JAPAN! It began with the slow dissolve of a long-haul flight and ended with an android: Hiroshi Ishiguro’s ALTER4, to be exact, its eyes rolling, mouth agape, arms raised in ecstasy.
I’d come to Tokyo for that city’s edition of Prada Mode, an “itinerant private club” for which the Italian luxury brand enlists an artist to organize a program of talks and events specific to its given location. Invitees so far have largely been excellent: Martine Syms (Los Angeles), Trevor Paglen and researcher Katie Crawford (Paris), the world-historically great filmmaker Jia Zhangke (Shanghai). In Japan, our host was to be Kazuyo Sejima, partner in the Pritzker-winning architectural firm SANAA, best known in New York as creators of the teetering stack of gray-white cubes that is the New Museum on the Bowery. That was my brief. Otherwise, I was going in blind.
We arrived on Friday morning, finding a sea of rounded Azealia bushes and crisply besuited factotums swiftly directing our movements. The venue: the gardens of the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, a hidden gem of an institution nestled in a leafy area near Meguro Station. Designed in the 1920s with input from Henri Rapin and René Lalique, the grand Art Deco structure briefly served as imperial residence for one Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, a dashing and cosmopolitan military leader who would later order the Nanjing Massacre. Yikes. Still, if you’re a sucker for machine-age botanical decoration, I couldn’t recommend it more.
Sejima presided, looking astonishingly great in a loosely draped T-shirt and a wedding-inspired pencil skirt festooned with thalassic spangles. Standing amid a sloped pavilion designed by her SANAA partner, Ryue Nishizawa, she introduced a lecture by Yukihide Muta, director of the museum, and later answered questions from the press. The event then began in earnest as the grounds filled up with impossibly stylish attendees, many with young children, and music filtered through the air.
Prada Mode cites Carsten Höller’s Fondazione Prada–commissioned Double Club, 2008–2009, as inspiration, and in keeping with that precedent, the structure of the proceedings owed a debt to the tradition of relational aesthetics—not only the movement’s 1990s heyday but its progression through the art world in the ’00s and beyond, as art institutions, eager to satisfy the demands of the post-Greenbergian “experience economy,” looked to artists for new models of audience engagement. And so we find a menu of recognizable tropes: Architectural pavilion? Check. Conversations? Check. Artist-designed seating areas? Check. Food, drink, music? Check check check. Unsurprisingly, it worked: The studied imprecision of the Teien’s garden formed an inviting backdrop to the aleatory unfolding of leisure. Families in beautiful clothes laid out on Sejima’s custom furniture (her hana hana tables and severe/cute bunny chairs), while discreetly placed speakers played shimmering electronica drones (part of a music program organized by Craig Richards and writer/editor Kunichi Nomura) that elevated the day into a dreamlike unreality. The talks—especially the presentation by Nishizawa and architect Junya Ishigami—were good. Meanwhile, Prada’s triangular logo asserted itself on virtually every surface, even the paper sleeves holding chopsticks. This branded experience proved to be relational aesthetics’ ideal expression, its final form.
At night, the indolent pleasures of a day in the park dissolved into something more like a party as the guilelessness of families-with-children gave way to the ambient self-consciousness of the young. I have it on good authority that attendees included actors and actresses such as Shuichiro Naito, Rinka Kumada, and Kentaro Sakaguchi, star of the 2018 Japanese romantic-fantasy Color Me True. A mass of teen girls thronged outside the Teien’s entrance, iPhones pointed inward. “Are there celebrities here?” I asked. “I heard the Korean ambassador is coming,” someone said. Like, a diplomat? No no, brand ambassador—none other than K-pop heartthrob Jaehyun. (Who later joined us for dinner, holding court with his entourage in the museum’s elegantly appointed courtyard.)
But the moment that left me starstruck transpired hours earlier, at one of the traditional tea ceremonies regularly scheduled for attendees. Let’s be clear, I avoid “cultural experiences” at all costs—prefab touristic consumption creeps me out—but I set that proclivity aside for journalism’s sake. Plus, the ceremony was being led by one Sen So’oku, a “grand tea master” who has lectured widely about the history of chanoyu at venues like the Japan Society in New York. What’s more, he was joined by a man I have shamelessly stanned for decades: none other than Hiroshi Sugimoto. (The photographer’s series of darkened movie theaters remains, to me, a signal statement on the medium of analogue film at the twilight of its dissolution.)
In this very intimate setting (there were no more than a dozen of us), Sugimoto explained that the ceramic tea bowls from which we drank were ones he’d made as a student, and that the scroll hanging in the tokonoma, or teahouse alcove, featured his student work as well: a black-and-white photo of Kegon Waterfall, in the Tochigi Prefecture, and the genesis, Sugimoto explained, of his serene and epochal seascapes. So cool.
Day Two: A gray mist clung to the air, and the crowds huddled under the pavilion to escape the rain. On the schedule was a conversation between Sejima and curator Yuko Hasegawa, and afterward, one between writer Mariko Asabuki and composer Keiichiro Shibuya. But the highlight of the day, no doubt, was the aforementioned android. Designed by Ishiguro—an engineer famous for making a robotic copy of himself—the robot moved in response to the notes Shibuya played on his synthesizer. Falling fathoms deep in the uncanny valley, it jerked and rotated on a hydraulic pivot, its gray-rubber baby face grinning and grimacing, its mouth opening wide as if screaming electronic drones. “Where was it born?” I heard someone ask.
The performance was short, yet its bizarreness lingered. For better or worse, Tokyo remains baked into our ideas about the future, giving it shape and infusing its possibilities. But the future won’t always mean weirdness and wonder. As Sejima remarked the day before, “Tokyo has changed; it has gotten modern . . . architecture is becoming more about mass production.”
I noticed a camera flash in the distance and the rain continued to fall.
