Tomio Koyama ：An Overview of the Art Scene in Europe, the United States, Asia, and Japan

The Dawn of Art Fairs in Europe and the United States

Before I opened my gallery, I worked as Nishimura Gallery until 1988, a time during which art museums had long been the ones that bought works. Around when I started working at Masami Shiraishi’s SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, it was perhaps the end of the era in which art museums were buying works. That’s because various museums were opening at this time, like the Museum of Art, Kochi, in 1993 and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 1995. At the time, the president of the real estate developer Touko House was a big art collector and started a museum, the Touko Museum of Contemporary Art (1988–91). Shiraishi was appointed vice director of the museum and I helped out too. The exhibitions enjoyed a good response.

I opened my gallery in 1996. Shugo Satani had a space called the Art Room and I rented it with all the furnishings, built a wall, and that was my gallery. The economic bubble had just collapsed, so this wasn’t a time in which art was selling well and though I represented artists like Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara who are now world-famous, it was the toughest time in my career. Back then, the market in Asia was still rudimentary, and everything centered on Europe and the United States.

That said, even in Europe and the States, art fairs were not as developed as they are today. There was Art Cologne in Germany and Art Basel in Switzerland, while the fairs in Chicago were on the wane. Amidst all this, I was on the lookout for places to sell and exhibited at the second edition of the Gramercy International Contemporary Art Fair in 1996, which was held on the upper floor of the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York. The fair was pretty makeshift and the atmosphere was more like a live music venue. There were two galleries from Japan at the fair: Taka Ishii Gallery and mine. But other people at the fair included Jay Jopling of White Cube, the dealer and gallerist Jeffrey Deitch (director of Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, before later opening his own gallery in 2014), and Emmanuel Perrotin. They are all bigger hitters in the art world today but were only just beginning their careers back then.

In Basel, a new fair called Liste arrived, located in a former factory where artists rent studios. For the period of the fair, the stuff in the studios was tidied away and the spaces divided into tiny booths for exhibiting artworks. I shared a room with galleries from New York and Norway and exhibited at the fair for six years. It was interesting because it felt like a fair that everyone was making together. The other day, I met Andrew Kreps, whose gallery is in New York, and we were joking how we sold almost nothing back then. The second half of the 1990s was a laid-back time.

The Finance World Enters the Art World

The magazine Frieze was launched in London in 1991. It proved popular and, coupled with the arrival of globally renowned artists like Damien Hirst and other figures in the Young British Artists movement, the art scene in London flourished. The first Frieze art fair was held in 2003. A major part of this was the involvement of people from finance—or the City, as the London financial district is known.

Until then, though rich people in America had supported artists and art, there was an unwritten rule that you shouldn’t make money off of it. But this wasn’t the case with people in London, especially those in the City. London didn’t originally have a huge number of contemporary art collectors, but their numbers now massively increased. A virtuous cycle emerged whereby magazines produced criticism of works, which were bought and sold via platforms like the fairs, and then art museums like the Tate ascribed further value to them.

The Forces Driving the Expansion of the Asian Art Market

In Asia, an art market emerged that centered on China. That the impetus for this was art auctions feels somehow very Chinese. Around when contemporary art started to appear in Hong Kong auctions, artists were putting their own works up for auction, and curators from Christie’s would get works in Japan and then hold auctions. The appetite for art among Chinese buyers meant the market kept expanding. In Japan at this time, though, museums were not buying art and the market was shrinking. Looking back on it, it was a really strange time.

Chinese collectors’ motivation for buying art was fundamentally investment. In Japan and the United States, there are artists, galleries, and fairs, and then things circulate further through the market via the auctions, but the market in China started with auctions. When they saw that the works were selling, galleries then appeared, following by fairs. Museums are places that ascribe academic value to works, but they also sell works. That’s right, museums sell art. Doing this has meant that the market has continued to grow. Perhaps it’s grown a little too big considering that artworks are technically counted as personal property (chattels).

The Entrepreneurial Spirit Changing the Japanese Art Market

Behind the current robust health of the art market in Japan lies the involvement of entrepreneurs and investors from IT and other industries. I think there is a close affinity between their venture mindset and artists. An artist makes their work not knowing if it has value, unsure how they will survive. An IT entrepreneur looks at society and then creates a business, builds up new values, and pursues profit. These people from a business sector where they start off not knowing how things will turn out use their profits to buy artworks and support artists, and then connect ideas for their projects. This situation began about five years ago and is a really interesting phenomenon.

There is a precedent for this, not least the Ryutaro Takahashi, Taguchi, Oketa, and Obayashi collections. The involvement of these kinds of people in the art world will keep on growing, I think, as they continue to buy works that appeal to their sensibilities. The museums now have fine curators, there are researchers, while the biennales, triennales and other such international art exhibitions are also developing. The numbers of collectors and new galleries are on the rise, and artworks are becoming known across the world via Instagram. There’s no doubt that the Japanese art scene is expanding.