Tokyo Wonder Site

Tokyo Wonder Site is the Institute of Contemporary Arts and International Cultural Exchange in Tokyo, an art center dedicated to the generation and promotion of new art and culture since 2001. TWS was first created by the Japanese Government as the Tokyo Wonder Wall in 2000, a new innovative exhibitionspace for emerging artists in Tokyo. The Government was dealing with the aftereffects of the economic bubble around the millennium where many artists lacked economic support and places to display their works. Tokyo Wonder Wall meant to discover and support these emerging artists, and has now grown til the big organization it is today, with three different locations around town: Hongo, Shibuya and Aoyama, each with a unique focus.

TWS Hongo works mainly with young talents and with the still-existing Tokyo Wonder Wall. TWS Shibuya is the global cultural network in Japan and abroad that functions as an international platform. TWS Aoyama opened the Creator-in-Residence program in 2006, an international program for all genres and nationalities with the aim to create a platform for shared processes. TWS also collaborates with IASPIS in Sweden.
 
TWS are arranging different programs and events throughout the year, from the ongoing Tokyo Experimental Festival - Sound, Art & Performance to the International Advisor Talk, organized together with the Open Studio day.

This year's first Open Studio took place on the 21st of January and included works by 15 artists, both from Japan and abroad. 
 

Visting Ryusuke Kido's studio. 

SJCAGF visited when the International Advisor was the wellknown curator David Elliott. Elliott is the Artistic Director of the Kyiv International Biennial of Contemporary Art (Ukraine) in 2012, former Director of Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), and former Director of the Modern Art Museum (Stockholm) between 1996-2001. Elliott gave a lecture on curating contemporary art with a focus on asian art. The talk was called "Looking for comparisons. Thoughts about curating contemporary art". 

Of particular interest for us was the part of the presentation thar concerned the exhibition Bye Bye Kitty - curated by Elliott - that was shown at the Japan Society in New York in 2011. Organized as an attempt to go beyond the stereotypes that has marked the view of contemporary Japanese culture from a Western perspective, Elliott's proposal departed from what he described as Japan's "five epic struggles" namely that; between the generations, between the sexes, with history and tradition, with the self and with nature. The question of the role of feminism in Japanese art was touched upon briefly, mainly through hasty examples of some of the works that were chosen for the exhibition. The catalogue that accompanied the exhibition includes a text by Elliott that supposedly should give some remarks on the subject.

 Elliott's presentation, translated into Japanese.