Defining modern and contemporary art

The first thing you have to do when you arrive in Japan, or I suppose anywhere in Asia, is throw out everything you know about anything.  Just leave it all on the airplane you just exited.  It simply does not apply.  If you've grown up in North America or Europe, history, culture, customs, language are all taught and learned from our own perspective.  Math and science may be the only commonalities as 2 + 2 is always 4 no matter what continent you live on.

Japan has an incredible history of art dating back more than a thousand years and I can say honestly without exaggeration I really know almost nothing about it.  As an artist this is a bit embarrassing.  But I am keen to learn.  Apparently there was no word for "art" in Japanese until the 19th Century.  The beautiful paintings and exquisite objets that are now part of museum collections around the country were simply things that craftsmen made.  It had no elevated status, as these same sort of things did in the West.

In America and Europe "modern" generally refers to avant-garde art produced in the first half of the 20th Century by the likes of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky, etc.  After visiting the Kyoto Museum of Modern Art I think Japan might have a different definition.  

I had gone to see an exhibition called "Reading Cinema, Finding Words: Art After Marcel Broodthaers."  This was a really good show like what you would expect to find at MoMA in New York City.  Afterwards I wandered through the permanent collection.  I was sort of amazed and a tad disappointed to find paintings from the 1980s that looked like they might have been done in the 1880s or even 1680s.  The galleries were full of realistic pictures in watercolor and oil of birds and trees and kimono-clad women on scrolls or screens.  Was this Japanese neo-realism?  Why are these included in the collection of the Kyoto Modern?  This is probably me applying my Western ideas of modern art to Japan.  Maybe for a Japanese visitor to the museum, these pieces are radically different from traditional painting of past centuries.  I couldn't see the difference because I am outside the culture.

Before going to the museum I was at a cool contemporary art gallery on Sanjo Dori.  What did I see there?  Beautifully rendered watercolor landscapes.  Again I was sort of dumbfounded.  These paintings were really good, but so terribly conventional.  Where, I wondered, is the new school of Japanese artists that have dismantled their history, turned it on its head or tossed it on the dustheap.  I know they exist.  Maybe Kyoto is too traditional and conservative for really cutting-edge art.  Maybe it is elsewhere, in Tokyo or Osaka.  Or maybe Japan, like Italy or Greece, is sort of stuck in its glorious past.

What does this mean for me as I pursue my own art career in this great city?  Will I break the Kyoto art world wide open and be celebrated or will I completely confound them and be railroaded out of town?