Japan Unlimited

With a line-up of artists known for their critique of the Japan's imperial past and of recent inadequacies by the nation's current government, the artworks included in “Japan Unlimited” engaged with historical erasure, the conservative nature of Japan’s National Diet, as well as the culpability of the government and the associated cover-ups surrounding the 2011 Fukushima nuclear incident and its fallout. A significant portion of the exhibition’s content were by artists that have faced censorship and protest from nationalists and politicians in the past for their artworks that confront Japan’s ongoing Emperorism or engage with war history in ways not to the state’s liking. The exhibition also featured a number of individuals who had recently participated in the contentious 2019 Aichi Triennale, many of whom had publicly decried the racist nature of the Triennale’s censorship.

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Due to the deliberate inclusions of critical political artworks, "Japan Unlimited" had its funding withdrawn by the Japanese Embassy in Vienna promptly following the exhibition’s opening—an amount that encompassed half the exhibition’s total funding. This proved to be yet another shocking blow to the Japanese art scene, both in the suddenness of the decision, and in the brazen display of censorship by the Japanese government towards the political nature of the exhibition's selected works, topics that would hardly be cause for censorship in a European art world context. Luckily, the local Austrian government stepped in and financed “Japan Unlimited” through the end of its exhibition term.  

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We included “Japan Unlimited” in our curatorial project as a decisive case demonstrating the conservative nature of Japan's current policy-makers. Akin to the pushback received when a "comfort woman" statue was erected in Berlin in late 2020, this exhibition and its disreputable censorship—especially in the wake of the Aichi Triennale scandal—clearly demonstrates that the largescale efforts by Japan's politicians to preserve a spotless image of its political and historical record in the public eye has extended well past its domestic borders. In an attempt to promote a national erasure of the country's colonial and war-ridden past, as well as its inadequate responses to national crises, "Japan Unlimited" embodied our thematic concept of "national amnesia." It was almost interesting to note how the curator Farebegoli was able to amass such a political group of artists for one exhibition—this demonstrates how much smoother it is for Japanese artists to showcase political critique outside of the nation's borders. 

Notable works included Kazama Sachiko’s “Picturesque” woodcut series depicting the dystopic colonization of nature and rural villages that harken to her home country’s many neoliberal regional development projects that promote gentrification and tourism at the expense of the nation’s marginalized populations, as well as Sawada Tomoko’s videowork “Mask,” or 面, that depicts the artist removing her mask again and again each time only to reveal her own face—alluding not only to deception and masquerade, but also to duplication, showing how the conventions of societal norms become one and the same with society itself. Another notable work was “The video of a man calling himself Japan’s Prime Minister making a speech at an international assembly” by Aida Makoto, in which the artist parodied of former Prime Minister, Abe Shinzō, apologizing for Japan's former war crimes in English, an impossible sight as Abe himself has repeatedly denied the existence of the nation's imperial wrongdoings throughout his administration—revealing once again the manner in which farce is key component of Japan’s international image, domestically and abroad.

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Kyodo News Exhibition Highlight

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