Curator's Text

Yamamoto Atsuo

FROM DUALISM TO ONENESS:
A Thought on the Potential of Asian Art
Yamamoto Atsuo

I have been involved in this project for three years now. Such a long time, and yet such ashort time too. Embarrassingly, my heartfelt sentiments read just like hackneyed platitudes, but all thesame, I must say that these three years have been an emotional journey for me. As I write, the Tokyo
exhibition draws near, and one of my dearest personal goals is close to attainment. It seems a suitablejuncture to reflect on what the last three years have meant to me.
I have made my share of mistakes, but I have made just as many discoveries. The earliest wasmade at the initial Working Seminar, where I met curators from different parts of Asia for the very firsttime. Their individual presentations were of great interest, but the atmosphere intimidated me and, made me acutely nervous. Meetings had never been my element, and to make things more difficult,thiswas my first experience of being surrounded by such an assortment of skin tones and faces that wereboth familiar, yet different. All around me, interspersed with simultaneous interpreters, there was lively
debate conducted in English, the seminar's lingua franca. I remember feeling like a fish out of water.
Waiting for my own turn to deliver a presentation, I felt like a condemned prisoner approaching thescaffold, and privately wished I had never, ever set foot in that building.
My presentation proved to be utterly out of place. Even now, my face burns at the memory. I
recall trudging wearily home afterwards, feeling as if I had the words "complete fool" stamped on myforehead.
What I should have done in that situation was to stick to what I knew well, or in other words,
to focus on introducing the artists of the Kansai region, and to give a presentation on the methodology
used in jointly-planned exhibitions. I knew this well enough at the time, and would have been perfectly
capable of doing it, if I had wanted to. However, it did not feel right to simply follow the invisible rails
laid out in front of me. I'm naturally timid, though, and I sort of regretted my perverse approach, but asa result I almost deliberately. maneuvered myself into giving an inappropriate presentation . The subject I
had chosen was children's art.
I remember that after my talk, someone commented that it had been "more of a credo than apresentation." I remembered having heard the word "credo" before in a mass, or something of thatnature, but I am sorry to say that I did not know exactly what it meant. When I got home, I looked it
up in the dictionary. I was pleased to have learned such a useful term, even if the occasion had been
someone using it to cover for my off-the-wall speech. Looking back now, I realize that for the last three
years, I have been driven by a shadowy impulse to find out whether my own "credo" is really no morethan a self-indulgent hobby-horse, or whether it contains some universal truth.

0 This phenomenon is extremely difficultto
convey, no matter how detailed adescription I might attempt Any interested
reader is referred to the following catalog:
8/iku Sozo to Keisho (Esthetic Culture:
Creation and Inheritance), December 11,
1999 to February 13, 2000, Ashiya City
Museum of An. & History.

At the time of the inci$lent I have described, I was engrossed in studying particular artworks
created by children, and the insight I garnered then has stayed in the back of my mind to this day,nigglinglike a tiny fishbone lodged in the throat. To cut a long story short, let me tell you that I have nointerest in the general run of children's art. To make myself perfectly clear, I would go so far as to saythat ninety-nine percent of it is outside the scope of esthetic discussion and criticism. What interests
me is that under certain conditions, or in certain circumstances, in a tiny minority of extreme cases,
there is something like a nuclear reaction. Words are rendered meaningless by its overwhelming
power, and value judgments informed by conventional human feeling are robbed of all power. This
astonishment is at the root of my "credo." [OJ
The basic problem of esthetics is the disconnect between ideas and actual experience. In
certain examples of children's art, I discovered an important function: an almost sacrilegious,
iconoclastic mechanism which makes the latent problem manifest. Of course, I do not simply dismiss
sensibilities and value systems different from my own. However, individual reactions to actual works ofart vary too excessively, and most of the discrepancies originate in the special nature of the authorship.
To put it in slightly more prosaic terms, in most children's art, the child's identity is not very significant.
All that matters is that the child is provided with an environment conducive to uninhibited selfexpression. To appreciate works of art, one does not need a database listing artists' names, styles andso forth. Perhaps this is a bit of an overstatement, but appreciating an outstanding work of art by a
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Yamamoto Atsuo

Cura1or·sText

child means throwing away all one's preconceptions and confronting its existence with an open mind.
My credo values amazement and questioning over awareness and understanding . My contact
with the works I see around me, as well as with children's art, has taught me that amazement andquestioning lies at the very roots of art. I am not simply arguing that actual experience is good andideas are bad, or that confronting existence is good and cultivating awareness is bad. However, in theartistic environment of the Kansai, where I live, there seems to be a well-established trend towards
amazement and questioning. This is where I would like to start.
There is no need for me to remind you that this project is a mutual exchange rather than aone-way street, and embraces a variety of factors in the form of subjective statements from within
Asia, since this has been explained several times elsewhere in this volume. "Under Construction" isindeed pregnant with all sorts of undifferentiated possibilities. Kansai-based artists producing highquality work still tend to be overlooked when there is a Tokyo-centric viewpoint , so· the task of
selecting such artists and helping them onto the international circuit is definitely an important andworthwhile undertaking. I am constantly aware that such selection and assistance should not be
sidelined into being just the "editing" of information. Personally, I see it as a truly creative process. I
select works of art informed by their creator's perception of reality, and when those manifestations ofart become the input to "Under Construction," I do not know what output this will produce. Rather
than editing what already exists, this is making something new happen. I think it is important not to lose
sight of this fact.
Maybe the issue of Asian identity has a bearing on this. At first, this question puzzled me
considerably. I must admit that, before I encountered this project, I did not personally have muchawareness of myself as belonging to Asia. I may have understood it intellectually, but I did not feel it
viscerally.(This is another classic example of focusing on abstract ideas instead of actual experience.) Like
most Japanese people, I had always thought of "Asia" as a slightly exotic place located somewhere else.
Indeed, I had barely thought of it at all, other than from a consumer's perspective. At any rate, after starting
to work on the projeet, I began to feel self-conscious about suddenly exploiting the word "Asia" to myadvantage. Meanwhile, I began to wonder about Japan's strange lack of awareness of her own Asianness.
If I were to be allowed a little self-justification, perhaps every art exhibition could be seen as asort of inquiry. Is there no other valid approach than to focus exclusively on what one knows well andcompletely grasps, aiming, in effect, to eliminate the unknown and the unexpected? If the scope ofevery exhibition had to be restricted by the scope of the curator's knowledge, this would be impossibly
limiting.It can sometimes be a good thing to put together an exhibition, precisely because one does notunderstand what is to be expected them. There is a big gray zone between these two poles, too. I am
certainly not saying that a curator should throw together a negligently incomplete exhibition, or
abrogate responsibility for its content, but an exhibition should be a voyage of discovery for its curator
as well as its visitors. When this happens, the space will be electrified by the excitement that occured
at the initial stage of creating the exhibition.
Having thus redefined my position , I focused on the concepts of "de-centering" and"transcending borders." This is not an especially radical approach, but I feel it highlights the fact that
our Asian world-view is essentially and fundamentally different from the Western-European's which
premises on the individual in relation to the pivotal concept of God. In the Western mind, theindividual is defined by his or her differences from others, and "differences" sometimes manifest
themselves as "walls" or "boxes" for compartmentalizing the world. We Asians, however, naturally
perceive the world in all its unmediated chaos.
Of course, in the information society we live in, a certain amount of homogenization is underway, in urban areas at least, and it is definitely becoming harder to define clear-cut conceptual
differences between East and West. On the other hand, thanks to the computer networks that arearguably a symbol of the current era, the "walls" and "boxes" are undergoing if not dissolution, then atleast a transmutation . The walls have now become semi-permeable, allowing information to seepthrough and penetrate in both directions. Maybe we should positively embrace a new perspective intoday's networked society - symbolized by the internet - as a metaphor of the Asian viewpoint.
To help catalyze this reaction, "flora" was selected as a keyword for the local exhibition.
However, preconceptions about this word will be deliberately challenged. Because it provides the ideal
surroundings for relaxation, nature tends to be depicted in a facile way. As everyone knows, plants areoften chosen as subjects for fine arts, and artworks depicting them run the risk of degenerating intocliche. In real life, plants are tough, fierce, and also extremely (even surprisingly) dynamic. When I heard
about the way plant populations have been cross-penetrating with particularly intense vigor between
our neighbor countries in Southeast Asia, it occurred to me that this was yet another metaphor forour computerized and networked society.[&]Jt. 029f) With regard to the current situation inconnection with flora in Southeast Asia, I am
indebted

to Futanavaluable suggestions.

Yoshihi

for

some

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Cu<atm'sTe,t YamamotoAtsuo

But what if border-transcending dynamism ended up in a dualistic deadlock with static places
like art galleries and museums ? Dualism is intimately related to the aforementioned structuralism of
the Western-European world view. We Orientals, however, have developed a philosophy that neatly
sidesteps it. In expressions such as "All in One and One in All," and "sonyata (emptiness) is tathata(suchness), and tathata is sonyata," the meanings of "in" and "is" have a different nuance from themathematical expression "equals." The Asian world-view is premised on the fact that duality exists, andon the desire to see it as it is. The fact that the duality is a single entirety is grasped instinctively, before
understanding has time to take place.
The concept of the "HUB" can provide a useful metaphor for that which reconciles both partsof a duality. In a computer network, a hub is a kind of node. People, products and information converge
towards the hub, pass through it and are thus distributed to new networks beyond. A hub does notexert any global control. Instead, it acts as a conduit, functioning as a lubricant in the network.
However, we must not interpret this metaphor too mechanistically, lest we fall again into thetrap of awareness . A point does not even have a physical existence. In the future, it will become evermore necessary for art to swim freely through the open seas of the global network. By its very nature,art will try to avoid being collected in a static physical location. One way of allowing artworks to beaccessed efficiently by large numbers of viewers would be to set up a hub, and have an access lamp flash
each time in!ormation passes through the hub as a user views the artwork . This raises a number ofinteresting questions. What is the significance of the light? Is it more than just a trace? At which physicallocation can the artwork be said to be art? These issues would need to be addressed on a case-by-casebasis. Of course, the creator of the artwork could easily settle the issue by deciding on the answers.
Personally, I think the value of the experience thus provided would depend on whether theimage managed to convey a real aura redolent of actual experience, as opposed to being a mere unit of
information in the form of a virtual image. This could be dismissed as mere spiritualism. However,
perhaps this is the very thing that will open up fertile ground with regard to the possibilities of Asian orOriental art.
Some readers may have noticed that in this essay, I have made several allusions to Zen. Like"flora," this term needs careful attention. I hardly need to point out the danger of associating this wordwith simplistic orientalism, or using it carelessly as a blanket term for difficult-to-pigeonhole concepts.
In order to avoid the risk of committing the latter error, which is particularly repugnant, I am quite
prepared to allow Zen to be self-contradictory. In these matters, willingness to peel away the outer
coverings and get right to the essence of a concept is a sine qua non. Zen is not something to bedismissed as a piece of spiritual baggage from the past. It remains wonderfully useful and applicable tomodern realities.
In Western Europe, the preoccupation is with tracking one's own position and orienting
oneself on one's own mental map. In contrast, our own preoccupation is with, as it were, keeping
moving as an end in itself. Maybe we would be more Asian if we stopped trying so hard to alignourselves with Asia, and simply stopped making any us-them distinction . Maybe we should stop
telling ourselves that East is East and West is West, and contemplate the statement that "East isWest." That would certainly rescue the word "globalism" from its current status as a tedious cliche.
The circuit is always open. If spending so much time in close contact with local art in Japan has taught
me anything, it is that our .local art springs from the core of our Asian identity . Moreover, it has thepotential to surmount such an identity our national identity crisis.
So, have we spent the last three years traveling in a circle, only to end where we began ?
prefer to think of our trajectory as a spiral. We may go round and round, but we are slowly rising.

YamamotoAtsuo (Curator I AshiyaCity Museumof Art & History, Japan)

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