Love and light at Hara Museum

Friday, Oct. 16, 2009

Love and light at Hara Museum

By ANDREW MAERKLE
Special to The Japan Times

In 1979, when he founded the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in his grandfather's former residence in Tokyo's Shinagawa district, Toshio Hara was driven by the vision of creating one of Japan's first institutions dedicated to living artists. At the time there were precious few other venues for contemporary art and government support was minimal.

Speaking with the Japan Times recently, Hara reflected: "When I was planning the museum, contemporary art was so uncommon, and in a certain sense unpopular, that there were no guarantees people would actually appreciate it. There was no organizational support or encouragement. Many of my friends thought I was crazy."

Celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, the Hara Museum — housed in a distinctive Bauhaus-style building designed by architect Jin Watanabe that was built in 1938 — is now both a figurative and literal landmark in the country's art landscape.

Over the years, the Hara has emerged as a taste-making institution, organizing tightly-focused solo exhibitions for an eclectic mix of artists ranging from Sophie Calle and Nobuyoshi Araki to Pipilotti Rist and Tabaimo.

Working with limited space, the Hara's curators have also overseen permanent installations such as Tatsuo Miyajima's arrangement of LED displays with blinking numbers in a hidden, semicircular enclosure near the building's central stairwell and Yoshitomo Nara's recreation of his studio environment, including drawings and paintings scattered among empty bottles and CD cases, in a garret at the far end of the second floor.

And while the designs of recent museums such as the publicly funded Museum of Contemporary Art or the corporately funded Mori Art Museum, founded in 1995 and 2003, respectively, have tended to favor cavernous exhibition halls, the Hara presents art at an intimate, human scale.

Bordered on its near side by a shaded garden, the ground level arcs around a central lawn on its opposite side, while the upper level is an orderly progression of rectangular rooms. This combination of dynamism and form often creates a synergy with the works on display, as exemplified by Scottish artist Jim Lambie's installation this January of black-and-white curvilinear tape patterns over the building's parquet floors.

Hara says that from its inception, the museum philosophy has remained constant.

"More than simply maintaining a collection or organizing exhibitions, the museum is about getting to know artists and having a kind of spiritual exchange," he explained. "Inevitably that will result in artworks, permanent pieces, exhibitions — but all of that is just a means to express the exchange."

He admits that, given the relative lack of organized patronage of the arts in Japan, there has always been an underlying uncertainty about the sustainability of his museum. However, seeking to pursue more ambitious projects, in 1988 Hara founded an annex, Hara Museum ARC, in the mountains of Shibukawa, Gunma Prefecture, about two hours' journey by train from Tokyo.

Although ARC has largely been used for rotating exhibitions of work from the museum collection, the past year has seen a succession of modest developments there. For the annex's 20th anniversary, Hara commissioned architect Arata Isozaki, who designed ARC's original facilities, to add an extension dedicated to his great-grandfather's Edo Period art collection, which previously had been kept in storage.

In September of this year, Hara installed a new outdoor sculpture by French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel in front of the ARC entrance. Entitled "Kokoro," the work is made of large, red glass bulbs threaded together into the looping outline of a heart shape.

And on Oct. 10, Hara presided over the inauguration of a site-specific work by Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic artist best known for monumental projects combining art, architecture, design and science to explore humanity's relationship to the natural elements. Entitled "Sunspace for Shibukawa," Eliasson's contribution is a stainless steel, four-meter high cupola that sits with futuristic aplomb on a sloping field overlooking the valley below.

Crowning the cupola roof is a parabolic row of 13 prisms in circular encasements. The prisms are positioned corresponding to the movement of the Earth around the sun over the course of a year, from Summer Solstice to Equinox and Winter Solstice. On clear days, the sun casts linear rainbow patterns onto the cupola's concave interior; every two weeks, those patterns converge to form a circular rainbow that lasts for approximately 10 minutes. Completing the work, Eliasson has plotted a curving pathway through the field that mimics the Earth's orbit around the sun.

Part avant-garde sculpture and part quixotic observatory, "Sunspace" evokes an elaborate drawing machine as the play of light sketches calligraphic arabesques onto the wall. When the sky is overcast, the buckled interior becomes an impassive white bulb, but visual stimulation cedes to an unexpected soundscape amplified by the architecture: rustling paper, parched lips, steady breathing.

In public remarks at the inauguration, Eliasson described "Sunspace" as a way to visualize time and relativity, noting that, "It does require a little bit of patience but the fact that you can see the actual color move if you spend 10 or 15 minutes in there is something very valuable because what you see is not the moving light, but [in fact] the rotation of the Earth as it travels around the sun."

He discussed the work as a meditation on Newtonian mathematics and the impact modern science has had on contemporary societies, but added that in it there is also, "Something irrational, and that I say would be the way you approach the piece, what you think, how you experience it — I think there is something unpredictable in that."

At the inauguration, Hara seemed especially pleased. He first began discussing a commissioned work with Eliasson in 2004, and along the way from proposition to completion, the artist had a solo exhibition at the Hara Museum that opened in November 2005.

Both Hara and Eliasson considered "Sunspace" testimony to Hara's determination to pursue his vision of contemporary art against all odds. Concluding his remarks with a self-deprecating acknowledgment of the challenges involved in realizing "Sunspace," Eliasson said, "I think that Mr. Hara shows that the irrationality of art or intuition also deserves a platform in our society. Something that is not so easy to verbalize or to explain can have a highly relevant position in the world that we live in, and if you think about it there's not so many people who actually show that kind of commitment to this idea."

Hara told the Japan Times: "Even now I don't know how long the museum can continue. My conviction comes from an immediate feeling, not reasoning. Basically I'm doing this because it makes me happy. If it ever makes me unhappy, I would probably stop immediately."

"Kokoro" by Jean-Michel Othoniel and "Sunspace for Shibukawa" by Olafur Eliasson are permanent installations at the Hara Museum ARC, which is showing "Selections from the Hara Museum Collection: What's interesting about Japanese contemporary art?" till Nov. 23; admission ¥1,000; open 9:30 a.m - 4:30 p.m. For more information visit www. haramuseum.of.jp/generalTop.html