Here's 2023's best art books
PLUS: I speak to Japan House London's Director on five years in the UK capital
Hello.
I’m landing in your inbox on a Wednesday which means it’s an interview! (If you’re a new reader, a reminder that you get two of these each month in addition to the Friday news round-ups.)
Today’s chat is to mark the fifth anniversary of Japan House London, a cultural hub which shares a lot of its DNA with a museum, but isn’t. I ask Director Sam Thorne to explain what they do and why. And as a former Director of Nottingham Contemporary gallery, we also look at how his time in the art world helps him in his new role.
Below I also bring you a very special edition of my Hot List too. Five leading names — including the Dutch Ambassador to the UK and the Director of the National Portrait Gallery — recommend the art and culture books they most enjoyed over the past year. With Christmas just 33 days away, I hope it gives you some inspiration for your gift buying. (Plus, if you purchase through the links included below, you’ll be supporting this newsletter as I get a small affiliate commission — so it’s win-win I hope!). Another five names will offer their recommendations in the next edition too.
Finally, I’m excited to say that also in the next edition l’ll be launching a brand new regular feature which I’m VERY excited about. And I have a hugely influential first contributor. Watch this space.
Now let’s dive in!
— maxwell
The Hot List
This week in a special edition of my Hot List, I ask five leading figures to recommend the art and culture book they most enjoyed in 2023.
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📖 ALL THE BEAUTY IN THE WORLD: THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART AND ME by Patrick Bringley
Recommended by Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director of the National Portrait Gallery
“In the lead up to the National Portrait Gallery’s reopening in June, I was reading Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World. The book chronicles the author’s 10 years spent as a museum guard at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As a former museum guard myself, and someone who worked at the Met, it nails the very particular thing of spending your days in galleries, and how close you grow to the works and the people that come to see them. It felt like a poignant book to be reading at a time when thousands of our best-loved portraits were making their way back onto our walls.”
📖 ARTISTS MAKING BOOKS: POETRY TO POLITICS by Venetia Porter
Recommended by Gareth Harris, Chief Contributing Editor at the Art Newspaper and author of Censored Art Today
“This book — published by British Museum Press — opens up a whole new world: the rich seam of artists’ books from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. Porter curated the accompanying display at the British Museum (on now until 18 February 2024), stressing that the project “aims to expand the boundaries of the subject” by concentrating on 61 artists. We read to find out something new and there are plenty of discoveries here from the range of techniques and styles used — concertinas and photo books — to intensely personal pieces such as Beirut-born Abed Al Kadiri’s My Father’s Grave (2020), which was written during the pandemic.”
📖 THE SONG OF THE STORK AND THE DROMEDARY [HET LIED VAN OOIEVAAR EN DROMEDARIS] by Anjet Daanje
Recommended by His Excellency Mr Karel J G Van Oosterom, Ambassador for the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the United Kingdom
“This is the book I enjoyed most this year. The protagonist is Eliza May, who is modelled after Emily Brontë and lives in early 19th century Yorkshire. Daanje uses a beautiful mixture of writing styles. I read the book in Dutch, because it hasn’t been published in English yet. I would have preferred to read it in English, because the story of 19th century Great Britain in described in a beautiful, associative manner by Daanje. Rights to the book have been sold in many different countries already, but not yet in English speaking countries. That’s just a matter of time, though. The author’s agent is in conversation with various publishers in the English speaking world.”
📖 ART IS MAGIC by Jeremy Deller
Recommended by Geraldine Collinge, Chief Executive Officer of Compton Verney
“This is an art book that has brought me joy this year. It’s a celebration of the work he has created and its power to transform. One of things I love about it is that it showcases how his work responds to place, is collaborative and makes you think in different ways — I won’t forget the experience of bouncing on Stonehenge in Glasgow. It’s a fun, playful book, though his work explores challenging questions and shows that these aren’t mutually exclusive. And if I may have another choice, a book that is making the way into the stockings of my nieces and nephews this Christmas is The Women who Changed Art Forever a graphic novel that highlights the work of four brilliant artists and is a great introduction.”
📖 DAVID SMITH: THE ART AND LIFE OF A TRANSFORMATIONAL SCULPTOR by Michael Brenson
Recommended by Farah Nayeri, Culture Writer at the New York Times and author of Takedown: Art and Power in the Digital Age
“Artist biographies, even bestselling ones, are usually one of two things: (1) a great read, but full of conjecture and unsubstantiated gossip, (2) highly documented, but somewhat turgid and dull. Michael Brenson’s biography of David Smith, which took the better part of 20 years to produce, is both a seamlessly written narrative and one where every sentence is documented and rooted in fact. It’s the most important book on David Smith published to date, and a major contribution to art history. Brenson, one of America’s foremost art historians, is a former New York Times art critic and a onetime Getty and Guggenheim fellow. He was for two decades on the sculpture faculty at Bard College. If you read one artist biography, make it this one.”
*This newsletter is reader supported. I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you if you buy a copy of these books through the links provided.
The Big Interview
In 2018, Kensington in West London welcomed yet another cultural institution to neighbour the area’s famous museums, art colleges and an historic royal palace. But this was a different beast entirely to those more established venues.
Now five year’s old, Japan House London is going from strength to strength. Its exhibition programme punches far above its weight for a venue its size, and its stunning art deco building has become a destination for all manner of other activities, from shopping to dining. It’s all with the aim of presenting the very best of Japanese art, design, innovation and cuisine to British audiences.
To mark its fifth birthday, and to celebrate their just-opened new exhibition on the contemporary lives of the indigenous Ainu of Northern Japan, this week’s interview is with Sam Thorne, Director General & CEO. Here, we chat about the House’s relationship with its museum neighbours, how the institution is funded, and his big ambitions for the venue in the coming years. But we begin with the most important question: What actually is Japan House London?
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Hello Sam. So, Japan House London has a big remit, and there’s A LOT of activity in its Kensington home. How would you describe it?
Our mission is to bring the very best of Japanese cultures to London and to Europe. That remit is both simple and potentially infinite. What really drew me to the role is that, as a cultural institute, Japan House London is hybrid. Meaning, we have an exhibition space, an auditorium, a library, a shop and a restaurant. As a curator and writer, I’ve always been fascinated by the intersections between art, design and architecture — where music meets literature, for example, or where craft meets technology. And it’s those kinds of meeting-points that are at the heart of what we do at Japan House London.
For me, we’re at a moment when museums and cultural institutions everywhere are trying to work out why they’re doing what they do, who they’re for, what they are. We’re finally moving away from the 20th-century paradigm of museums. So to be part of a still-young organisation that can be malleable and responsive is tremendously exciting.
You've just opened your new exhibition: Ainu Stories. Tell me a bit about it.
The Ainu are an indigenous people who live mainly in Hokkaido — that is, Japan’s northern-most island. Like indigenous communities all over the world, their history has been marked by discrimination and oppression, to the point that their language and culture almost disappeared.
When their work is exhibited, it has tended to be through an ethnographic lens, which is to say it’s located historically, it’s othered. Our exhibition is different in that it goes in deep into the contemporary cultural practices of one place, Nibutani, a community of just over 300 people in the south of Hokkaido, the majority of whom are of Ainu descent.
Ainu Stories has been some years in the making, and brings together more than 200 works – from textiles and carving to archival presentations – alongside specially commissioned videos. It’s a show that asks urgent questions about cultural transmission.
How do you decide the exhibition programme?
Our programme is extremely broad in scope. Since opening five years ago, we’ve presented shows on architects such as Sou Foujimoto and Sejima Kazuyo, group shows that have included legendary artists like Tanaami Keiichi and Yamaguchi Harumi, and thematic presentations that have explored prototyping, metalwork, braiding — the list goes on. It’s a really cross-disciplinary endeavour.
We’ve got a brilliant curatorial team here, who develop around half of our exhibitions. These, like Ainu Stories, are often research-intensive projects that take several years to develop. A huge amount of effort goes into the design of our exhibitions, as well as the series of live events that spin out from them. The other half of our exhibitions we develop in collaboration with curators and institutions in Japan. These are touring presentations, which also travel to our sibling organisations, in the USA and Brazil.
What is your relationship with the museums in London which have significant Japan collections?
We’ve got close relationships with the Japan specialists at both the V&A and the British Museum. They often contribute to our talks programmes and, in preparation for Ainu Stories, we took a group from Hokkaido to visit the Ainu collections at the British Museum. We were also really happy to recently support some of the learning activities as part of the Young V&A’s new show, Japan: From Myths to Manga.
Looking around London right now, there’s a real upsurge of exhibitions of Japanese artists. There’s Hiroshi Sugimoto at the Hayward Gallery, Daido Moriyama at the Photographers’ Gallery. Next year, the William Morris Gallery will do a survey of Mingei, or folk-crafts, and Tate Modern will present a survey of Yoko Ono’s work. In the future, we’re looking forward to developing new collaborations with institutions of all sizes, both across London and around the UK.
How is Japan House London funded?
We’re part of a global initiative supported by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with two other Japan Houses located in LA and Sao Paulo, who we work with closely on a number of projects.
We are also very grateful to our dedicated group of corporate supporters, who enable us to do everything we do. Because of the nature of this support, we don’t have to charge for entry — all of our exhibitions are free, and there are free events happening very regularly. At the moment, for example, we’re running a film programme on the brilliant director Koreeda Hirokazu. As Hans Ulrich Obrist, our neighbour over at the Serpentine, recently said to me: I can’t understand why other countries don’t start their own Japan Houses…
You joined Japan House London after six years leading Nottingham Contemporary. What have been the biggest similarities and differences between running a leading dedicated gallery and something like the House?
In some respects, Japan House London and Nottingham Contemporary are – perhaps surprisingly – comparable organisations. They both have a team of around 70-80 people, they both present ambitious research-intensive exhibition projects, they are both committed to education, research and live programmes, which are free to attend. But there are a huge number of differences too. At Japan House London, we’re located in a particularly dense area of other cultural and educational institutions – we’re just by the Design Museum, the Royal College of Art, the museums on Exhibition Road, and so on. And of course, we work in a very deep and wide-ranging way with just one country, Japan. What the two do have in common is that they continue to evolve, like all good institutions should.
You've just passed one year in the role. What are your ambitions for the next few years for the institution?
We’ve only just turned five, so we’re still a very young organisation. What we’ve been working on this past 12 months is to develop more collaborations with institutions of different scales around London and the UK.
I don’t need to repeat that this is an impossibly difficult time for cultural institutions in the UK, after a decade-plus of cuts, closures and so-called austerity measures. It’s never been more challenging. So we’re looking to find ways that we can support London’s cultural ecology and infrastructure.
To take one example, that includes establishing residencies for artists, researchers and curators. The first couple of these, with Delfina Foundation and Van Gogh House, will launch in the spring. We want to become a house not only in the sense of bringing people and ideas together, but in the sense of being a production house.
If someone is planning a trip to Japan, what are the must-see museums, galleries and arts centres they should have on their to-visit list?
One personal highlight is Tokyo’s Mingeikan, or Folk-Crafts Museum, which dates back to the 1930s and is just exquisitely installed. For contemporary art, around Japan, there is SANAA’s Museum for 21st Century Art in Kanazawa, or artist Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Enoura Observatory in Odawara. Japan is an incredible country for highly specialist museums. I’m thinking of places like the Mizkan vinegar museum, or the Awagami Factory Paper Museum.
Another personal favourite, hard to get to, is Nagi MOCA, a cosmic micro-museum designed by Arata Isozaki in a tiny village, in Okayama prefecture. Next, I’d love to visit the Mosaic Tile Museum in Tajimi, a quarry-type mound designed by Terunobu Fujimori.
Finally, a Britain House in Tokyo, would that be a winner?
Seriously, though, in terms of cultural exchange, there are deeply rooted connections between the UK and Japan. I think of the potters Bernard Leach and Hamada Shoji moving from Japan to my own workplace of St Ives, in 1920, to set up the first Japanese kiln in Europe.
Certainly there is currently a lot of dialogue between Japanese museums and the UK. This year alone, exhibitions in Tokyo have included David Hockney at MOT, Thomas Heatherwick at Mori Art Museum, selections from the Tate collection at The National Art Center, and Cerith Wyn-Evans at the beautiful Isamu Noguchi-designed Sogetsu Kaikan.
— Ainu Stories: Contemporary Lives by the Saru River runs at Japan House London in Kensington until 21 April 2024. Entry is free.
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With enormous thanks as always Maxwell.
Opened my eyes to Japan House and all it has to offer - now top of my list for the next visit to London.