Lloyd Wise on Prada Fashion Tokyo

JAPAN! It started with the slow crossfade of a long-haul flight and ended with an android: Hiroshi Ishiguro’s ALTER4, to be exact, eyes rolling back, mouth open, arms raised in ecstasy.

I had come to Tokyo for this city’s edition of Prada Mode, a “travelling private club” for which the Italian luxury brand hires an artist to organize a program of conferences and events specific to its given location. The guests so far have been largely excellent: Martine Syms (Los Angeles), Trevor Paglen and researcher Katie Crawford (Paris), filmmaker Jia Zhangke (Shanghai). In Japan, our host was to be Kazuyo Sejima, a partner at Pritzker Prize-winning architecture firm SANAA, best known in New York as the creator of the tottering stack of grey-white cubes that is the New Museum on the Bowery. . It was my brief. Otherwise, I was going blind.

We arrived on Friday morning, finding a sea of ​​rounded Azealia bushes and perfectly suited factotums quickly directing our movements. The place: the gardens of the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, a hidden gem of an institution nestled in a leafy neighborhood near Meguro Station. Designed in the 1920s with input from Henri Rapin and René Lalique, the grand Art Deco structure briefly served as the imperial residence of a dashing and cosmopolitan Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, who would later order the Nanjing Massacre. Yeah. Still, if you love machine age botanical decor, I couldn’t recommend it more.

Sejima presided, looking stunning in a draped T-shirt and wedding-inspired pencil skirt embellished with thalassic sequins. Standing in the middle of a sloping pavilion designed by her SANAA partner, Ryue Nishizawa, she presented a lecture by Yukihide Muta, director of the museum, and then answered questions from the press. The event then began in earnest as the pitch filled with incredibly stylish attendees, many with young children, and music filtered through the air.

Prada Mode quotes Fondazione Prada by Carsten Höller – commissioned Double club, 2008-2009, as a source of inspiration, and in keeping with this precedent, the structure of the procedure owed a debt to the tradition of relational aesthetics – not only the height of the movement of the 1990s, but its progression in the art world in the 2000s and beyond, as art institutions, eager to satisfy the demands of the post-Greenbergian “experience economy,” looked to artists for new models of public engagement. And so we find a menu of recognizable tropes: Architectural pavilion? Check. Talks? Check. Seats designed by artists? Check. Food, drink, music? Check check check. Unsurprisingly, it worked: the studied vagueness of the Teien garden formed an inviting backdrop to the random unfolding of leisure. Families dressed in beautiful clothes arranged on Sejima’s custom furniture (his hana hana stern/cute bunny tables and chairs), while discreetly placed speakers played shimmering electronic drones (part of a musical program hosted by Craig Richards and writer/editor Kunichi Nomura) that elevated the day into a dreamlike unreality. The discussions, especially the presentation by Nishizawa and the architect Junya Ishigami, were good. During this time, Prada’s triangular logo asserted itself on virtually every surface, even paper pouches containing baguettes. It does not matter that the event is closed to the public, open only to “members”, this brand experience turns out to be the ideal expression of relational aesthetics, its ultimate form.

At night, the lazy pleasures of a day in the park turned into something more like a party as the ingenuity of families with children gave way to the ambient self-awareness of young people. I know from a reliable source that the participants included actors and actresses such as Shuichiro Naito, Rinka Kumada and Kentaro Sakaguchi, star of Japanese romantic fantasy of 2018. color me true. A mass of teenage girls crowded the entrance to the Teien, iPhones pointed inward. “Are there any celebrities here? ” I asked. “I heard the Korean ambassador was coming,” someone said. Like, a diplomat? No no, brand ambassador – none other than K-pop idol Jaehyun. (Who later joined us for dinner, holding court with his entourage in the museum’s elegantly appointed courtyard.)

But the moment that’s gone Me Starstruck appeared a few hours earlier, during one of the regularly scheduled traditional tea ceremonies for attendees. Let’s be clear, I avoid “cultural experiences” at all costs – prefabricated tourist consumption freaks me out – but I put this propensity for journalism aside. Moreover, the ceremony was led by a certain Sen So’oku, a “grand master of tea” who gave many lectures on the history of chanoyu in places like the Japan Society in New York. Plus, he was joined by a man I shamed for decades: none other than Hiroshi Sugimoto. (The series of photographer-darkened movie theaters remains, for me, a signal statement about the analog film medium in the twilight of its dissolution.)

In this very intimate setting (there were no more than ten of us), Sugimoto explained to us that the ceramic tea bowls in which we drank were those he had made when he was a student, and that the hanging scroll in the tokonome, or teahouse alcove, also featured his student work: a black-and-white photo of Kegon Waterfall in Tochigi Prefecture, and the genesis, Sugimoto explained, of his serene seascapes and era. Very cool.

Day Two: A gray mist hung in the air, and the crowd huddled under the pavilion to escape the rain. On the program, a conversation between Sejima and the curator Yuko Hasegawa, then one between the writer Mariko Asabuki and the composer Keiichiro Shibuya. But the highlight of the day was undoubtedly the aforementioned android. Designed by Ishiguro, an engineer famous for making a robotic copy of himself, the robot moved in response to the notes Shibuya played on his synthesizer. Falling fathoms deep into the strange valley, it jerked and spun on a hydraulic swivel, its gray rubber baby face grinning and grimacing, its mouth opening wide as if screaming electronic drones. “Where was he born ?” I heard someone ask.

The performance was short, but his quirkiness persisted. For better or worse, Tokyo remains embedded in our ideas of the future, shaping it and infusing its possibilities. But the future will not always be synonymous with strangeness and wonder. As Sejima remarked the day before, “Tokyo has changed; it has become modern. . . architecture is increasingly becoming mass production.

I noticed a camera flash in the distance and the rain was still falling.

— Lloyd Sage