Sorry I'm a couple of days behind. So much is happening and I haven't had reliable Internet service. But I'll keep posting until I've told you all about it.
I noticed it the first time we arrived at the New Sanno. Outside the entrance to the hotel is a fountain in the middle of a round courtyard. The courtyard has a wall all the way around. Just visible over the wall, to the right of the hotel building, was a painting of a boy hugging his knees to his chest. The black and white paint showed amazing detail. If this was graffiti, it was very sophisticated graffiti.
Just below him, there was something else all together. It looked like a fanciful doodle with chalk on an old black chalk board, only it was 3 dimensional. It has words that I could just read over the top of the wall - No Man's Land.
Every time we walked into the hotel I noticed it and wondered what it was - a bar, a nightclub, a portal to another world? Finally we decided to investigate. On our way back from the Imperial Palace we detoured down a side street I thought might take us to the painting and the chalk board. It did, but we were no more enlightened than before. It was obviously a gate, a freestanding gate leading from nothing to nowhere. It looked like a dark cartoonists rendition of the torii gates found at the entrances to Shinto shrines.
Now I was really curious.
We went back to the hotel where I did what I always do when I'm curious - I googled it. Google promptly informed me that "No Man's Land" was a modern art display set up in the old French Embassy building. Seventy artists from France, Japan and maybe some other places got together and decorated everything - rooms, hallways, driveways and office furniture were all fair game.
The display would be dismantled at the end of January when it would be replaced with apartments. It was closed for the holiday, but would reopen on the sixth - today was the sixth. It was open until 6 pm; my clock said 4.
"We have to see this," I said. And this is what we saw.
- sheet metal paper airplanes crash landed into the driveway
- a graffiti Mario world complete with shells and coins
- a stairwell blocked by power cords that hung like vines
- an entire office spray painted silver from desk chair to stapler to floor
- a paper flower that sent tendrils out through windows and air vents
- a room covered in clay to look like bark
- a room filled waist high with shredded paper
- a family of Roomba robots sliding around a darkened room shining alphabet lasers on the floor from the end of long sticks strapped to their backs
- whole cities cut from books
and much more, so much I can't describe it. All I can say is if you live in Japan or can get here before Jan 31, you need to see this exhibit.
I leave you today with a quote from Charles Mingus, "Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity."
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