Yasufumi Nakamori is the Senior Curator International Art (Photography) at Tate Modern. He is the author of For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968 – 1979 and Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture among other significant books. Previously Dr. Nakamori was the Head of Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. He holds a PhD in History of Art and Visual Studies from Cornell University. Here we learn more about the background to his current practice, in a recent interview with Romina Provenzi.
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RP: At some point in your life, you left a career in corporate law to become an art historian. What is art offering to you that you couldn’t find in other fields?
YN: Art has always made me happy. I grew up in Japan in the seventies, and I have always been curious about things. My father appreciated modern art and photography in particular, so we used to visit museums together. Yet, I spent a lot of time looking at the numerous books of Western and Japanese photography that we had at home. When it was time to think about university, my father encouraged me to pursue a degree for a business career and I became a lawyer. A number of years later, my life changed unexpectedly. After landing in NY on the 11th of September 2001, at 9am I was getting off a taxi to walk into my hotel located between the Twin Towers when I heard the first plane crashing into the north tower. At the time I was a corporate lawyer working long hours, but after six months I made a decision to leave my career as a lawyer to pursue art studies and a career in the visual arts.
RP: In your catalogue Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, you wrote about the collaboration between photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto and architect Kenzo Tange, who designed the Fuji TV building in Tokyo and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial among many other buildings around the world. Can you explain your view about the relation between art and architecture?
YN: There is a deep connection between art and architecture, and especially between photography and architecture. Photographers and architects are deeply connected, and as an art historian I like to explore their power relation. For some reasons, the vision of the architect has always being predominant compared to the vision of the photographer, and my contribution intends to readdress this unbalance. The catalogue includes five chapters of my thesis dissertation, and it explores how the Japanese American photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto’s vision had been considered secondary to the one of Japanese architect Kenzo Tange. Traditionally there is a hierarchy in the relation between architects and photographers despite the closeness the two professions. Their power relation is fundamentally insecure, and I wanted to give justice and be an activist for Ishimoto’s vision, as well as for the equal value of the photographers’ vision compared to architecture.
RP: Earlier this year at the Daiwa Foundation, you spoke about the work of Japanese photographer Lieko Shiga. Is her work in the Tate Collection? Why is her work so relevant?
YN: Tate Collection hasn’t acquired Shiga’s work. Shiga lives and works in Miyagi in the Tohoku region in Japan that was devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. There is a very peculiar relation between facts and art in Lieko Shiga’s work. With a background as a ballet dancer, the artist uses photography as a medium to share collective memories and to reimagine these collective memories making people perform. These acts are arranged to evoke the memories of the dead. I find that there is a very deeply personal touch and psychological depth in her work that makes it relevant.
RP: Why is Japanese photography so important within the visual arts globally?
YN: Japanese sensitivity with the nature, light and water traces back to the philosophical Japanese beliefs about transience and photography is the perfect medium to capture that through the lens. How we Japanese look at the reality of life and at the momentary phenomena, it is captured in lens and paper.
In a culture that appreciates and reflects on the transient nature of life, photography has a special place as a medium in Japan in terms of accessibility for self expression too. During and after World War II, the majority of Japanese people documented the disasters in the cities with their cameras. In the following decades, the Japanese people wanted to document their come back because of the way the war ended and therefore photography found a special place in Japanese art again. For example, Japanese photographers made the most critical work within the arts after the Tohoku triple disaster in 2011. A research into the recent work of Japanese photographers who responded to the triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami, nuclear) that hit Japan in 2011 has been shown in the exhibition ‘In the Wake’ organised by the MFA in Boston in 2015.
RP: In 2018, you joined Tate Modern to develop the strategy for representing photography in the programs, exhibitions and displays. What have you achieved so far, and what are the areas within the collection that needed more attention?
YN: Since I joined Tate Modern, my biggest achievement has been co-curating the major exhibition of South African artist Zanele Muholi in the UK. It was a new kind of exhibition for Tate Modern because it showed Muholi’s (their) activism through photography. With their work, Muholi is a voice for all South African transgender and non-conforming people and their community, showing with their work that their presence matters to the rest of humanity. In the last ten years, Tate acquired ten works by Muholi. Before 2018, Tate Modern acquisitions aimed at building the foundations of its photography collection looking mainly at European, British, American and Japanese artists. Only since 2018, Tate started to include works by minorities, queer artists, and disabled artists to fill the gaps in the collection. Examples are the display of South African photographer Ernest Cole within the ‘Artists and Society’ section, which is free to visit as all displays are at Tate Modern. As a Curator and Art Historian, we always look for strong works and context with new acquisitions because the works will enter a national collection and belong to it for the foreseeable future. The works need to be so good, that we want to make space for them in the collection.
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For further viewing: Tate
