Art festivals in Japan: Fueling revitalization, tourism, and self-censorship

ABSTRACT

This paper critically considers large-scale contemporary art festivals that have become a significant force of art tourism in Japan. While many of these projects got their start in socially conscious endeavors with a focus on machizukuri, or local community building, the increase of government-sponsored revitalization initiatives and heightened pressure from the tourism industry has shifted the output of these festivals over the years. As such, this paper aims to situate such festivals within their shifting genealogy, observe some of the ways that today’s artists and their artwork may be subject to precarious positions of instrumentalization and censorship, and raise points of critique for audiences to keep in mind around the topic of rural revitalization – i.e. what are some of the challenges that artists, curators, and organizers face today? While reflecting on factors at stake for art and cultural production in a hyper-touristic context, this paper also highlights the work of Shitamichi Motoyuki, an artist disrupting this paradigm in ways reminiscent of earlier forms of machizukuri art practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Japanese art
• contemporary art
• revitalization
• art tourism
• art festivals
• censorship

Introduction

Since the late 1990s, large-scale “art festivals for revitalization” have become an increasingly popular method of machizukuri, or community-building, to combat Japan’s ongoing conditions of depopulation, economic stagnation, and the mounting disparity between its urban and rural regions.¹ The proliferation of art festivals in Japan has picked up speed in the past decade in correlation to the growing trend of fashionable “art tourism.” As such, the art festival model of revitalization has become an effective method for various cities and regions to stimulate their local economies by incentivizing domestic and international tourism. The draw of these large-scale, recurring, multi-week, and often multi-season events attract visitors with the promise of contemporary art that highlights and celebrates the unique culture of each given locale.

Despite such an optimistic premise, sociological and visual studies research has begun to reflect a more complex reality, as these art festivals also have the potential to produce new problems for host communities even as they stimulate economic growth (Klien 2010a; Qu 2019; Tagore-Erwin 2018a). Large-scale art festivals bring droves of seasonal tourists that often inconvenience and disgruntle the very host communities they are meant to revitalize and may also be positioning the participating artists themselves in precarious ways, often hidden by socially engaged machizukuri rhetoric. The objective of this paper is thus to consider the challenges that artists, curators, and organizers may face today by outlining and exploring some of the ways that the marriage of state-sponsorship and social engagement in art festivals may be creating an environment that simultaneously instrumentalizes artists that engage with social practice while repressing artistic expression. This paper expresses a cautionary approach towards the art festival model by reflecting on some of the factors at stake for art and cultural production in a hyper-touristic context, and recognizes the work of Shitamichi Motoyuki, an artist working quietly to disrupt this paradigm in ways that are evocative of earlier forms of machizukuri art practices.

Art festival paradigm and origins

Many of Japan’s revitalization festivals today have a format of commissioning or curating artworks to be sited throughout a town or region in locations that repurpose abandoned buildings or create emphasis on the local culture and surrounding landscape. They usually invite audiences (including locals, tourists, and volunteers) to form a renewed appreciation for the locale, while spending time and money in the region – effectively contributing to both the cultural and economic “revitalization” of the locale.² For decades, these festivals and their associated artworks were seemingly overlooked on an international scale, absent from so-called “global” publications about contemporary art happenings (i.e. western tastemakers). However, this has changed in recent years. Much has been written about Japan’s art festivals in international art circles and academia, with primary attention to this phenomenon revolving around the particularly successful endeavors of Kitagawa Fram, the renowned Art Director of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, which became an archetype for emerging machizukuri-oriented art festivals in Japan in the 2000s. The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (ETAT) was inaugurated by Kitagawa in the rural Echigo-Tsumari mountain region of his home prefecture of Niigata in 2000. It is now considered the premier revitalization festival in Japan, including a lineup of hundreds of art installations, performances, community workshops, dining occasions, and other associated events over the course of 50 days.

Kitagawa’s festival model aims to harness the power of a “slow art” experience of visiting art sites scattered throughout a region as a way to celebrate the uniqueness of the place, revitalize the negative impacts of depopulation and economic decline, as well as democratize the art world by bringing it outside of Japan’s urban centers and into the countryside (Kitagawa 2015; Tagore-Erwin 2018a). Kitagawa’s approach is not apolitical – his initial, anti-consumerist approach to these festivals was likely influenced by his early days as a former leader of leftist student activist movements in the late 1960s. Kitagawa has written that these experiences inspired him to establish large committees and a diverse volunteer-base to keep festival operations free of exclusivity and intolerance through “no policy, no leaders, and a fluid definition of membership” (Kitagawa 2015).

In the eight cycles since its inauguration, ETAT has resulted in a measurable increase of art tourism in the area, contributing to the economic vitality and funding of infrastructure in the region – and becoming the pioneering model of Japan’s revitalization festival movement (Jesty 2021; Klien 2010b). As such, the success of what art historian Justin Jesty has referred to as the “Echigo-Tsumari paradigm” – including the telltale festival branding and marketing rhetoric, extensive volunteer support systems, and the sprawling of art sites throughout a locale – has been reproduced for other festivals in Japan’s rural regions, most notably the Setouchi International Art Triennale (Jesty 2021).

Historically speaking, Japan’s modern art system was largely self-operated by artist-led bijutsu dantai (art associations) with very little outside support for the arts, but the outdoor model of today’s revitalization festivals can be traced back to dantai-led experimentation in outdoor exhibitions of the late 1950s and 1960s (Tomii 2017). The experiments brought art outside of the museum context, but machizukuri-focused art initiatives really began with ground-up community projects in the early 1990s – foundational activities that art historian Kajiya Kenji argues were representative of a “shift from artist-oriented activities organized by artists to audience-oriented projects organized by curators or curatorially minded artists” (2017, author’s emphasis). Such initiatives included Art Camp Hakushū (1988–1999) and the Haizuka Earthworks Project (1994–2003), two important artist-run experiments that embody the initial community-building idealism behind the more commercialized festival models that drive art tourism today (Kajiya 2017).

Art Camp Hakushū was a month-long summer festival organized by Butoh dancer Tanaka Min at an experimental art cooperative he ran on a farm in the village of Hakushū in Yamanashi Prefecture (Kajiya 2017; Tanaka 2022). Artists from Japan and abroad were invited by the curatorially-minded Tanaka to farm the land – including negotiating leases with local landowners – while producing artworks on site with the intent of “exhibiting them until they decay[ed] and turn[ed] to dust” (Kajiya 2017; Tanaka 2022)., A simultaneous camp for children was also established, where local elementary and junior high school students could learn about art and farming amongst the visiting artists (Tanaka 2022). Art Camp Hakushū developed into an artist-run operation that effectively created a sustained community in a depopulated area, with more than 70 artists participating in the camp before it was restructured in 1999.³

The Haizuka Earthworks Project was conducted in northeastern Hiroshima during the construction of the Haizuka Dam, which was slated to displace the inhabitants of three small towns along the Enokawa river (Haizuka Earthworks Projects n.d.; Kajiya 2017). Artist Okazaki Kenjirō and a group of local and non-local artists, architects, engineers, natural scientists, and social scientists organized robust workshop programs for adults and summer camps for children to ease the anxieties of the transition period. A main focus of their work was using art to revitalize the spirit of the impacted community and reframe the disappearance of their historic villages and farms (Haizuka Earthworks Projects, n.d..). They scrutinized construction plans on behalf of the impacted residents, creating counterproposals that better conserved the natural environment. For example, Okazaki worked for years with government officials to revise an unsatisfactory proposal to turn an abundant rice field into a swampy reservoir, instead helping facilitate the creation of an accessible natural wildlife area, Nakatsukuni Park (Haizuka Earthworks Projects, n.d..). Even though they could not prevent the dam’s construction or community’s displacement, the multifaceted Haizuka Earthworks Project highlighted existing relationships within the community itself and organized projects to foster sustained pride and ownership over a landscape that would inevitably be altered forever.

Artist residencies, community workshops, children’s programs, volunteer systems, and emphasis on local environment are still evoked in the idealistic rhetoric of the Echigo-Tsumari model today, but with increasing popularity throughout the 2000s, many art festivals have inevitably become commercialized, top-down initiatives by the state and large corporations. Cultural economist Kawashima Nobuko has detailed how existing infrastructural support for the arts was established during Japan’s economic boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s – roughly around the same time that Art Camp Hakushū was formed (2017). During this inflated “bubble” economy there was heavy investment in the construction of high-quality arts facilities, but a noticeable lack of arts management education programs resulted in a scarcity of individuals who could sufficiently manage their use (Kawashima 2017). It wasn’t until after the market crash that a new generation of arts management officials entered the workforce and facilitated the development of governmental and corporate sponsorships for a range of art initiatives and subsidies that can be observed today in the funding structure of much of Japan’s art scene. Art Camp Hakushū was one of the first initiatives to receive subsidies this way due to the keen skillset of the late Kobata Kazue, a curator and longtime associate of Tanaka Min. Kobata organized funding for the camp by serving on its successful “Promotional Operating Committee” that included Saji Keizō, president of Suntory and well-known art patron; Yanai Hiroshi, president of the publishing and online ticketing company PIA Corporation; as well as Shimokobe Atsushi, key bureaucratic architect of national development projects in postwar Japan (Tanaka 2022).

During the economic bubble, pre-existing government-led public art initiatives had also picked up speed, installing thousands of sculptures around Japan to improve public amenities and further increase the property values of urban development (Kajiya 2017; Yagi 2010). When the markets crashed, budget cuts were made to urban development. The cultural sector was instead incentivized to invest in arts and culture programs because they were cost-effective ways of revitalizing neglected areas of Japan – as demonstrated by the socially engaged activities of the Haizuka Earthworks Project (Kawashima 2017). By positioning cultural policy in connection with other public policy areas, government spending on arts and culture projects became “justified” in their potential to lead to community development, inbound tourism, national branding, and related soft power (Kawashima 2017). As the status of cultural policy has risen, national and local governmental authorities have been increasingly held responsible for integrating cultural policy within larger frameworks of city and community development in regions throughout Japan. These machizukuri initiatives continued to proliferate as a result of the development frenzy leading up to the 2020/21 Olympics (Kawashima 2017). Thus, the model of art festivals for revitalization has become enacted more and more as a cost-efficient solution, a successful marriage of economic and cultural development exemplified by the success of Kitagawa’s ETAT. Research by sociologist Meng Qu uncovered more than 80 similar art festivals of varying scales – both urban and rural – across the nation as of 2017. These festivals have been garnering support from the National Agency for Cultural Affairs, and they retain local and prefectural government individuals on festival executive committees (Qu 2019). Kitagawa himself continues to direct five of the largest of these festivals (Jesty 2021).

Socially engaged art and its discontents: Instrumentalization and censorship

Consequently, domestic artists have been provided with significant platforms to experiment in the production and exhibition of artworks that engage the community in various ways, a practice referred to as “socially engaged art” (it has often been referred to domestically as āto purojekto, the Japanese transliteration of “Art Projects”). Increased access to economic support for the arts from state and corporate sponsors has provided a stream in funding opportunities for art initiatives that can be tacked on to larger community-development initiatives, and this has facilitated socially engaged art practices to become more widespread, prompting what has been referred to as a “social turn” in the Japanese art scene (Jesty 2017). Festival organizers often encourage and prioritize projects that support civic engagement, with an emphasis on interaction and exchange, collaboration with locals, and promotion of local culture. As such, these revitalization festivals have become a hotbed for artists that engage with community and other forms of social engagement, especially emerging artists with propositions for artistic projects that aim to rejuvenate and repurpose abandoned buildings, form new connections between community members, enable participation from locals in the creation of their work, and/or otherwise offer various forms of assistance to local communities.

Especially in the years since the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, there has been a wave of young artists engaging with social and participatory art activities, as observed by sociologist Mōri (2015). Many artists included in festival lineups engage directly with the sociopolitical work of aiding in community recovery, blurring the boundaries between art and social work. However, this in turn may be placing a generation of artists at risk of being taken advantage of behind a cheerful machizukuri rhetoric. The line between social practice and socially engaged art is notoriously elusive and has been subject to ongoing debates in art circles both in Japan as well as internationally for more than two decades. Particularly relevant to these festivals is the ongoing discussion around the question of ethics – in a genre of art practice that tends to involve local communities, the artists and associated funding apparatuses of socially engaged art projects are necessarily scrutinized for their approach to that involvement. On this topic, art critics and curators in the US/Europe have voiced concerns that can be applied to what is occurring in Japan; they worry that the defunding of public sectors has created a vacuum where artists step in to provide social services such as education and housing in the absence of government support (Bishop 2006; Thompson 2012).

Mōri echoes these concerns with regards to Japan’s recent cultural policies; he claims that “while the art market thrives in the context of speculative neoliberalist globalization, artistic practices have gradually been reorganized under the pressure of both public and private financially-led instrumentalism” (2015). As cultural management remains a powerful government sector, and support for the revitalizing potential of art (i.e. economic) continues to propagate, it is essential to have a critical approach to the intentions and limitations put in place by the stakeholders behind Japan’s increasingly prevalent festivals for revitalization. Especially after the Great East Japan Earthquake, the instrumental aims of government stakeholders are cause for concern. Sociologist Adrian Favell has addressed the growing concern about artists being “drafted into welfare service,” and noted that the “idealized presentation of some [art] projects can mask the social conflicts and divisions” that have been produced by the governments’ neglect towards marginalized populations, especially post-disaster (2017). If the goal is truly for increasing development and economic stimulus, aren’t there more direct and cost-effective routes of action for machizukuri in rural regions that don’t handle artists and artworks like “spinning tops” (Tagore-Erwin 2018b)? Even if the development of Japan’s recent cultural policies has created more opportunities to support oneself through art, artists are also wary of it being true only insofar as they align with the goals of government stakeholders. With so much dependence on public funding, artists become vulnerable to co-option and suppression of their artistic individuality – this in turn can compromise the free political expression of artists.

Sociologists have suggested the 2011 disaster served as a catalyst for a notable resurgence of political engagement and activism in Japan. This can also be witnessed in the art scene in a correlating movement towards socially engaged and political art practices (Chiavacci and Obinger 2018; Hasegawa 2018). Mōri (2015) has argued that even before 2011, Japan’s lengthy recession as well as the international shock of the 9/11 attacks in the United States had moved artists in Japan towards more subtle forms of political engagement in their work, but it was not until the 2011 triple disaster and its fall-out that many young artists began to more brazenly situate their artwork in relation to sociopolitical issues in the mainstream. This is hardly the first generation of political artists in Japan, but the parallel between the recent political engagements of artists and the emergence of Japan’s new protest cycle has been more visible in the domestic art scene and on an international scale.⁴ At the same time, however, Japan became notorious for the suppression of free speech and political opinion under Abe Shinzō’s administration, still ranking only 68 out of 180 in the “World Press Freedom Index” as of 2023 (Reporters Without Borders 2023). For this reason, the question of censorship – or self-censorship as it is often posed in Japan – is crucial when it comes to the influence that government stakeholders have on the artistic content of the festivals. This seems especially pressing in light of the highly mediatized censorship scandal of the “After ‘Freedom of Expression’” exhibition at the 2019 Aichi Triennale, which ultimately resulted in the retraction of 78 million yen in subsidies promised by the Japan Arts Council for the Triennale and the revision of the funding body’s policy to allow the government agency to withdraw financial support for art and cultural works deemed “inappropriate” for the public (Mōri 2019). Another high-profile event was when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs rescinded the official support of the Japanese Embassy for the exhibition “Japan Unlimited” held in Vienna, Austria, in November 2019 for including brazenly political works that painted an unflattering image of Japan.⁵ More recently, The Human Rights Division of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government banned the screening of a film during Iiyama Yuki’s exhibition “We Walk and Talk to Search Your True Home” about ableism at the Tokyo Metropolitan Human Rights Plaza in 2022. Iiyama’s film “In-Mates” seems to have crossed the line by including information about the massacre of Korean residents during the 1923 Kanto Earthquake. These censures are ominous, demonstrating how divergent political views are rendered invisible, and raising concerns about their likely influence on the curatorial processes of art festivals to come. This kind of “preventative power” occurs in the art world as the fear of losing funding with the inclusion of political artworks prompts art administrators and curators to self-regulate to avoid loss of support (Mōri 2014). The recent frequency of these incidents could effectively silence a new generation of artists in Japan who are increasingly engaged in social and political issues.

Expectations for artists to be responsible for executing social work initiatives may ultimately relinquish the state from bearing responsibility for supporting these peripheral communities. Can artists attempting to fulfill their proposed projects really be held accountable for the revitalization of these communities? And if so, what does this mean for free artistic expression – does their work simply become a force of creative, state-sponsored social work? In such a sensitive (and regulated) context, it’s certainly important for curators, critics, and artists to be thinking about what it means to produce art freely and what kind of art is possible to produce freely. Art critic Andrew Maerkle pointed out that the optimistic promises of art festivals in Japan serve to overshadow and prevent deliberation on the ideological agendas at work, risking artists’ “subsum[ption] into the celebratory propaganda machine” (2017). Even as the government is coming down hard on political artists, the trend of social engagement in art has reached nationally encompassing levels, such as the 2019 establishment of a new grants system specifically for socially engaged art practice, the Kawamura Arts and Cultural Foundation. The notion that socially engaged art can be encouraged while political art is admonished is transparently contradictory, operating on the assumption that the social and political are separate areas of art practice.

Can the work of socially engaged artists be taken seriously against the backdrop of tourism, or are artists simply being deployed as generators of cultural capital that can then be integrated into a respective region’s brand (or even the nation as a whole)? Furthermore, does their artwork really attend to the needs of local residents, or do they operate as advertisements for future gentrification and redevelopment of once economically destitute areas? As they have become more popular, sponsorship and donations from private industries that benefit economically from the festival seasons, such as railways, airlines, banks, hotels, and tour operators have increased, alongside funding opportunities from cultural foundations and universities that focus on cultural exchange within the Asia Pacific, all of which in turn influences festival line-ups.⁶ Additionally, the recurring inclusion of works by international art stars such as Yayoi Kusama, James Turrell, and Olafur Eliasson also raise questions as to whether these festivals are truly engaging with the local community or simply becoming tourist destinations (Tagore-Erwin 2018a).

As pointed out by Qu, disparities emerge in the opposition between a contemporary art paradigm and the slow-life traditions of many of Japan’s rural areas (2019). Perhaps the apolitical “theme park” appeal of many of these art festivals, while serving to attract tourists in droves, does more to disrupt existing communities than to showcase new forms of artist expression in Japan. Those who have voiced criticism of the contemporary art festivals’ impact on local populations have argued that they disrupt the lives and traditions of the residents that host them (Akagawa 2015; Klien 2010a; Qu 2019). Especially with the ETAT’s model of revitalization, much of the draw of the festivals is the promise that the artwork inserted into the communities will serve and reflect residents. In critical studies of the larger festivals, it has been observed that locals have been displeased with festival endeavors – a perspective that is not necessarily being accounted for in the organizers’ calls to artists. Accordingly, in his study of the Setouchi International Art Triennale, Qu urges scholars that examine socially engaged art as a revitalization mechanism to extend their focus from the aesthetic qualities of the artworks to the “real, local impacts of intervention” (2019, 36). However, the notion that festival organizers can come to rely on the practices of artists’ temporary involvement in a community to rejuvenate the communities is quite impractical in and of itself – this top-down narrative may be positioning artists as patronizing outsiders, inserting themselves into a community to “better” it, with or without their consent. In contrast to the artist-run initiatives of Art Camp Hakushū and Haizuka Earthworks, the positioning of outsider artists as agents of governmental and corporate agendas could easily be construed as antagonistic and even disruptive to the community.⁷

Shitamichi Motoyuki’s Setouchi “” Archive

At the same time, there is growing awareness of this paradigm amongst artists themselves. Research-based artist Shitamichi Motoyuki (b. Okayama, 1978) is one such artist, working from the popular “art island” of Naoshima to run the Setouchi “” Archive at Miyanoura Gallery 6, a unique space that engages with the local community from within the thriving tourism of the Setouchi International Art Triennale. Originally from nearby Okayama, Shitamichi had spent the majority of his nomadic, research-based photographic career with home bases in urban centers, first in Tokyo then Nagoya. In 2020, he made the decision to move with his family to the small island of Naoshima during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.⁸ The artist was approached by the Fukutake Foundation in 2018 about starting an “art laboratory” focused on the Setouchi region – an idea that grew into his proposal to create a museum focused on archiving and exhibiting the region’s culture and history. During early site visits, Shitamichi had noticed that Naoshima lacked a local library or museum, an observation that grew into the artist’s drive to organize a community space that primarily serves residents. He has now been running the Setouchi “” Archive for 4 years, creating a dynamic assortment of exhibitions and collaborative projects within the renovated walls of a former pachinko parlor-turned-gallery designed by architect Nishizawa Taira.⁹ As suggested by the blank space left in the title of the Setouchi “” Archive, Shitamichi’s projects are open-ended and ephemeral, and the title of the space is updated based on the current exhibition. The unique laboratory format of the space has allowed Shitamichi to actively collaborate with locals to source and preserve overlooked histories of the region, a process that is necessarily slow and communal, in contrast to the swift and single-minded processes of tourism development. As such, the artist has been able to inventively circumvent the transplanting nature of many of the art installations on Naoshima, creating an immersive and long-term project with socially engaged commonalities with Art Camp Hakushū and Haizuka Earthworks – harkening back to the era of artist-run projects that preceded today’s large-scale revitalization festivals.

Shitamichi’s project confronts his own misgivings about the impacts of rapid development and art tourism amongst the now-famous art islands of the Setouchi region. When he first moved his family to Naoshima during the pandemic, Shitamichi overheard local residents commenting that the lack of visitors at the time was “like Naoshima in the past,” causing him to wonder how life on the island had been before the influx of art in the region (Kanahiro 2021). Naoshima today draws immigrants, new cultural facilities, and improved schools even as its neighboring islands continue to experience population decline, proof that art tourism has indeed benefitted the small island. But since COVID-19 restrictions have eased and tourism has engulfed the island once more, Shitamichi observes these benefits with caution. He is especially wary about the trend of what he calls “SNS tourists” – those who come to Naoshima for only a few hours to take photos with the artwork for social media platforms before heading back to the mainland.¹⁰ The micro-visits of these social media tourists worry the artist, as their mounting presence influences the direction of business ventures that cater to such audiences. In Shitamichi’s own words, “the speed of consumption and consumers may be too fast … I’m thinking about what I can do in a situation where arts-related development is destroying the old landscape” (Shitamichi 2024).

Shitamichi manages to turn these thoughts into action, planning and executing projects that probe the arts tourism industry from within the most impacted island in the Setouchi region while still carrying out the social work of community-building for residents. The first project organized in the new space was Setouchi “Yōichi Midorikawa” Museum in the autumn of 2019, sharing the life’s work of a photographer from Okayama who traveled throughout the Setouchi region capturing images of life during the pre- and post-war years. Rather than exhibiting a selection of Midorikawa’s photography with a white-cube curatorial approach, Shitamichi organized the carefully selected display of approximately 200 materials of ephemera from the late photographer’s studio with a focus on his handwritten notes. With this more wholistic approach, audiences – both residents and tourists – could engage with Midorikawa’s photographic practice as a whole, engaging with the archive of his work as if time had stopped, revealing bygone ways of life in Setouchi (Kanahiro 2021).

Shitamichi developed this overarching theme further with his second project, the Setouchi “100 Years Tourism” Museum which opened in the summer of 2020. The space was transformed into a working timeline that presented the development of tourism in Setouchi from the early 1900s to 2020, drawn from a multitude of printed materials including guidebooks, posters, brochures, and newspapers. The timeline presented during the exhibition’s opening was not considered complete – instead Shitamichi’s exhibition concept invited residents (and visitors) to contribute to the collected information in the gallery space. In this way, the exhibition presented an ever-growing timeline that traced the shifting framework of tourism’s impact on Setouchi’s landscape, functioning as an interactive record of the community’s growth and changes, vetted and substantiated by community members themselves. Also on display were 15 meticulous scrapbooks created by Naoshima native Tanaka Haruki that chronicled all news articles published about the island from 1983–2019. Exhibiting Tanaka’s scrapbooks not only revealed a detailed account of Naoshima’s years of rapid development, but also unearthed delightful and nostalgic memories for community members and visitors as part of Tanaka’s personal “buried treasure” (Kanahiro 2021).

While his work on Naoshima is not openly critical, Shitamichi’s projects are far from apolitical – rather, archival accumulation and display is able to become a loaded act in itself.¹¹ These exhibitions create valuable space for looking to the past as a way to imagine what the future may hold for Setouchi and Naoshima (Shitamichi, n.d..). Outside of these main exhibitions, the artist also holds weekly community workshops, including a well-attended Pottery Works Study Group that has cooperated with ceramic artists on the nearby Awaji Island. For two years, Shitamichi has led an afterschool Island Children’s Laboratory, which operates as a “school for expression” for a group of elementary school students. Most recently, his students created an illustrated book of Naoshima based on fieldwork around the island (Shitamichi, n.d..).

Over the course of four short years in Naoshima, Shitamichi has integrated himself into the community, treating art as an everyday practice in the experimental space of his laboratory. His flexible yet tenacious approach to pondering the boundaries of what art is and what it means to produce meaningful art in today’s world art are made possible by his rare knack for engaging community on a grassroots level. Perhaps in spite of Naoshima’s hyper-touristic setting, he continues to conduct small-scale, slow-paced machizukuri initiatives that have become sustainable activities for the island community. In contrast to the splashy, profit-based recovery models of most art festivals today, Shitamichi staunchly avoids straying into the instrumental or didactic with his Setouchi “” Archive, instead working to render visible the ongoing transformation of his adopted island community while propagating deeper conversations about development and society that leaves space for locals to fill in the blanks.

Conclusion

The popularization of art festivals for revitalization has demonstratively raised the number of sightseers that visit the host locales, in turn serving to stimulate the economies of local businesses alongside the various divisions of the tourism industry. However, the correlation of state sponsorship and socially engaged art practice may point to a troubling propagation of instrumentalization and apolitical restrictions as the Echigo-Tsumari model of revitalization continues to be adopted in more locales. As a cost-efficient way to provide support for community-building measures in many of Japan’s most vulnerable areas, investing in art festivals has become a way for government agencies to absolve themselves of the complex sociopolitical issues that have contributed to the disparity of rural and post-disaster regions. This essay argues that holding participating artists responsible for demonstrating measurable outcomes of community-development in their works could quickly turn into relations of exploitation, both for artists and residents. In turn, there are also disparities between the reality and intentions of contemporary art that can negatively impact the local residents. While some artists such as Shitamichi Motoyuki have found creative ways to engage with the shortcomings of the revitalization art festival model, there is still a rising cause for concern about the impacts of art tourism on Japan’s art scene. As such, it may be time for a hard look at the respective organizational, economic, curatorial, and artistic approaches of these festivals to find sustainable ways to maintain their original promises – both of machizukuri undertakings that benefit residents over tourists, as well as real opportunities for artistic expression.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Japan Foundation .

Notes on contributors

Eimi Tagore

Eimi Tagore-Erwin is a New York-based curator and doctoral candidate of East Asian Studies at New York University. Her research focus is contemporary transpacific art, especially practices engaging with colonial history, memory, and politics. Most recently, Eimi curated Un / Weaving: Haji Oh at Alison Bradley Projects in the spring of 2024. Her previous curatorial projects include KANTEN 観展: The Limits of History (apexart, 2023), Floating Monuments: Motoyuki Shitamichi (Alison Bradley Projects, 2023), and Fierce Autonomy: Paintings by Yuki Katsura (Alison Bradley Projects, 2021). She was a 2023 Curatorial Fellow at the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation and a 2021 Wikipedia Fellow for PoNJA-Genkon and Asia Art Archive in America, where she focused on Japanese artists who have faced censorship.

Notes

¹ For more context, see: Matanle et al. (2011).

² For more information on Kitagawa’s approach to art festivals for revitalization, see Kitagawa (2015).

³ The archive and legacy of Art Camp Hakushū was the subject of an autumn 2022 exhibition at Ichihara Lakeside Museum, a small art museum directed by Kitagawa Fram in Chiba Prefecture. The guest curator was Kohei Nawa, who was involved with Art Camp Hakushū for ten years from the age of 18. See more here: https://lsm-ichihara.jp/exhibition/the_trace_of_hakushu/

⁴ Art historians Justin Jesty (2018) and Reiko Tomii (2017) have written about such social and political engagement, arguing separately that due to inherited Euro-American assumptions about artistic forms, many have been overlooked in mainstream exhibitions.

⁵ The exhibition was commemorating 150 years of diplomatic relations between Austria and Japan.

⁶ Kitagawa’s interest in fostering cultural exchange by bringing Asian artists to participate in ETAT and form the “East Asia Art Village Initiative” was spurred in the winter of 2004 by his realization that there is a large presence of Southeast and Northeast Asian immigrants living in Tsunan Town. In 2012, the East Asia Art Center was established in the Uwano settlement in Echigo-Tsumari under the direction of Hong Kong’s Sense Art Studio, and in 2013 the Fukutake House Asian Art Platform was opened as part of the Setouchi International Art Triennale (see Kitagawa 2015).

⁷ There have been well-documented critiques over the practices of US and European artists who have conducted projects under the premise of social engagement, but have in reality served to exploit and/or exotify the lived realities of communities for the benefit of their international art careers, or gradually displaced them altogether through the formation of art districts in formerly low-income areas that raise real estate prices (i.e. gentrification through art, a process called artwashing). Some examples of controversial artists include the works of Santiago Sierra, Richard Lowe, Olaf Breuning, Renzo Marten, and Dawn DeDeaux.

⁸ Conversations and interviews with the artist were conducted by the author before, during, and after the curation of his solo exhibition FLOATING MONUMENTS at Alison Bradley Projects in January 2023, and group show KANTEN 観展: The Limits of History at apexart in March 2023. Both exhibitions were held in New York City.

⁹ Shitamichi’s project was first entitled Setouchi “” Musuem, but he updated it to Setouchi “” Archive in the spring of 2021.

¹⁰ SNS is short for Social Networking Service.

¹¹ Shitamichi is no stranger to the dangers of censorship and political co-option within an arts context. His most well-known series of work, torii (2006-2012, 2017-Present) traces the vestiges of Japanese colonialism throughout the Asia Pacific, and has been curated into group exhibitions that have been subjected to censorship scandals such as at the Sakima Museum of Art in Okinawa in 2009.