The Deutsche Bank Collection in Tokyo "Absolute reflection on the everyday" Sanno Park Tower, home of the Deutsche Bank headquarters in Tokyo One of the highest buildings in Tokyo, the tower housing the headquarters of the Deutsche Bank is now a familiar component of the city's skyline. Located in Tokyo's government district, the 194 metres of the Sanno Park Tower soar high above the surrounding area, offering those working on the 16th to 20th floors a fine panorama of the metropolis. Since its completion in August of 2000, the tower has housed not only the headquarters of the Deutsche bank in Japan but also some 350 works of art from the concern's collection. Under the motto "cultural exchange", the exhibition juxtaposes contemporary works by German and Japanese artists. The artistic concept for the bank's offices there was developed by Friedhelm Hütte, a director of Deutsche Bank Art in Frankfurt, in cooperation with the Tokyo art advisor Yoshiko Isshiki. The theme that links the works in the exhibition is perceptions of everyday life and situations. Reception hall of the Deutsche Bank in the Sanno Park Tower, Tokyo Out of consideration for the outstanding architecture in the vicinity of the tower, the architects' office responsible for its construction, Mitsubishi Jissho Sekei, refrained from placing art works in and around the building. The restrained Modernism of the tower's functionally designed 15-metre-high entrance hall betrays nothing of the peace and warmth radiated by the Deutsche Bank's Minimalist reception hall on the 16th floor. The Berlin Reichstag before its renovation, a piece of fruit traced over with threads of light, the megalithic cult centre Stonehenge - Tokihiro Sato's black-and-white photographic triptych Horned Melon (1994), located on the right-hand wall of the foyer panelled with polished limestone, greets the visitor to Deutsche Bank Japan. The work introduces the theme of artistic contrasts that is the leitmotif of the entire Tokyo collection. Photographs by Tokihiro Sato in the foyer of the Deutsche Bank, Sanno Park Tower, Tokyo Deutsche Bank Collection © Henning Bock Night seems to hang over Sato's pictures - they appear to be bathed in a pallid glow and sown with mysteriously glimmering points of light. His images are made using exceptionally long exposure times—and the points of light are created by his positioning himself—during daylight hours—at different locations within the scene and directing sunlight into the camera lens with a mirror. At night he uses a fluorescent light stick. Moving slowly but steadily across the camera's field of vision during the exposure, Sato himself remains invisible; only the points of light betray his position. Whereas the poetic juxtaposition of apparently unrelated visual motifs may be seen as challenging the observer to seek for relationships between opposites, in his work Sato is primarily concerned with the visualisation of subjective temporal perception. The traces of light in the photographs represent time seeping away, creating in the interplay between space and movement an almost tangible structure. Photographic works from Nobyoshi Araki's Tokyo Story series in the entrance area of the Deutsche Bank in Tokyo Gerhard Richter uses photography in a completely different way. The apparently "objective" representation of reality in the photographs he uses as a basis for his works serve as a foil for his painting. His prints exhibited in Tokyo - Kanarische Landschaften II (Canary Island landscapes II, 1971) and Besetztes Haus (Occupied house, 1990)—recall his photo-realistic grey paintings of the sixties and nineties. Clear analogies between Richter's photographic works and those of prominent Japanese photographs are apparent in many of the works exhibited between the 16th and 20th floors. The black-and-white series Tokyo Story (1983-84), with which Nobuyoshi Araki presents a cool documentary of urban life; and Hiroshi Sugimoto's impressionist photo triptych D. E. Shaw and Company Office (1997), whose eerie emptiness creates the impression of a sacred space, both perfectly complement Richter's exploration of painting, photography and human perception. As in an episodic novel, a narrative panorama of daily city life is played out before the observer's gaze. Photographs by Thomas Struth in a conference room of the Deutsche Bank, Sanno Park Tower, Tokyo Deutsche Bank Collection © Henning Bock The biggest room in the Tokyo headquarters is the boardroom on the 20th floor. Here the broad windows on the front of the building afford an uninterrupted view over the skyline of the Rappongi district. Nine photographs from Naoya Hatakeyama's River Series (1993-96) hang on the walls between the windows. Against the background of the skyline, they draw the observer's attention to artificially created natural spaces that might otherwise go unnoticed: Hatakeyama's apparently idyllic pictures depict the concrete landscape of Tokyo's sewage system. But first impressions can be deceptive: the tranquil atmosphere of this urban architecture illuminated under the night sky, serenely mirrored in the water flowing through the sewers, yields on closer inspection to sober reality: in the broken reflection on the musty waters may be seen the sheer brute force of the city's ruthlessly regimented image. The other focus of the Tokyo collection besides photography is works on paper: individual floors are devoted to different aspects of German and Japanese post-war art. On the 17th floor are to be found sculpture drawings, and on the 18th neo-expressionist works by artists such as Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz and A.R. Penck. The 19th floor is devoted to Minimal and Concept Art. The theme of the perception of time, already apparent in Tokihiro Sato's Horned Melon series, is here taken up by Makoto Sasaki in his 1998 work Heartbeat Drawing 24-Hours in which, as the title suggests, in its lines of bright red ink records the artist's heartbeat over a period of 24 hours. The result is an almost monochrome, shimmering image. Sculpture by Tatsuo Miyajima in the entrance area to the trading rooms at the Deutsche Bank, Sanno Park Tower, Tokyo Deutsche Bank Collection © Henning Bock Although the spectrum of German and Japanese art in the Sanno Park Tower manifests cultural and historical similarities and differences, they are indeed separated physically only by a heartbeat, and their proximity makes clear the variety of experience that art affords. At the entrance to the trading rooms for global markets, the visitor's attention is immediately drawn to Tatsuo Miyajima's luminous numbers sculpture K. C. C. Y/R-7. It was selected for the exhibition because it places the kind of numbers with which the traders work every day in a new context. "As long as it is supplied with electricity, the work can generate ever new sequences of completely random numbers ," explains Yoshiko Isshiki. The signs of the times point to continued change: with its concept of "art at work" the Deutsche Bank in Tokyo still occupies a pioneering role vis-à-vis other concerns in Tokyo, especially when it comes to contemporary works by younger artists. In Japan it is unusual to find art in office buildings—workplaces here tend to be plain and functional. Yet in Tokyo too "art at work" is taking root, and once it has become a part of people's everyday lives it begins to unfold its powers. Take for instance the work of Rupprecht Geiger on the 19th floor: Yuko Ujita, Vice-president for Marketing and Communication admits that Geiger's brilliant orange-coloured circles are always inspiring her to new, creative ideas. This integration of the worlds of art and work appears slowly to be gaining acceptance in the city: from the 20th floor of the Sanno Park Tower the visitor has an uninterrupted view of the Mori Tower, where in 2003 Japan's most famous building contractor and art collector Minoru Mori opened his internationally renowned museum of contemporary Japanese art on the 53rd floor. » back to overview