Exhibition at Centre Pompidou Metz offers a fresh look at contemporary Japanese art
(Artdaily.org)

Torn between a powerful cultural heritage and a national discourse on modernization, alternating between phases of openness and withdrawal, the cultural evolution of Japan in the early 1970s was marked by major social, political and natural events. Exhibition curator Yuko Hasegawa looks back on these turbulent decades during which Japan oscillated between globalisation and affirming its identity. In 1970, the Osaka Universal Exposition and the 10th Tokyo Biennale marked the beginning of a transitional period during which Japanese visual arts freed themselves from Western influence present since the post-war period. Japanese artists adopted an economy of means embodied by two movements, one concerned with materials (Monoha), the other conceptual (Nippon-Gainen-ha). In the 1980s, Japanese cultural identity evolved into an embodiment