Tour of Deutsche Bank Tokyo

Deutsche Bank Tokyo is situated in the Sanno Park Tower nearby the Shinto shrine Hie and the parliamentary building. It is one of the city's most well-known modern buildings. In its collection there, Deutsche Bank confronts post-war and contemporary Japanese and European artists in search of "absolute reflection on the everyday". Andre Kunz invites us to a tour.

Turn to the East

Tokyo seems to be well on its way towards becoming the main hub of the new art of the 21st century: nowhere does the ambivalence between tradition and innovation, between East and West become as evident as here. Margrit Brehm's essay provides a sketch on Tokyo's art scene and the development of contemporary Japanese art from calligraphy to Tokyo Pop.

Miwa Yanagi

The photographer Miwa Yanagi uses the computer as classical painters use the glaze. With its help, that impression of skin-deep purity arises that we've grown accustomed to in advertising photography. Miwa Yanagi doesn't shrink back from this aesthetic. On the contrary: She obeys it - in order to conquer it. A classical Japanese form of martial arts, says Arno Widmann.

Naoya Hatakeyama

The Japanese artist Naoya Hatakeyama has photographed lime works, rivers in cityscapes, tunnels, and blasts. His images are about the gigantic construction we call civilization. Hatakeyama asks where it begins and where it ends, what it consists of and whether the image it creates of itself can stand up to its own abysses. A portrait of the artist by Ulf Erdmann Ziegler.

"Japan is different in a different way"

That, in any case, is what the hero in Cees Nooteboom's novel "Mokusei" claims in an effort to describe how difficult it is for a Western mind to understand the complexities of Japanese culture with all its various influences. Yet at the same time, Tokyo seems to be well on its way towards becoming the main hub of the new art of the 21st century. When Francesco Bonami, curator of this year’s Venice Biennale, promoted the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami as a key figure of today’s art scene, he was also offering an indication that the view to the East can be interpreted as a deeper-reaching change in perspective. More passionately than anywhere else, artists in Japan are investigating contemporary art’s possibilities for determining an individual position in the age of the global information society. This is also reflected in the Deutsche Bank Collection in Tokyo, which the main focus of our current edition is dedicated to. +++ Andre Kunz has taken a tour through Deutsche Bank in Sanno Park Tower, where German and Japanese post-war and contemporary artists are engaged in dialogue. +++ Margrit Brehm provides a sketch on the development of contemporary Japanese art from calligraphy to Tokyo Pop. +++ Ulf Erdmann Ziegler has written a portrait of Naoya Hatakeyama, who investigates civilization’s depths in his photographs. +++ Arno Widmann describes the strategies of the artist Miwa Yanagi as a classical Japanese form of martial arts. +++ Toshihiro Umezaki from Deutsche Bank Tokyo explains why "Art at Work" is a completely new concept in Japan.