"Emotional Site" at the Shokuryo Building - Tokyo

The group show "Emotional Site" was a bittersweet farewell to the Shokuryo Building, a three-story former rice and food market built in 1927 that had served as one of Tokyo's alternative-art mainstays for nearly 20 years and a center of contemporary galleries for about six. But "old and atmospheric" rarely lasts in the City of Perpetual Renewal, and soon the Shokuryo will be torn down and replaced by condos.

The four galleries associated with the building's artistic history banded together to produce a nine-day exhibition of 36 of their artists. No room went unused. Abandoned offices of pickle makers and rice merchants displayed copious drawings by Yoshitomo Nara, videos by Jeanne Dunning and Gillian Wearing, and even early pieces by Takashi Murakami. A photo of Paul McCarthy's "Death Ship" performance was positioned high on the wall above a putrid toilet in one of the ancient coed bathrooms.

Several artists produced memorable site-specific installations that captured the building's unique spaces and history. Hee Chang Yoon hung lumpy, imperfect ceramic-block protrusions about waist-high on several of the interior walls. Painted the faded blue-gray of the hallways they occupied, the objects seemed to be organic growths that, like the flaking paint, scarred linoleum, and stained and sun-bleached floors, traced the building's aging process.

Yasumasa Morimura had one of his breakthrough shows in Sagacho Exhibit Space, Shokuryo's alternative gallery, in the late 1980s. For "Emotional Site," Morimura installed a series of video monitors in the spooky, low-ceilinged storage chambers of the blue-lit, dungeonlike boiler rooms. Peeping through small windows in the doors, you could see (and hear) close-up hands clapping at different speeds, interspersed with silent intervals of blackness. A sculpture of two hands clasped together as in prayer or at the contact point of clapping was floodlit in the center of a larger room.

In the broad open courtyard, emerging artist Shintaro Miyake--dressed in a homemade Kabuki outfit with a comic, oversized head--painted a huge version of one of his female figures in a hilarious performance. As hundreds of spectators hung out of windows, off balconies and from the rooftop, Miyake swept onto the enormous canvas. He picked up a giant roller brush and scurried awkwardly back and forth for about 20 minutes trying to keep his floor-length braids of red hair from falling into the black paint outline. Throughout, Miyake proclaimed his intentions in a loud Kabuki voice, "Now I'm painting the mouth!" and so on. The spectacle culminated in a shower of confetti thrown from overhead, drifting down around the artist as he twirled in the center of his creation.

The huge public turnout for "Emotional Site" revealed the desperate need for a major alternative-art space in Tokyo. The surprising amount of support for this one--more than 1,700 people came on a single Sunday--makes clear the significant loss represented by the Shokuryo's demise.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group