When I stepped into the Taro Nasu gallery, I commented that it felt quite spacious — at least, more so than I had expected.
“Maybe for Tokyo,” said Masako Hosoi, the gallery’s director. “But Taro is always trying to make his gallery as small as possible, that’s his theory,” she said, referring to the owner, Taro Nasu, who is also a director. “We can’t be a big gallery just like those in London, Paris, Berlin. We can’t compete with them.”
The Taro Nasu gallery is on the upper level of a four-story building in the heart of Roppongi, an entertainment and business district in Tokyo known for its museums and galleries.
“Taro’s direction is trying to make his project or space as small as possible, so we can do something unique, a little bit away from the commercial mind, or theoretically something authentic,” she said.
Nasu added, “And close relationships with artists are important.”
Some of the artists the gallery represents include the French conceptual artist Pierre Huyghe, the Japanese British visual artist Simon Fujiwara and the British artist Ryan Gander.
On the hot September day I visited the gallery, I was greeted by a hospital bed and plush toys in soft pastel tones: the work of the French artist Benoît Piéron, who was there putting the finishing touches on his exhibit “Fabric Softener,” scheduled to open the next day.
“The material I mainly work with is hospital sheets that still bear the marks of previous users,” said Piéron, who spent most of his childhood in the hospital undergoing treatment for leukemia. “It’s a bit like the memory of other people that I tend to turn into collective bodies.”
He chose “Fabric Softener” as the exhibit’s name because, he said, “There’s this idea of gentleness. I try to reconcile people with death or illness.”
He showed me a friendly-looking plush bat in soft yellow, blue and pink hues, named Monique — all of the installation’s stuffed animals are named Monique (after Monique Wittig, a feminist writer).
“I use cute as a kind of capsule so that I can deal with this kind of stuff without people looking away,” he said. “It’s gentle and it’s also about offering a different view of illness.”
Nasu opened his gallery in 1998, after studying for six months at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and a short course at Sotheby’s. Back then, his gallery was in the historic Shokuryo Building in the Koto ward of eastern Tokyo and it was known as the home of the first wave of Japanese contemporary art galleries. (The gallery moved a few times before settling in its current location in Roppongi in 2019.)
“Contemporary art in Japan was, let’s say, for otaku,” said Nasu, using the Japanese word for people with an intense interest in a particular topic. “There was very little conceptual art in Japan” in the 1990s, he said, when his gallery opened.
Why so little?
“Conceptual art seemed to be rather underestimated in Japan,” he said. “There are so many good conceptual artists from overseas, who should have been introduced to Japanese audiences.” He added that he had decided to introduce some important artists of the 1960s such as Lawrence Weiner and Marcel Broodthaers, with exhibitions by Weiner in 2018 and Broodthaers in 2023.
“Marcel Broodthaers is a very important person for recent conceptual art,” he said, adding that he was a big influence on many artists. “But he’s not properly introduced in Japan. No museum shows. Just small group shows and small collections. I see no major pieces in museums. He’s very important historically.” Hosoi added, “Our clients love Broodthaers pieces, even without any knowledge.”
In an email, Fujiwara wrote: “By bringing this level of conceptual artwork and in some cases quite established practices that were unrepresented in Japan, Taro’s first role, I think, was to educate. The kind of work he shows requires a level of commitment and knowledge, and Taro dedicated himself to that task.
“Often what seemed too ephemeral or even uncollectable would find a home in a dedicated collection. Although collecting ephemeral, time-based or conceptual art was not as common in Japan, it never made sense to me as the culture itself has such a deep respect for the ineffable and that which is not always seen.”
Fujiwara added, “In general, the gallery is a kind of beacon that very much looks outside of itself, commonly collaborating in other foundations or offsite projects.”
One of those is an artist commission series organized by the gallery at a Shinto shrine, Dazaifu Tenmangu, to produce permanent works. The collaborating artists included Fujiwara, Ryan Gander and Pierre Huyghe (Huyghe, for example, created a garden and pond).
Taro Nasu “is a small gallery,” Fujiwara wrote, “but within Japan it has a broad and deep reach and creates new spaces and opportunities for its artists.”
This year at Frieze London, the gallery will bring a plastic advertising-style sign by Broodthaers, depicting a clock and some of its parts, in addition to works by Fujiwara, Gander and the Japanese painter Futo Akiyoshi.
“He has a solid career in Japan,” Hosoi said of Akiyoshi. “Public museums in Japan purchased his works. And he got a lot of attention from the Japanese audience. But his paintings are rather subtle and not cartoonish or colorful, which is quite trendy.”
A series by Akoyashi called “Room” comprises paintings made of different shades of gold, depicting a room full of light. “We are aiming to introduce his works again to the European or American audience as a different aspect of the Japanese art, especially contemporary art,” Hosoi said. “It’s quite minimalistic and it’s so serene, subtle, quiet.”
While Hosoi admires Japanese manga-style paintings, she wants to introduce the other side of Japanese art, “because so many tourists or foreigners love the Japanese traditional gardens in Kyoto or tea ceremony culture.” She added that “while it doesn’t seem to be very connected to contemporary art, it actually is,” in the way that they are minimalist and conceptual.
She feels similarly about Mika Tajima, a Japanese American artist. The gallery will present two of her paintings at Frieze, one acrylic and one woven from textiles.
“There’s something similar with Futo Akiyoshi, something silent, quiet, inner poised and all about the reflection,” she said. “Those pieces reflect your inner thinking or your meditation. It’s sort of a nice opponent with which to have a dialogue about yourself, or your perception or emotion.”
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