of community-based art projects and presents them in temporary exhibition spaces throughout the Kansai region. At the time of TsukaharaYuya’s installation, Breaker Project occupied a two-story, multifamily residential unit from the early 20th century that the current artist-in-residence discreetly transformed by means of delicate light, sound, and sculptural installations that fiddle with the infrastructure. One room was also modified to include a sleeping area for overnight visitors, and on the floor above, an enclosed platform was built in the otherwise unstable attic (the artist had fallen through the attic floor a few months prior and broken his arm). The project was accompanied by varied educational programming intended to engage the local community indefinitely — even after the show closes and Breaker Project moves on.

Contact Gonzo

By Nancy Lim

Contact Gonzo is a performance group from Osaka founded in 2006 by Tsukahara Yuya and the dancer Kakio Masaru. Gonzo means “eccentric” or “hooligan”; the name comes from Gonzo journalism of the ’70s in the United States. The group has developed a very specific form of contact improvisation and Russian-style Aikido. Based on physical ability and trust, its innovative practice is at the crossroads of contemporary dance, performance, and street actions. Contact Gonzo’s first works were performed outdoors, mainly inspired by street and skate culture, and uploaded on YouTube. Recently they have been performing in many festivals and art spaces in Japan and Europe. The group has also developed a an innovative strategy of documenting their performances.

Contact Gonzo Live

By Eva Respini

I traveled across town to the Kichijoji area of Tokyo to catch a performance by the Osaka-based performance collective contact Gonzo. We met the members of contact Gonzo in Osaka, and they showed us documentation of their performances. This young collective straddles the worlds of dance, performance, and visual art: the founder is trained in theater design and dance, but other members come from the fields of graphic design and art, as well as dance. When I heard they were performing as part of the Teratotera Festival of contemporary dance and performance, I jumped at the chance to see them live. Contact Gonzo performed for 20 minutes on the roof of the Tokyu department store, in front of an audience of about fifty people.The performance included five of the six members (the sixth member was photographing and videotaping), was improvisational, and included water bottles and a single illuminated lightbulb as the only props. It was one of the most exhilarating performances I have seen, especially since it was punctuated by a dramatic darkening of the skies and light rain.

Day 5

Interviewing Shiomi Mieko

By Michelle Elligott

I had the honor and privilege of conducting an interview with Shiomi Mieko. A strikingly elegant and articulate artist, she spoke with insight and ease about her work and her participation in Fluxus activities. I especially appreciated her explanations of how she arranged the cards for the MoMA exhibition Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962–1978 and her inspirations for Spatial Poem and Disappearing Music for Face. In regards to the latter, she stated her belief that anything can be music, even the shifting clouds. She once saw a young girl’s smile fading; she said it was like beautiful music.

Day 6

Yumiko Chiba Associates, Ginza Showroom

By Eva Respini

My day in Tokyo began with a viewing of vintage photographs by Uematsu Keiji at the Ginza showroom of Yumiko Chiba Associates. We have only one work by Uematsu in MoMA’s collection, and I was excited by the opportunity to see more. The Uematsu exhibition included vintage 1970s prints of his performative actions in the landscape. With these works, he was seeking to draw out shapes in space and use his body to find the equilibrium point within a gravitational field, creating mutual interrelationships between the body, the object, and space. He is an artist who later became associated with the Mono-ha movement. It was interesting to see the little-known photographic works of an artist mostly known for his sculpture. In addition to the exhibition of works by Uematsu, there was a fascinating exhibition of conceptual photography titled To the 1970s: The Turning Point of Photography and Art. The exhibition traced conceptual photographic practices in the 1970s in Japan, including works by Masafumi Maita, Kanji Wakae, and Takamatsu Jiro’s 1972–73 series Photograph of a Photograph (one example is in MoMA’s collection). Many of the works in the exhibition explored the materiality of photography and an intermedia relationship. The works were made by artists rather than photographers, and at this time, photography emerged as a tool to escape known forms of visual perception and forge new visual languages. Many of the works and artists in this exhibition were new to me. It was exciting to become acquainted with a different tradition in Japanese photography.

Day 7

Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

By Eva Respini

The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography has one of the best photography programs in the world. Kasahara Michiko is their chief curator and a friend. She is ambitious and inventive in her programming, and I was happy to see her again and to meet her fellow curators at the museum, Fujimura Satomi and Tasaka Hiroko. We viewed works from their storage collection, including Otsuji Kiyoji prints. The images dated from the 1950s, but the artist made the prints in 1989 and ’90, at the time of the museum’s opening. We also looked at photographs by Hosoe Eikoh, including works from his seminal collaboration with Butoh legend Hijikata Tatsumi for the book Kamaitachi, which involved a series of journeys to northern Japan in order to embody the presence of mythical, dangerous figures at the peripheries of Japanese life. At MoMA, we have works by Hosoe in the collection, but only a few from his collaboration with Hijikata. As always, there is no substitute for seeing works in the flesh, so to speak. We ended our visit of the museum with a viewing of the Naoya Hatakeyama exhibition Natural History. The exhibition was a survey of some 150 color photographs focusing on the landscape, including pictures made in Switzerland, France, and Japan. The exhibition included new work detailing the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Hatakeyama’s hometown, one of the hardest hit areas. The work juxtaposed a slide show of pictures Hatakeyama had taken in his hometown before the destruction with some sixty photographs of the disaster and its aftermath. The exhibition also included a new video animation of his well-known explosion series, for which he scanned and animated his previously still photographs. This step represents a new artistic endeavor for Hatakeyama.

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