Arts & Culture on the Pacific Rim : A SPECIAL REPORT : Japanese Artists Buck a Rigid System

A pool of blood-red fabric explodes from the pelvic area of a billowing blue dress, which is armless, headless and backed by painting of a flaming nimbus.

Shoko Maemoto said this is what she felt one night last year, when she visited Bali during a local festival and found herself running around with abandon, in the dark. No social commentary is intended, she said, by the work of art. It is not a conscious statement about the constraints of her native culture, or the oppression of Japanese women, or the pent-up energy of a struggling artist.

Maemoto, 31, confessed that she does feel inhibited living in Japan and liberated when she travels, like many young Japanese who go abroad these days.

“But I’m not an intellectual,” she said. “I don’t like to frame up my ideas and present them to people in hard form. I prefer to relate my experiences and create stress in the viewer, maybe evoke some passion.”

Her work is hardly typical--some local critics dismiss it as frivolous--but it represents a new pulse in Japan’s art scene.

A generation of young artists is rebelling against the cliches that for decades dominated Japanese contemporary art. Their work is sometimes awash with color and loud with narrative; it is sometimes sensual and celebratory of natural forms and textures. And it is bucking against a rigid system that discourages innovation and risk-taking.

The outside world is beginning to take notice. Several Japanese artists received critical acclaim in Europe. In June, the first major U.S. exhibit of contemporary Japanese art in 18 years will open at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, featuring Maemoto’s installation piece, “Silent Explosion: Running Through the Night on Foreign Streets,” among the works of nine other artists. An explosion of other exhibitions in America are reflecting a boom in interest among American and European curators and collectors.

With the rise in foreign interest comes a grudging recognition that the new artists are doing more than imitating the trends in New York or Paris to work from an “emphatically, uniquely Japanese” aesthetic that “searches for the roots of Japanese culture,” said Howard Fox, curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

When Fox was invited to Japan to lecture on Western contemporary art at a museum four years ago, he was excited by the vitality of the work he saw in Tokyo’s galleries.

“I walked around quite amazed by Japanese society and astonished by the breadth and depth of contemporary Japanese art,” Fox said. “I knew this was a new world; it was the 21st Century. Here we were steeping ourselves in European art, and yet we knew virtually nothing about what was happening in Japan.”

Fox was especially smitten by a handful of sculptors working with earthy materials--wood, stone, molten-like metal--who expressed a spirituality of “communing with nature” in their art.

Consider Kazuo Kenmochi, 38, one of the artists Fox selected to participate in the County Museum of Art show next year, tentatively titled “The Primal Spirit: Ten Contemporary Japanese Sculptors.” In a recent installation at the Sagacho Exhibit Space, an avant-garde gallery on Tokyo’s waterfront, Kenmochi piled rotting, tar-stained lumber on the floor and covered the walls with blown-up photographs he had painted over.

A dismembered statue torso, chairs and teacups are seen darkly through the bold brush strokes of black, brown and orange oils, creating a powerful environment one critic described as “poisonous . . . confessional and accusatory.”

Kenmochi said he intended to “possess the space,” incorporating the stench of the tar, without dominating it entirely.

“I wanted to draw out the memory of the wood,” which he had salvaged from incineration after it was used at a construction site, Kenmochi said. “Wood has a cycle to it. There is a sense of time in wood that you can’t get out of stone or stainless steel.”

Maemoto and Kenmochi may be lesser names among the stable of young Japanese artists now earning international praise, but their stories are typical. Both paid for their debut by showing work in rental galleries, which is the norm here, and supported themselves with other jobs while waiting for acceptance by a seemingly uncaring public.

More than 90% of Japan’s galleries operate on a system of renting to the artists for upwards of $1,600 a week. When it is shown, contemporary art rarely sells because collectors favor safer investments in established Western art or traditional Japanese painting.

Corporate patronage is almost nil, and with few exceptions, Japan’s museums ignore home-grown artists. The government offers no tax breaks for museum donations, and beginning in April it will levy a new 3% consumption tax on transactions involving art, along with most other goods and services.

For many years, aspiring artists had to go overseas to seek recognition. Such was the case with the 1971 show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum--the last major museum show of contemporary Japanese art in the United States--which centered on the work of New York-based expatriates of the austere, minimalist “Mono-Ha” school.

But Maemoto and Kenmochi have never lived abroad. Both said they resolved at one point in their careers to stop paying for gallery exhibits and to challenge the system.

“I decided that I’d starve to death if I couldn’t make it,” said Maemoto, a woman whose fingernails are painted pink, green and purple. “It was sink or swim.”

Maemoto has managed to support herself over the past four years by selling decorative ceramic panels, which hang in the homes of wealthy patrons, but she has yet to interest a collector or a museum in one of her installations of psyche-rattling dresses.

Kenmochi teaches art at a private high school in Tokyo. To date, only one of his pieces has been spared destruction: a scrap lumber sculpture that is decaying next to a chicken coop on a friend’s farm.

The professional art world in Japan is locked up by conservative art societies that operate like cartels, rewarding artists for conformity and seniority rather than creativity.

“The people at the top of these societies will never fall, no matter how bad their work gets,” said Kunio Yaguchi, curator for the Japan Foundation, the cultural promotion arm of the Japanese government. “Their success is assured inside Japan, but outside, nobody knows about them, or cares.”

The work being done by the established artists tends toward hackneyed adaptations of traditional techniques and subject matters, which may explain why contemporary Japanese art has been largely overlooked by the West.

“The system stifles originality,” said Robert Singer, curator of Japanese art at the L.A. County Museum. “It’s hard for the Japanese to accept art that doesn’t look back to traditional models, and the artists who are doing work that breaks away from the mold can’t support themselves.”

The Hara Museum, founded 10 years ago by impresario Toshio Hara, scion of a wealthy banking and land-owning family, was the first Japanese institution, and remains one of the few to actively encourage and support unknown contemporary artists. The museum is co-sponsoring next year’s exhibit at the L.A. County Museum, starting the show in March at its Hara Museum ARC extension in Gunma Prefecture before it opens in Los Angeles in June 1990.

Hara, 54, who was educated at Princeton University, said the outside world’s interest in Japanese contemporary art comes at a time when Japan is redefining its cultural identity and attempting to shed its workaholic stereotype.

“We are going through a major transition period when we are changing very rapidly and starting to regain some self-confidence,” Hara said. “There’s a tremendous desire to show the world that Japanese are not just interested in working hard and making money. We want to express ourselves in a more unique way.”