The Japan Foundation, in collaboration with the Museum of Art, Seoul National University, presents Re: Quest -Japanese Contemporary Art since the 1970s, an exhibition that surveys the art of the last 40 years, from the 1970s to the present.

In the past, Japanese art has been widely shown in the Asia region with an emphasis on cutting-edge, contemporary works. However, for this time, the exhibition will focus on the history of Japan’s postwar art, which provided an important foundation for later work, and will present the survey of the last 40 years of Japanese contemporary art from various perspectives. It will encompass works dating after 1970 that have never been introduced in a comprehensive manner in Korea, and will include works of important artists, who remain highly influential in the field, and those of younger artists. It is expected to offer the opportunities to reexamine Japanese contemporary art and consider the diversity, relationship, and interaction between artistic expression and art history in the wider Asia region since the end of World War II.

Concept
The 1970s deeply reflected the modernist ideals of Universalism. Its vocabulary and methods were applied to explore psychological and social domains in the 1980s. The following decade saw young artists to begin adopting a completely new perspective: they started viewing Japanese culture as if they were foreigners. Then from the 2000s it came to a new generation of artists who sought to present the daily life of a highly diverse and complex society in films and installations. Looking back, we realize just how far we've come.

Despite all these developments, only a few art exhibitions that aim to trace and survey historically the art works of the 1970s and '80s have been organized -- in Japan, at any rate -- in the last few decades. This may be another sign of globalism. Meanwhile, interest in contemporary art of Japan and other Asian countries -- that is to say the modern, or contemporary, art that developed in parallel to Western art -- is in fact growing ever stronger worldwide, partly due to the international success of artists such as Kusama Yayoi, Lee Ufan, and so on.

Is there such thing as Japanese contemporary art history--history in the sense of a sequence of events and transitions? If so, to what extent, if at all, is this local history connected to the world art map or the radical changes that have shaped art history in the rest of world? These are questions that have guided the development of this exhibition aimed at taking a fresh look at Japanese contemporary art from a historical perspective.
- Matsumoto Tohru (Deputy Director, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo)

Artists: Approximately 120 artworks by 53 artists from the 1970s to the present

*Image (left)
Everything is Everything, 2006
© Tanaka Koki
material: 8 channel DVDs, color, sound and many materials in daily use size: dimension variable
time: each DVDs are 00:01:31, 00:01:50, 00:01:20, 00:01:22, 00:01:34, 00:01:31, 00:01:19, 00:01:48.
view: Installation at Taipei Biennial 2006 "Dirty Yoga" in Taipei Fine Arts Museum