Back to Tokyo.
And went to see an exhibition about contemporary art from India called Private Mythology: Contemporary Art From India. A good show, curated by Tatehata Akira whom I forgot to mention I met 2 days before and with whom I had a nice conversation about Tetsumi Kudo. A dead Japanese artist that I like a lot.
From the exhibition I liked Ravinder G. Reddy and his big golden goddess. I read them as being sort of kitsch. But my biggest difficulty with the art from this part of the world is that I think I frame it in my own cultural background, something between Paris, Marseilles and Minneapolis. I am afraid it is wrong. I'll study and let you know.
The other one I like is Sudarshan Shetty. He is doing large-scale installations dealing with irreverence for tradition, history, high modernism, popular culture.
My third favorite is Sheela Gowda. A big, delicate abstract installation with needles, thread and pigments.
According to the catalogue, her work, a little bit Eva Esse in style, is dealing with vulnerability, pain, entanglement, flow, desire, passion and aggression...nevertheless, I like it. Am I becoming old or what? It is not supposed to be my style. Maybe Japan changed me.
I ended this calm day in a quiet way. My initial plan was to go to a club but I did not find anybody to come along and did not feel like going by myself. I am really aging... I think the language gap was the reason. The nice thing about going to this kind of place alone is that you can have conversation with people you do not know and won't see again. So it is very nice for very open conversation. One can even lie. Who cares. But the perspective of speaking with my hands and my "Say it in Japanese". So I had a walk and some soba in crowded place where Japanese people from all ages get drunk very loudly. Mostly males. They are very funny. Very well-educated before the 2 first drinks. Then it is wild and interesting. But in the end, a little sad. Shout, I am getting melancholic now??
There is something about despair to see all these people in suits, sweating a little bit, not able to control the position of their glasses on their nose, not able to walk. It is not a moral thought. It is just that after 7pm, they are all over the place. Exhausted and drunk. I would not like to be one of their wives when they come back home. I mean, nobody asked such a sacrifice of me, but I was just thinking. They seem to be squeezed.