TOKYO, Japan — Art Fair Tokyo closed yesterday, reporting record visitor numbers and solid sales for its local participants. After the upheavals of last year, when the fair was postponed in the wake of Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami, its director Takahiro Kaneshima worked hard to put together the most extensive list of exhibitors to date for this year’s edition, and to strengthen the curatorial credibility of the event.
Compared to other international events of this type, Art Fair Tokyo is less sharply focused, presenting an eclectic mix of antiques, arts and crafts, nihonga (traditional Japanese paintings), and modern art, alongside contemporary offerings. This clearly made it a hit among visitors, who jammed the aisles over its four day run, but it tended to mitigate against artistic fireworks. There was little that pushed the envelope and even contemporary art powerhouse galleries like SCAI THE BATHHOUSE were restrained in what they put on show.
Business was briskest among Japanese galleries showing contemporary painting at its most unchallenging. Galerie nichido sold out an entire booth of works by Hiroki Yamamoto, whose oeuvre centers on young women in winsome poses rendered in an unthreatening palette of pastels. Other work finding favor included pieces in a similar vein by Tsuyoshi Katagiri (at Gallery Ginza Artone), bravura tempura and oil on canvas works in the style of Italian Renaissance masters by Masato Yoshioka at Saitama Gallery, and exquisite pencil on paper studies by Izumi Akiyama at Kobayashi Gallery. Although the tastes informing such acquisitions might be judged conservative, the prices collectors were willing to pay were not, with works by Yamamoto, Katagiri, Yoshioka, and Akiyama ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of Yen.
Overall business was slow for the handful of international exhibitors. Korea’s PKM Gallery hadn't secured any sales by the end of the fair, despite showing work by Lee Bul, who's currently having a solo show at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum. Doing best among the foreign galleries was Taipei’s TKG+, which featured video works referencing classical landscapes by Chi-Tsung Wu, and a project in honor of the victims of last year’s tsunami by Charwei Tsai. Tsai’s work was one of the hits of the fair as it required audience participation to be completed. It featured hundreds of shells gathered from the tsunami-ravaged beaches of northern Honshu on which Tsai invited fairgoers to inscribe words from the seminal Buddhist text, the Heart Sutra. The gallery was hoping to sell a number of sets of these shells, especially as part of the proceeds from their sale would be donated to the children of tsunami victims.
The dominance of local galleries at the fair made one wonder whether it should even aspire to being an international event. Fair director Kaneshima, when quizzed on this point, however, was adamant that it should. “International participation is very important to make Japan’s art market more transparent and more global,” he said, “[and to] stimulate Japanese galleries, too. It is necessary for the further improvement of the fair’s quality.” Certainly Art Fair Tokyo had done what it could to attract international participants, offering a range of incentives to offset the costs of exhibiting.
Despite disappointing results for the non-Japanese galleries this year, Kaneshima says there is an emerging group of younger collectors in the country who do have an “international perspective.” No doubt it will be the possibility of reaching them that will bring international exhibitors back to the fair next year.
Click on the slide show to see highlights from the Tokyo Art Fair.