Contemporary art from Japan
Zones of love are slippery zones of unmeasurable intensity. Zones where unalike things touch, and find resonances in each other that neither can name. So it is with Zones of Love: Contemporary Art From Japan, a remarkable show curated by Judy Annear.
The critics seem mostly to have preferred the works by the older artists represented in this show over the younger ones. It is not difficult to see why. Toshikatsu Endo's sculptures in burnt wood speak of an era in Japanese art when one could still have faith in the mystical role of the artist as shaman, conjuring up out of nothingness deeply veiled signs of being. His burnt wooden boat filled with water is so simple yet so laden with significance as to be almost unbearable. Endo's work can be taken as flowing either from some ineffably Japanese philosophical aesthetic, or from a recognisable variant of European modernism. Either way it valorises the artist's apartness from the everyday and draws the spectator into a parallel realm of experience. The paradox is that this work can be read at one and the same time as familiarly and reassuringly modern art and as familiarly and reassuringly Japanese and hence unintelligible. Besides, the burnt wood smells nice.
The rest of the work in the show departs from the notion of the artist as embodied in Endo's work. Zones of Love brings together artists mostly in their early thirties, who grew up in the dense, fleeting information landscape of the contemporary first world which Japan struggled so cheerfully to join in the 1960s. The materialist prejudices of the '60s new left, and the reflexive questioning of identity and signification of the postmodern