A Tour of the Japanese Art Exhibition at Red Bull Music Academy's Tokyo Headquarters

Red Bull Music Academy has come to Asia for the first time in its 16-year history, with a diverse, brilliantly curated mix of events, concerts, DJ sets, and talks all over Tokyo from Oct. 12 - Nov. 14. While celebrating the culture of Japan for a month—and giving one-of-a-kind musical experiences to the city's residents—they've also given 60 young singers, rappers, producers, and instrumentalists the opportunity to come to Tokyo and learn from veterans (Just Blaze, Dorian Concept, James Holden, Om'Mas Keith, Holly Herndon, TOKiMONSTA, Dave Smith, and more). Through lectures, access to multiple recording studios and state of the art equipment, and putting these newer artists on bills with established acts, RBMA continues to have a successful, authentic artist incubation program that nurtures the careers of tomorrow's musical innovators.

For RBMA, it's not only about the music; it's a focus on all art that contemplates the present and how it becomes history. This year, at the Red Bull headquarters in Tokyo's Shibuya district, they've mounted a stunning contemporary art exhibition curated by Kenji Kubota, in a space designed by the architects at Kengo Kuma. Kubota was tasked with representing Tokyo through works by 20 artists on four floors containing a lobby, recording studios, an office space, a dining room, and the lecture hall.

The "Academy Exhibition," as they call it, is not only decorative but meaningful, showing Japan as "a city of futuristic architecture and traditional culture," as Kubota says. Works like Chim↑Pom's BLACK OF DEATH film connect the past, present, and future, reflecting on the devastating 2011 earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan with alternating scenes of present-day Tokyo. The crows in the film represent a historical superstition (that crows are bad luck), and there's video footage of restricted areas in Fukushima, making the viewer question how citizens deal with their present reality in the aftermath of such trauma.

The exhibition also compliments Kengo Kuma's architectural aims for the overall space. Kuma partner Javier Villar Ruiz says, “Each floor has different character and a different concept. We had this idea of bringing the outside to the inside. We wanted to do more than just traditional architecture and try to see how we could do an outside-inside concept within a building.” Ruiz describes the materials they used in the interior as "humble, rough, and natural," such as left-over wood from the building's exterior construction, to create the appearance of a wooden home where the eight individual recording studios exist. To further bring the outside in, Kubota chose artist Tetsuro Kano to create Savage structures, an installation using tree branches, bird cages, and live birds that gently fly around the recording spaces.

For a musical artist who's flown across the world to learn more about the history and practice of music-making, experiencing visual art in these educational spaces is certainly a treat. Check out many of the pieces on view at the Red Bull Music Academy Tokyo headquarters with commentary by curator Kenji Kubota and watch a mini-documentary of the four-floor HQ in Aoyama​ below.

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Kenji Kubota says, “This installation is about the wedding of a member of Chim↑Pom. The woman, Ellie, got married to a man, and they did a wedding ceremony as a demonstration in the street, which ended at Robert Indiana's LOVE public art sculpture. In Japan, after the earthquake, there were many demonstrations, such as anti-nuclear ones, and the government is now trying to change the constitution to keep the peace. But Chim↑Pom did a demonstration with a wedding, which is not political at all, but at the same time, it is sort of. So all the participants are holding these placards and demonstrating, around 500 people in Shinjuku. But all of these images are not political; it’s about love and unity.”

Kenji Kubota says, “BLACK OF DEATH is a video and photography documentation project, where crows are lured to a tourist site through the use of stuffed crow decoys and amplified pre-recorded crow-calls, while the photos were later sold as souvenir postcards at the sites.”

Kenji Kubota says, “Tetsuro Kano's practice is a mixture between a wide variety of materials and a broad category of found objects. In the past, this has culminated in work such as an installation to watch over the growth of plant seeds that were sown into the exhibition space and a site-specific installation where natural living objects such as birds and fruits were brought togehter with ready-made products such as garden supplies and bird deterrents. During this exhibition, an idyllic home for birds will be recreated as an installation, with actual birds living in the space.”

Influenced by video games and sci-fi films during his childhood, Hiroki Tsukuda makes works based on his own photographs using both analog and digital processes. Inspired by 20th-century surrealism, Tsukuda makes works that depict alternate realities, reflected in the title for The beginning of the empire. Kenji Kubota says, “He combines imaginary buildings and real buildings together. So it looks like a futuristic scene, but at the same time, it looks old. It's the juxtaposition between the very contemporary and the more nostalgic.”

Kenji Kubota says, “Yumiko Shinozaki is a very young ceramic artist. Ceramics are a very traditional Japanese way of expression, and we use them to make vases or for tea ceremonies and traditional things. But she uses this technique to make these kinds of abstract, colorful objects, which are not used for something like tea.”

Kenji Kubota says, “In 2004, Ujino began to work on a new project, 'The Rotators.' Conceived as a kind of 'research into the material world' of the 20th century's rapid expansion of mass consumer society, this work cobbles together everyday objects and techniques from all over the world—home appliances, cars, furniture, old records, and so on—in a DIY fashion to create sounds, sculptures, and performances.”

Kenji Kubota says, “These photographs were taken by Takashi Yasumura. They look like abstract images, but they're actually part of real buildings, or a bridge, or columns. Yasumura's work presents the uncertainty of everyday life, and in so doing pushes us to re-evaluate the world.”

Kenji Kubota says, “These are embroidered pieces using antique sewing machines made in the late 19th century when modernization happened. Satoru Aoyama thinks of producing art as a labor of contemporary society. That’s why he uses motifs like the socialist manifesto or images taken from Time magazine or Newsweek, which are also social images.”

Kenji Kubota says, “Rooted in an anthropological approach, Mishima's works go beyond their age, taking the theme of the universality of energy and the constant renewal of wisdom and sensation.”

Kenji Kubota says, “On the one hand, his works with wigs, high heels, and belts are fetishistic—all divorced from the body and hardened—they also call to mind folklore and natural history.”

Kenji Kubota says, “Yuko Mohri combines disused tools and electronic parts such as motors, and with the aid of magnets and gravity, presents installations that unfold almost entirely organically. In recent times, Mohri's work has been concerned with the relationship and boundary between the artificial/natural and human-induced/incidental.”

Kenji Kubota says, “Using a technique to apply vivid color to carved wood, Hideki IINUMA creates contemporary female portraits. Using his imagination, he made the parts of these women that were invisible in the photograph three-dimensional, i.e. visible.”

Kenji Kubota says, “Choosing to become homeless, Naoki Hirose lives his life out in Tokyo, the floor his bed; and his work represents a message directed at society. This work is a document of a mock funeral centered on the streets of Shibuya, commemorating the graduation of gyaru members from a team.”

Kenji Kubota says, “Izumi Kato's work consists of human-shaped primitive beings depicted either in two or three-dimensional form. There is an air of eerie charm about these creatures that seem neither child nor adult, nor can they be distinguished as species or as living entities.”

Kenji Kubota says, “This is one of the group's major works. Super Rat is a stuffed specimen that looks like the anime character of a rat—an animal which, even after repeated extermination attempts with ever more sophisticated means, continues to inhabit the streets of Shibuya.”

Kenji Kubota says, “Kazuki Umezawa makes his work by collecting large numbers of images from the Internet and using Photoshop to make a collage out of them. Umezawa makes images that seem to bring the beings of the Internet back to real society.”

Kenji Kubota says, “The work shown here records the situation of Kato and a Korean man carrying out shared labor, even though they are unable to communicate with each other. They carry out this work on Tsushima, an island that lies between Japan and Korea, and which both countries claim as their own territory.”

Kenji Kubota says, “This is by Fuyuki Yamakawa. He’s also a performance artist. There was a river in Shibuya, but after modernization, the river was buried underground. But it kept running. So he researched all these streams and recorded the sound of the streams on this computer next to the pieces. These are the photographs he took.”

Kenji Kubota says, “Beginning with hip-hop, Riyoo Kim was influenced by the street culture of his generation: graffiti, tattoo, rap, beatboxing, DJing, [and] science fiction. At the same time, when he studied art and ceramics, he was attracted to the vitality of ancient bronze pottery and the even older pottery of the Jomon period.”

Kenji Kubota says, “The pattern on the surface of his objects gives off a magical, indigenous quality; yet, while it is ceramic, it also has a dull metallic quality which leaves a neo-futuristic impression.”