Stop and shop

When on family trips, there is always one leader. On this trip, the Materialist was meant to be that one leader. She set the agenda. She read the maps. She dictated when, and where, people could go. (All while trying desperately to ditch them at every step.) But while the Materialist's mother and brother were happy to follow protocol, trailing after the Materialist through subway stations and down twisty streets, as obedient as small white dogs, the Materialist's father instead attached himself to her side, contradicting her every move. The Materialist's father likes to say that surgeons (with whom he has some experience) are "not always right, but always certain"--the same, however, must be said for him. If the Materialist said, "OK, let's catch the Chuo line to Kanda and then pick up the Yamanote," the Materialist's father was right there to say, "But why can't we just take the Chuo to Tokyo station and then walk from there?" If the Materialist said, "Let's stop by the hotel and drop off our stuff, and then we'll go off to Mandarake before it closes," the Materialist's father would say, "What? It won't close now! It'll be open another few hours at least!" If the Materialist said, "You can all go to hell in a handbasket," the Materialist's father would say, "But I think if we went by plane it would be much faster, and a more pleasant ride besides."

After several days of watching the Materialist and her father bicker, the Materialist's mother and brother decided to go off on some boring adventure by themselves. This meant that the Materialist and her father were free to do what they'd really wanted to do since the trip began, which is go visit Taka Ishii, one of Tokyo's leading contemporary art galleries, and buy some Nobuyoshi Araki photographs. Before they did, however, they stopped by TKG Editions, Tomio Koyama Gallery's new satellite shop in the Ginza district.

If Taka Ishii Gallery is, say, the David Zwirner of Tokyo, and Koyanagi--also in Ginza--the Sonnabend, then Tomio Koyama is the White Cube (sorry, the Materialist knows this is geographically upsetting the analogy a bit): one of the most influential galleries in Asia, its roster loaded with virtually every big name from the Takashi Murakami generation (Yoshitomo Nara, Hideaki Kawashima), including, appropriately, Murakami himself, along with the better-known of his acolytes (Chinatsu Ban and Mr.).

TKG is a bright windowed storefront, its walls hung with prints by Mika Ninagawa, an enormously popular photographer whose new show of super-saturated prints-fiercely blue zinnias and silk-petal crimson roses, all of them fake and shot so close and tight, that they appear, on first glance, just vivid planes of color-was showing at Tomio Koyama. The line between fine art and commercial art--or between fine art and commercialism--is much thinner in Japan than it is here, and although Murakami is far and away the most famous and ubiquitous practitioner of these flamboyant, Warholesque forays into advertising and the creation of mass-produced tchotchkes (his Pop-y, iconic images have decorated bags by Louis Vuitton, of course, but also been used in Canon ads, as well as printed across the walkways of Roppongi Hills when it first opened), plenty of his contemporaries have made their own brilliant and inventive forays into merchandising: Yoshitama Nara has designed imaginative and even enchanting toys for CerealArt, Chinatsu Ban plush toys, Daido Moriyama T-shirts for the American arm of the Japanese clothing chain Uniqlo. So here at TKG were T-shirts and fleece tote bags by Nara, postcards by Hideaki Kawashima, and, in a nod to the postwar Japanese tradition of great photography books, stacks of monographs, all of them by gallery artists. There were also bins of framed prints-lithographs, offsets-and small paintings, and here, too, was another blurring of lines: art presented as something accessible, in all senses of the word, its pursuit made as easy and pleasurable as flipping through CDs, searching for that something you couldn't yet define. These ranged in price from the affordable (a small square Masahiko Kuwahara painting in muted, Agnes Martin-y tones, for $1000) to the not-so (an offset by Murakami, in an edition of 300, for more than $3000-for an offset!), but the Materialist loved having art presented this way, and thought the gallery ingenious for not only expanding, quite literally, their base of operations (the gallery itself is in a rather dreary area called Kiyosumishirakawa, a ten-minute taxi ride away; but more on that later), but for presenting themselves to younger and first-time buyers in a form-the boutique-that might feel both more familiar and less intimidating. But what she loved most about it was its sense of honesty: buying art, the Materialist believes, is a much richer, giddier, more complicated experience than perhaps buying any other object, but in the end, it too is a form of commerce. Leave it to the Japanese--for whom, for better or worse, shopping, and consuming, is a secular religion of the every day--to once again mash highbrow and low into an experience anyone could appreciate, from Eli Broad to, well, the Materialist herself.

After several days of watching the Materialist and her father bicker, the Materialist's mother and brother decided to go off on some boring adventure by themselves. This meant that the Materialist and her father were free to do what they'd really wanted to do since the trip began, which is go visit Taka Ishii, one of Tokyo's leading contemporary art galleries, and buy some Nobuyoshi Araki photographs. Before they did, however, they stopped by TKG Editions, Tomio Koyama Gallery's new satellite shop in the Ginza district.

If Taka Ishii Gallery is, say, the David Zwirner of Tokyo, and Koyanagi--also in Ginza--the Sonnabend, then Tomio Koyama is the White Cube (sorry, the Materialist knows this is geographically upsetting the analogy a bit): one of the most influential galleries in Asia, its roster loaded with virtually every big name from the Takashi Murakami generation (Yoshitomo Nara, Hideaki Kawashima), including, appropriately, Murakami himself, along with the better-known of his acolytes (Chinatsu Ban and Mr.).

TKG is a bright windowed storefront, its walls hung with prints by Mika Ninagawa, an enormously popular photographer whose new show of super-saturated prints-fiercely blue zinnias and silk-petal crimson roses, all of them fake and shot so close and tight, that they appear, on first glance, just vivid planes of color-was showing at Tomio Koyama. The line between fine art and commercial art--or between fine art and commercialism--is much thinner in Japan than it is here, and although Murakami is far and away the most famous and ubiquitous practitioner of these flamboyant, Warholesque forays into advertising and the creation of mass-produced tchotchkes (his Pop-y, iconic images have decorated bags by Louis Vuitton, of course, but also been used in Canon ads, as well as printed across the walkways of Roppongi Hills when it first opened), plenty of his contemporaries have made their own brilliant and inventive forays into merchandising: Yoshitama Nara has designed imaginative and even enchanting toys for CerealArt, Chinatsu Ban plush toys, Daido Moriyama T-shirts for the American arm of the Japanese clothing chain Uniqlo. So here at TKG were T-shirts and fleece tote bags by Nara, postcards by Hideaki Kawashima, and, in a nod to the postwar Japanese tradition of great photography books, stacks of monographs, all of them by gallery artists. There were also bins of framed prints-lithographs, offsets-and small paintings, and here, too, was another blurring of lines: art presented as something accessible, in all senses of the word, its pursuit made as easy and pleasurable as flipping through CDs, searching for that something you couldn't yet define. These ranged in price from the affordable (a small square Masahiko Kuwahara painting in muted, Agnes Martin-y tones, for $1000) to the not-so (an offset by Murakami, in an edition of 300, for more than $3000-for an offset!), but the Materialist loved having art presented this way, and thought the gallery ingenious for not only expanding, quite literally, their base of operations (the gallery itself is in a rather dreary area called Kiyosumishirakawa, a ten-minute taxi ride away; but more on that later), but for presenting themselves to younger and first-time buyers in a form-the boutique-that might feel both more familiar and less intimidating. But what she loved most about it was its sense of honesty: buying art, the Materialist believes, is a much richer, giddier, more complicated experience than perhaps buying any other object, but in the end, it too is a form of commerce. Leave it to the Japanese--for whom, for better or worse, shopping, and consuming, is a secular religion of the every day--to once again mash highbrow and low into an experience anyone could appreciate, from Eli Broad to, well, the Materialist herself.