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By Zachary Small
Zachary Small spent two weeks speaking to artists, gallerists and government officials in Tokyo, Kyoto, Kanazawa and Osaka.
Yuko Mohri’s idea knew what the Japanese government was looking for its artists: anything conservative and quiet. In fact, it is not a Punk Renagat rocker with a inclination for moldy fruits.
“It started out as a joke,” she said during a recent interview in her Tokyo studio. She was explaining how memories of a school science experiment that turned lemons into makeshift batteries had spurred the idea for a proposal to fill the Japanese Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale with hanging lights plugged into pieces of fruit that would eventually rot. The exhibit was a critical success.
But the real story of her good fortune occurred in the scenes in which government officials, gallery owners and business leaders shaped a monetary network capable of supporting a Japanese artist like her on the foreign stage. It was part of a broader movement in Japan to regain the cultural influence the country enjoyed in the 1980s, when it dominated the global art market.
Those were the days when Japanese corporations regularly bought European treasures, helping transform the art market from a rich person’s hobby into an investment vehicle. A strong currency and a government campaign to promote foreign spending to expand Japanese business abroad led to jaw-dropping auction sales for Impressionist paintings by Renoir, Monet and Cézanne. From 1987 to 1991, official trade figures showed that Japanese collectors spent more than $8.7 billion ($16.5 billion in today’s dollars) on art. The trend peaked with the 1990 sale of van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” for $82.5 million, the highest price paid for an auctioned artwork at the time — roughly $200 million in today’s dollars.
Then, the monetary markets collapsed, which led to an era of economic stagnation in the 1990s, known as “lost decade”, until the disorders persist for so long that some have renamed it “30 lost years. ” The museums that had opened their doors in the skyscrapers that splashed the Tokyo horizon, have noticed that their reduced acquisition budgets and bankruptcy creditors sold their masterpieces due to Krach.
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