Two Japanese Art Triennials and their distinctive approaches to art and its audience
Two of Japan’s five Triennials or Biennials ran concurrently for just a week in September this year, and exposed two different models that are now well established within the country’s large scale art events.1 The 4th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale 2009 is concerned solely with Asian art, in common with Korea’s Pocheon Asia Biennial and Taiwan’s Taichung Asian Art Biennale and to a certain extent our own Asia-Pacific Triennial organised by the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art. The Museum in Fukuoka brings depth to this specialisation, being the first with a dedicated focus on contemporary art of the region and the only museum to systematically collect and exhibit Asian modern and contemporary art during much of the 1990s.
History and geographical location situated Fukuoka as Japan’s traditional gateway to Asia. When the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, located in two modestly scaled top floors of a shopping building near cinemas and theatres downtown, opened in March 1999 it was purposely dedicated to the programming of Asian art. This interest originated in the late 1970s when the Museum’s parent institution, the Fukuoka Art Museum, commenced its acclaimed Asian Art exhibitions with a two-part program in 1979 and 1980.2 By 1985 and the endorsement of specialist Asian art programming and collecting, the Fukuoka Art Museum heralded its distinguishing approach with the 2nd Asian Art exhibition that focused on younger artists and integrated a special section on the ‘Art of Bali’, punching above its weight in exhibiting three hundred and sixty-eight works.3
Fukuoka’s individual approach can be sensed from its thematic subjects and broad geographic reach: the 3rd Asian Art exhibition in 1989 was titled ‘Symbolic Visions in Contemporary Asian... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline