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By Zachary Small
Zachary Small spent two weeks speaking with artists, galleries, and government representatives in Tokyo, Kyoto, Kanazawa, and Osaka.
Yuko Mohri knew what the Japanese government expected of its artists: something conservative and calm. In fact, he is not a punk rocker Renégat with a penchant for moldy fruits.
“It started as a joke,” he said in a recent interview in his Tokyo studio. He explained how memories of a school clinic transforming lemons into makeshift batteries had given rise to the concept of a proposal aimed at filling the Japanese pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale with suspended lamps connected to pieces of fruit that would eventually rot. The exhibition was a critical success.
But the genuine history of his good fortune occurred the scenes, where government officials, gallery owners and business leaders shape a monetary network capable of supporting a Japanese artist like her in the foreign stage. This was a component of a larger motion in Japan to claim the cultural influence that the country enjoyed in the 1980s, when the world art market ruled.
It was the time when Japanese corporations bought up European treasures, thus helping to reshape the art market from a wealthy outing into an investment vehicle. A strong currency and a government crusade aimed at promoting foreign spending to expand Japanese affairs abroad have led to impressive auctions for impressionist paintings by Renoir, Monet and Cézanne. From 1987 to 1991, official industry figures have shown that Japanese creditors have spent more than $8. 7 billion ($16. 5 billion today) on art. The trend peaked in 1990 with the sale of Dr. Gachet’s “portrait” by Van Gogh for $82. 5 million, the highest value paid for an art painting sold at the time, around $200 million in today’s dollars.
Then, the monetary markets crashed, which led to an era of economic stagnation in the 1990s known as the “lost decade”, until the disorders persisted for so long that other people renamed him “30 lost years. ” The skyscrapers of the company splashed the Tokyo horizon if their acquisition budgets were reduced, and bankruptcy creditors sold their masterpieces on the high seas due to the accident.
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