The asian atmosphere in Ridley Scott’s movie Bladerunner isn’t something you will find in Philip K. Dick’s Book “Do andoids dream of electric sheeps”. It is a pure invention to place the set there and it expresses better then any other movie of the eighties the american fear of Asia. (Scott’s picture “Black rain” produced at the end of the decade in 1989 prouves the same preoccupations). It is always raining and you see a huge number of umbrellas in the picture. In the National Art Center building in Tokyo l’architecte Kisho Kurokawa replied in 2003 to Scott’s Bladerunner. Kurokawa issued of the metabolism movement of the 60‘s, build outside the wave front of his museum, a little building were spectators can secure their umbrellas, amongst others also Bladerunner umbrellas. Inside, the onlooker can choose between, postimpressionist paintings from the Musée d’Orsay, and a Man ray exhibition, both announced in english or an exhibition on calligraphy only presented in Japanese. The fact that there was no free press entrance made me focus on the umbrellas.

Japan gives the impression that everything is regulated by visual signs, beginning with the subway waiting lane marks to the plastic food in restaurants. It is true that not understanding and reading a language leads to a special kind of visual concentration because the eye is searching to guide you. However the omnipresence of visual signs in Japan depends also on the writing system the kanji imported from China which presents a word or a concept by an image. (This is also the reason why Japanese have a better memory, one character represents a word so that they can memorize longer sequences of sense.) It is not astonishing that all kind of signs have a real graphical impact with their great elegance and simplicity. Perhaps this explains even the graphical outline of japanese contemporay art. In the newly built Midtown complex the Japan Graphic Designers Association Inc. (JAGDA) held an exhibition on graphic design with examples of their yearbook 2010 which was, and that is rare in Japan, free of admission. Unfortunatly the graphic design exposed was in fact quite academic.

At this picture you can see the painter Atsing with the art critic Alain Coulange, lurking at his paintings as only art critics do. Under the title “In the city”, the exhibition shows four works out of a larger series. First exposed at the archeologic museum in Dijon you can visit them now till the 15th of may at Jean Brollys Vitrine space - 16 rue Montmorency. Always representing a couple of people, everything seems strange in these paintings which are showing people between a freezing and a moving state, in their everyday life. Expressions and colors are reduced to their minimum in order to have maximum impact. It looks as if you where applying to a figurative painting the essential  laws of abstract art, to create an essential figurativ art .“ 1. No texture - 2. no brushwork or callygraphy 3. no sketching or drawing, 4. no forms 5. no design 6. no colors 7. no light…“

This was my third visite of the Juergen Teller show at the Consortium in Dijon with some of the EMA ART SCHOOL students in Chalon-sur-Saône. Do they have another look on the exhibition after a week of hard work in the workshop on german photography? Who knows?

Since three weeks I worked with my students on exhibitionsflyers of Julian Opie, Sigmar Polke and Rothko. They had to describe prices, biographies, pictures and so on. The last day had come and we went to the Juergen Teller exhibition at the Consortium. Even if at first they were not very interested, they saw directly that the pictures had a autobiographical-context and were trashy. In front of the self-portait with a Mercedes, they said it was Juergen Teller with my car. A real hint that germanness exists mainly through german cars and expresses international dreams of utopic luxury - as the last suvivoir of the island of utopia .

The newest work by Ruth Hutter are simple.

It seems that, after an excursion into complex territories, she has returned to her beginnings, which primarily posed questions to solipsism, i. e. wether the human being is always cast back upon himself or if he stands in communication with others…

Text Fabian Stech