Sight unseen, Japan’s first truly contemporary art fair opens tonight. Scheduled on the same week as the Art Fair Tokyo, the 101 Tokyo Art Fair forces the megalopolis into its first Tokyo Art Week.

The world looks to Tokyo for what’s next, casually ignoring that what is there now consists of a tangled and underdeveloped infrastructure. It’s akin to many folks’ experience of moving to Tokyo and learning that it actually takes months to even get an internet connection installed. Compared to Basel and New York, Tokyo is a relative village of hovels when it comes to fine art as a commercial system.

On the macro scale, there is a severe lack of support unparalleled in other first world nations. No zaibatsu has a contemporary (or even modern) collection of note, and there is a complete lack of consumer awareness regarding fine art, though magazines like Brutus and Art-It have slowly been attempting to educate their readers about art history and the contemporary milieu. On the micro level, most Tokyo apartments lack adequate systems to actually hang art and real-estate agents charge exorbitant fees to plug holes in walls. There is a complete lack of a support network for emerging artists age 20 to 30 who more often than not leave their art careers in the dust in order to pursue a regular paycheck.

What has been present is an art fair that is more akin to a trade show than an art fair in both look and spirit. The Art Fair Tokyo would do well to look at the 101 interlopers as a source of inspiration. In lieu of a hodgepodge, non-curated mishmash of different genres, eras, and stuffed walls of the work that hasn’t sold for the year, 101 Tokyo offers another option. Namely, it’s a cultivated, highly curated sampling of exhibition spaces. Each gallery involved with 101 is permitted to show three artists maximum, and only new work is exhibited. The 101 Tokyo organizers are committed to educating their audience. They have gone as far as offering two separate seminars on art investing in Tokyo’s market in both English and Japanese, as well as a seminar on Collecting Art in the Context of Wealth Management.

There are other aspects of 101 Tokyo that are quite a change from the other gig in town. The fair is a stark contrast — the Director is an artist, and the crew running the fair is genuinely excited about visual work. All are young, a 32 year-old being the eldest, and they are decidedly international. 101 Tokyo stands as a series of events of inclusivity, something that must be cultivated if contemporary fine art as a commercial sector is to grow into something viable in Tokyo. They even have parties where you can shake your ass and even potentially get laid by someone your age whom you enjoy talking to about contemporary aesthetics with — more than can be said for elsewhere.

As purportedly over-invested in design and architecture as Tokyo is (which is debatable and a whole lot of lip service to say the least), contemporary fine art in Tokyo could really use a kick in the pants. With luck, 101 Tokyo will deliver a decent bruise.

There’s a cherished brand of city-strolling in Tokyo. I’m not talking about the Tokyo Walker magazine variety of weekend consumer trails that lead you on a curated tour of the city’s newest select shops and trendy dining options. Nor the retiree’s version either — best represented by the magazine Sanpo no Tatsujin (roughly, “Strollmeisters”), which takes a more historical-tourist approach, revisiting dead artists’ former residences and prowling grounds, hunting down venerable soba shops that are renowned less for their food and more for the wonder of their continued existence. Nor do I mean a kind of flaneurship for dandies. To “burabura” means to wander aimlessly and take in the sights, on a path usually not decided on in advance.

In prewar Tokyo, the term “burabura” was almost exclusively associated with the pleasure and shopping quarter of Ginza — to the point of spawning the phrase “ginbura.” Ginza anxiously tried to emulate the languid café life of Paris boulevards and the urgent rhythms of booming New York. Intellectuals and writers gathered in replicas of European coffee shops called kissaten and enjoyed “ginbura” rambling up and down the long, straight gridded streets. The neighborhood today remains one of the few areas in the city that resembles the geometry of Paris and New York. Even after the war, right through to the 1960s, Ginza and nearby Shinbashi were still predicated on a foreign conception of leisure. Ishii Teruo’s film Sexy Line, for example, with its swaggering Nouvelle Vague camerawork, faithfully captures that urban rogue spirit. The film tracks the hardboiled detective’s capers as he weaves in and out of cafés and underground bars, hurtles down warrens of narrow alleys, all closely matched to the swing and flourish of a jazz soundtrack.

Since the Ginza culture found little precedence in local Japanese history, and the flowering of café “culture” ended up leaving European veneers all over their city. Ginza denizens refashioned the atmosphere of the neighborhood to reflect a foreign image without much regard to what was there before. They nad free license to carve out new pleasure quarters, especially after the native versions (like the Yoshiwara red light district in the east of the city) were leveled after the war — both physically and morally.

Rebuilding was a heady time for Tokyo, especially in the run-up to the 1964 Olympics, but intellectuals were worried whether there was any meaning being created at all in the slapdash layout of the re-planned city. The pace of the renewal was disorienting; while it all looked “cinematic” in the movies, you sometimes couldn’t tell if the current state of the city was getting closer to completion or getting demolished once again.
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