2- Panel 2

Fine Arts and Architecture

M. Creighton: Japan and Africa Connections via Tange Kenzo Designing Abuja, Nigeria’s Capital

Countries seeking greater global prominence, often contemplate constructing the Ideal City. For Nigeria this was a new capital, Abuja, between different tribal areas, to enhance national identity. Tange Kenzo emerged as Japan’s foremost architect from post-WWII until the end of the 20th century, designing Tokyo’s reconstruction and the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park. Tange’s firm was selected for the Abuja project, bringing together an African and Asian country, in contemplating the Ideal City for an African capital. Building Abuja took decades. During this time, particularly the 1980s and 1990s, Japanese and Nigerians interacted, with Japanese residing in Nigeria, and Africans visiting the firm in Tokyo. This was a time when many Japanese had little interactions with foreigners and less with Africans specifically. The Abuja project reflects ways national identity is envisioned, then materialized through urban landscapes, and how an African capital template was influenced by factors within Africa and Japan. It depicts social interactions of Japanese and Africans meeting at a time when this was rarer. Ethnographically this research presents African/Asian encounters, stories of Japanese in Africa and Nigerians in Japan. Theoretically, it shows how a national identity project for an African nation also drew on the creativity of a Japanese architect resulting in something Nigerian/African and Japanese/Asian within Africa, while global elements are revealed through world influences channeled through Tange’s architectural vision. The presentation reflects 75 years of shifts in Japan since the end of WWII when Tange emerged as one of Japan’s most prominent 20th century architect.

S. Hohlios: Kawamata Tadashi’s Coal Mine Tagawa: Interlocal Circulation, Regional Art, and the Global Contemporary

Kawamata Tadashi’s ten-year conceptual art project Coal Mine Tagawa (1996 – 2006) reconstructs architecture and stages exhibitionary events related to Chikuhō, Japan’s regional coal mining history. It reconsiders coal’s place in modern systems of industrial production, imperial expansion, mobilized labor, and identity formation. Kawamata views the project as a local arts-political intervention that contributes to global consciousness around coal. The project connects the rural city of Tagawa with former and ongoing sites of coal production throughout Japan as well as China, Russia, South America, Australia, and elsewhere. Interlocal exchange between rural Tagawa and other former mining towns circumvents, in Kawamata’s view, the usual international circuits of arts communication concentrated in urban cities and national capitals. Tagawa functions in this context as a crucible of interlocal exchange. The significance of Kawamata’s Coal Mine Tagawa resides, I argue, in the long-term negotiations of the project’s meaning, value, and trajectory. In conversation with collaborators from without, local participants (artists, residents, and town officials) seek a tangible outcome for their community who faces economic challenges brought on by depopulation, brain drain, and the evacuation of coal as its signature industry. I situate Kawamata’s own art practices and stake in the conversation of how art relates to communities and histories of experience—local, regional, and global—against Japanese debates on whether and how “regional art” (chiiki āto, chiiki geijutsu) benefits the regional community. I make the case for region as an important trajectory in Japan studies and global contemporary art studies. 

X. Jie Yang: Thoughts and Concepts in Visual Edo’s Pictorial Commentary on Tsurezuregusa

Tsurezuregusa, an essay from the 14th century was widely read in the 17th century, rapidly became a classical canon in the early and middle Edo time. Among various intelligent works to reproduce and to explain this book from hundreds of years ago, there was a group of titles which presented an unique angle: to apply pictures as a means to visualize the content of the medieval essay. Such pictorial commentaries covered most of the sections of the original writing.

Pictures as a commentary followed the long and abundant tradition of visual expressions in the Japanese culture history, and yet attempted many creative ways to further expand compositions, challenged themes and topics there were abstract. This paper is to discuss how commentary pictures described concepts and thoughts, whether or not they were conveyed widely. It would help us to better understand Edo people’s way of reading classical works and their faculty of imagination.

H. Tsang: The Architecture of Two Tokyo Summer Olympic Stadiums: How the Designs of Two Stadiums Tell the Tales of Two Eras of Japanese History

Tokyo will be hosting its second summer Olympics in 2021, and it will be very different from the first time the city hosted it in 1964. Aside from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced the event to be postponed by one year, Japan itself is very different than it was 47 years ago. In preparation for both events, the city commissioned the construction of many new sporting venues as well as strengthened the city’s infrastructure, i.e. the first Shinkansen (bullet train), public transportation, roads, signage, etc. to be ready to welcome the millions of athletes and visitors who came and will come from around the world. Architecture is like a time capsule and tells a story of time and place. In Tokyo, the architecture of the stadiums built for the two Olympics tell two stories that reflect the realities of the time showing two distinct eras in Japanese history. This study aims to analyse the design of two stadiums designed for two Tokyo Olympics, and decipher how the design and symbolism in the building reflect the culture, economy and society of Japan at the time they were built, and what they represent today. The two stadiums are the Yoyogi National Gymnasium was built in 1964 and designed by architect Kenzo Tange, and the new Japan National Stadium was built in 2019 and designed by architect Kengo Kuma. The significance of these two buildings largely defines and encapsulates the theories of post-war and contemporary architecture in Japan.