Unbounded

My first visit to Beijing, China, was in 1989. The Chinese art I encountered at that time left a profound impact on me, making me sense the immense potential for China’s future development. My father had been exploring the possibilities of modern Asian art as early as around 1958—starting with Japanese modern art and shifting his focus to Korean modern art around 1968. At the time, almost no one paid attention to Asian art, but my father often emphasized to young artists the importance of Chinese history. Influenced by him, I developed an interest in Asia during my university years and began studying ancient art from China and Japan. After joining Tokyo Gallery in 1973, I started traveling frequently to South Korea. Given the deep historical connections between Korea and Japan, I have maintained ties with Korea for over five decades.

Against this backdrop, China has always been at the core of my reflections. I believe that when discussing Asian art, China inevitably occupies a central position, as both Japan and Korea have been profoundly influenced by Chinese culture. During my first visit to China in 1989, I already sensed that the country would emerge as a major force in the 21st century. In July of the same year, we held the “China Modern Art (Now)” exhibition at Tokyo Gallery, followed by Xu Bing’s “Book from the Sky” exhibition in 1991. I visited China many times after that and established the BTAP gallery in the 798 Art District in 2002.It was around that time that Chinese contemporary art began attracting attention from Europe and America. Art professionals and collectors flocked to the scene, and artwork prices soared rapidly. However, this boom did not last—the 2008 Lehman Brothers crisis caused the bubble to burst. Yet, I have always believed that this marked the true beginning of Chinese contemporary art in a substantive sense. In 2015, I curated the “Neo-Mōrōism” exhibition, aiming to explore the differences in thinking and expression between Eastern and Western traditions.

For nearly two centuries, global values have been dominated by the West. But since the beginning of the 21st century, Asia’s influence has been steadily growing. Asian civilization, with China at its core, boasts a history of over five thousand years. Today, it is time for us as Asians to build a new Asian culture by drawing on our own traditions while learning from Western experiences. Through the new platform of BTAP, I hope to continue exploring the direction of art in the 21st century.

——Tabata Yukihito

I have long been trying to understand what Tabata is doing, until one day he asked for my thoughts on the Neo-Moroism he proposes. This term immediately reminded me of the early 1980s, when China’s new poetry movement rose to prominence and was coined as “Obscure Poetry.” It was a mode that surpassed mere depiction of objects or straightforward emotional expression, emphasizing an ineffable “poetic quality instead.”

Su Shi once stated, “Children and laymen appreciate a painting that relies on likeness; a poem written in such a manner is certainly not by a true poet.” His point stresses the unique Eastern emphasis on imagery (yixiang)—a key dimension of poetic language. This includes the Daoist principle of “following the laws of nature” and the worldview of “the equality of all beings.” It is also a natural, unadorned mode of expression—as in the saying “lotus emerging pure from clear water, without artificial embellishment.” The Chinese term “ziran” (nature) carries both meanings of the natural world and the spontaneous, uncontrived quality of being-so-of-itself. This dual meaning does not exist in Western context. It comes from the influence of Daoist and Buddhist thought—Zen, which is “unspeakable,” but whose imagery can be intuitively felt through one’s empathetic capacity.

This perspective does not particularly emphasize modernist conceptualism or resistance to mainstream ideology. Instead, it focuses on the human being’s own experience in relation to the world—an ineffable state of life experienced within nature and society. In terms of expression, it values modes such as “joy without excess,” “sorrow without wounding,” and even the emotional restraint found in implicitness and forbearance. This sense of proportion is central—a form of emotional and expressive regulation that Confucianism calls zhongyong (the Doctrine of the Mean).

Zhongyong is not mediocrity; it is appropriateness—a calibrated balance between feeling and expression that stems from one’s lived experience. The East—especially East Asia—has embraced such a rich and diverse humanistic tradition. Artists today must examine and absorb it through a contemporary lens to establish an alternative artistic paradigm. At the historical moment when Western modernism swept across the globe, this is both an opportunity and a challenge. All of the above may well be a misreading of Tabata’s ideas; if so, let it be a starting point for discussion, “a handle by which doubts may be jointly examined.”

——Li Xianting