On the waterfront: the second Yokohama Triennale, set in warehouses in an active port zone, had a subtext of international movement

When Tadashi Kawamata was asked to take over planning for the second Yokohama Triennale on short notice, he was an unusual candidate, yet perhaps uniquely prepared. He is not a curator but an artist, and not an artist who curates, a la Mike Kelley and a number of others. Yet he has participated in international shows and projects since the early '80s, including two Documents, the Venice, Sao Paulo, Lyon and Shanghai biennials and the Munster Skulptur Projekt. He has taught at Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music since 1999.

Kawamata was thrust into this role following the resignation of architect Arata Isozaki due to scheduling and budgeting disagreements. Working quickly, starting less than a year before the opening date, Kawamata came up with a distinctive theme and selected three Japanese art professionals to help him execute it. (They are all men born, like him, in the early '50s: Taro Amano of the Yokohama Museum of Art, Takashi Serizawa of Tokyo's P3 Art and Environment alternative space, and Shingo Yamano of Fukuoka's Museum City Project.) Kawamata titled his Triennale "Art Circus (Jumping from the Ordinary)," and rather than aiming for sociopolitical declarations or institutional criticism, he went for populism. "Art Circus" aimed at local or, at most, regional appeal. It was programmed, like the most recent Documenta, with an elaborate list of activities that only those nearby would be able to attend. But, more than that, "Art Circus" itself was full of participatory works and works that changed over time. In this framework, video was a natural; Kawamata also picked up on the bars, lounges and other recuperative sites now common to the biennial circuit. Here, crowd comfort was a primary, not a secondary matter.

All this is not to say that this Triennale was an empty-headed entertainment. Among the offerings by 86 artists and groups there were discomfiting images. Ingrid Mwangi (born in Kenya, lives in Germany) showed a video installation titled Splayed (2004) that presented the artist's pensive visage and her outstretched arms on three flat screens mounted high on a wall, like a crucifix, and you watched as she carved the words "monogamous" and "polygamy" into her forearms with a utility knife. There were also pointed, if amusing, comments about contemporary life: Hedi Hariyanto (Indonesia) showed Where Is My Mom?, a life-size cow form covered with flattened milk cans, attached to a big cylinder with formula labels on the outside and rubber nipples and terra-cotta babies' heads inside. Other artists' works touched on the psychological and the spiritual. Yet the show as a whole emphasized doing.

The event took place in a pair of warehouses on a pier in Yokohama's active port zone, where goods arrive from around the world. Triennale visitors were cordoned off from the remainder of the pier by chain-link fences not just for admission-collection purposes but because the site was restricted by customs and immigration rules. This venue provided a subtext of international movement, purposeful or inadvertent. Most of the participating artists journeyed to Japan from elsewhere, so an understanding of cultural dislocation, expatriation and difference seemed at the forefront of many minds.

A few works were sited off the pier. They included a "hotel room" in Chinatown (more on this later); pink decorations by Maria Roosen (Netherlands) on Yokohama Tower, a sort of lighthouse overlooking the harbor; as well as two works in the adjacent shoreline park. One of these was Swimming Dragon, by Jiang Jie (China), in which the peak of a long, undulating, Chinese-tile roof seemed to rise from and sink into the soil like a scaly creature; the other was a pointed gateway by Luc Deleu (Belgium) consisting of four orange shipping containers standing on end. It was visible from a distance to lead visitors to the ticket booths (blue shipping containers) at the near end of the pier. Intrepid souls could walk a (half-mile) chain-link corridor to the warehouses under red-and-white-striped pennants by--of course!--Daniel Buren (a shuttle bus was easier but its route less festive). Within one of the warehouses, you could climb a bridgelike scaffolding by Keiichi Ikemizu (Japan) for an almost bird's-eye view of a portion of the fair, or you could sit at a collaborative work that included video, DVD and audio hookups, computer booths and tables with newspaper clippings. This well-wired site of exchange and information, titled Melting Pot, was the work of Open Circle, a Mumbai artist-initiated nonprofit organization founded in 1999.

Many other works in the Triennale were also team efforts. Among the largest groups were five Thai artists collectively known as SOI Project and five Chinese artists and an art director in the Long March Project (organized in 1999). The works by the Thai artists (soi means "back alley") included a lounge, games, music and installations. The Long March participants, with their interest in historical and geographic frameworks in a variety of Chinese locations (and a few foreign ones), offered performances and installations on such disparate subjects as building codes, psychic powers, the Lion Dance, "false documentary" videos and Chinatowns.