黑料不打烊

This summer, the city of Sapporo, Japan is set on a mission to define itself as a contemporary art destination with it’s first organized art event, the Sapporo International Art Festival. Spreading across the city’s cultural institutions and unlikely venues, the festival celebrates contemporary art, sound and performance based work, all curated by New York based Japanese artist and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. Up until September 28th the festival has adopted the theme of "Cities and Nature". With this lens, Sakamoto has linked art and activism, hoping to engage visitors with artworks that reference the history and land of Sapporo through the eyes of the artists he has chosen. For its debut, Sakamoto has chosen sixty-two international and Japanese artists and groups from the past and present. The two main venues are the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art and the Sapporo Art Museum. Innovative works like Fujiko Nakaya’s fog sculpture and Takashi Kuribayashi’s paper mountain experience will mesh with Sakamoto’s love for new media, and are installed at several off-beat satellite venues, all of which go to lend SIAF international art festival status.

For the past two years, appointed director Ryuichi Sakamoto has been developing SIAF, fusing his experience with the art world of his adopted home of New York with the selection of both cutting edge international and Japanese artists, to create a globally influenced vision.  As a result of these efforts SIAF is different than other international festivals, with an emphasis and focus on enriching Japan’s culture, rather than on monetary gain. By fusing art and activism, Sakamoto hopes that SIAF will create a long lasting global dialogue that puts the importance of preservation and history in front of the nose of the art world. Sakamoto is joined by two assistant curators; Shihoko Iida of the Aichi Triennale, and Yukiki Shikata, an associate curator from Mori Museum.

Sakamoto begins the visitor experience at the utmost starting point- the New Chitose Airport. Here, art enthusiasts traveling to Sapporo specifically for SIAF may begin their art pilgrimage properly, by experiencing Sakamoto’s Welcome Sound as they enter the city. Sakamoto, has also included himself once more, using a glass pyramid in Isamu Noguchi’s iconic Moerenuma Park as the venue for a sound installation collaboration with Yamaguchi Centre for Arts and Media. Completed in 2005 (18 years after Noguchi’s death), the park was considered by the late artist to be a giant sculpture in the making. This harmonistic approach to nature and art is the perfect venue for Sakamoto’s Forest Symphony in Moerenuma, a collection of audio speakers which transmit bioelectrical data sounds collected from sensors placed on trees around Japan, England and Australia. These sounds are meant to let visitors hear the voices of trees, while inside Noguchi’s park cum sculpture. Unfortunately these two interactions with Sakamoto's sound works will be a visitors’ last chance. The composer was diagnosed with throat cancer in June, and has subsequently canceled all of his SIAF public engagements to remain in New York.

Sapporo Art Museum acts as a major hub of the exhibition, holding some of Sakamoto’s most important examples of relationships between art and the environment. Perhaps the most anticipated piece is Fujiko Nakaya’s Fogscape #47412.  Using the courtyard of the museum as its container, the piece appears like a dense cloud borrowed from nature. Viewers are enveloped with the thick fog, becoming temporarily separated from the museum and their immediate reality, as if suspended mid-air in a billowy cloud on an autumn day. This isolation then gradually dissipates as Nakaya’s fog recedes, letting visitors go on their merry way.

Japanese artist Takashi Kuribayashi’s large scale installation, Forest from Forest, is another immersive piece that draws the viewer into a fabricated nature experience. Made from washi paper (which is made from trees), the forest spreads like a canopy along the upper portion of one of the museum’s galleries. In order for visitors to experience the artificial forest up-close, they must remove themselves from the gallery itself, and climb ladders through vantage points that thrust them into the middle of the white environment. Standing atop the ladders, the visitors experience the snowy paper forest on solitude, until, of course it is the next person’s turn.

The absence of nature is the theme of Youki Hirakawa’s Vanished Tree. The video installation, which is projected onto the ceiling, depicts the holes in the forest canopy above tree stumps the artist found in Makomanai Park. These holes, that reveal glimpses of the sky, are like “vanished forests,” symbolizing the encroaching urbanization that seeps across rural, forested areas everywhere.

Outside of the museum, Ryo Yamada’s Air Garden is perched above a grassy hill. Made from plywood, the installation is a narrow walkway that extends from a private garden into the sky.  Accessible by only one visitor at a time, the piece is meant to thrust visitors into the fresh air above, allowing each person to experience a moment in the sky and connect with nature without the distractions of other people.

Aside from engaging with nature, Sakamoto also has a penchant for new media. Young robotics artists So Kanno and Takahiro Yamaguchi have brought their Senseless Drawing Bot, an automated robot that spews colored paint from pressurized cans. The robot is placed within a room lined with blank canvases, where it creates an automated graffiti abstractions as it moves around, taking the artist’s hand out of the art making process.

   

These installations are rounded out with the presence of work by international stars. The epic sculpture Line of Control by leading Indian contemporary artist Subodh Gupta blooms in a mushroom cloud of shiny kitchen utensils, simultaneously symbolizing destruction and abundance. SIAF also brings the work of Anselm Kiefer to Sapporo for the first time, including the piece Meloncholia-  a sculpture of a German fighter plane, relates Kiefer’s commentary on the military past of his own country to global problems and responsibilities.

Beyond the museum settings, is a program called Sensing Streams, which takes place in an unlikely venue, the 520 meter Sapporo Ekimae-dori Underground Walkway which connects two subway stations. Curated by assistant Yukiko Shikata, the exhibition contrasts the flow of information and data with the physical flow of the rivers in the topography of Sapporo, contrasted with the commuters that flow from one station to the next in the walkway each day.

A full schedule of talks, musical performances, and film screenings will enliven the city throughout duration of the festival. Despite Sakamoto’s tragic diagnosis, the Sapporo International Art Festival is poised under his vision to permeate the city with his finger print, setting a precedent for future curators of SIAF to be inspired by.