by Jon Lackman | 19 March 2010 | Asia, Contemporary
The Japan Times interviews “Shihoko Iida, who late last year resigned from one of Tokyo’s most progressive contemporary art venues, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, and is now six months into a two-year sojourn at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia”:
Working in Australia has also opened Iida’s eyes to how her nation’s art is viewed from abroad. “Everyone is really interested in Japanese art,” she explained, “but, for them, the dominant discourse is still Takashi Murakami and his Superflat theory.” Murakami’s mid-1990s theory that playfulness, decorativeness and lack of depth are the dominant characteristics of Japanese visual expression — from classical painting and ukiyo-e through to manga, anime and contemporary art — is still, it turns out, the key reference point for the international audience. “It’s really a problem of translation,” Iida explained. “There’s nothing else they can refer to. (Art historian) Shigeo Chiba’s books aren’t translated, and for a long time catalogs and Web sites weren’t bilingual either.”
