Note: This is a raw transcription of an audio recording. Part of our mission is to release transcriptions as soon as possible, to improve access to M+ talks. Therefore—while we strive for accuracy—in some places, these transcriptions may be imperfect.

MODERATOR: [Japanese] Thank you for waiting. We will now begin the Mori Art Museum International Symposium. M+ and Mori Art Museum organised this conference over 2 days with the title ‘What Do Collections Mean to Museums?’ Following the conference we held over 2 days, we are holding this open forum from 6:30 pm to 8 pm in order to consider together with the audience the content of the discussions. This open forum is titled ‘What Is the New Thinking around Collections in Modern and Contemporary Museums in Asia?’ In addition to staff from Mori Art Museum and M+ who served as moderators, speakers from all over the world have been invited onstage. Please enjoy this symposium for the next 90 minutes.

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] Let us begin. I am Kataoka Mami, deputy director of Mori Art Museum I hope you enjoy this symposium. For 2 days, yesterday and today, we discussed the subject of museum collections with speakers from museums in different parts of Asia. In this public symposium, we will conclude and respond to what was discussed in each session.

First, Doryun Chong from M+ will present an overview of the museum and explain the initiative called M+ International. In Session 1, the topic of public museum collections was discussed. Horikawa Lisa from the National Gallery Singapore will conclude and respond to that. As for Session 2, in which I talked about private museum collections, Kasahara Michiko, vice director of the Artizon Museum, formerly known as the Bridgestone Museum of Art, will conclude and respond to that discussion. Yokoyama Ikko is lead curator of the M+ architecture and design collection. In Session 3, we discussed what it means to collect works from the architecture and design fields. Sugaya Tomio from the soon-to-open Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, will conclude and respond to what was discussed in that session. First, let’s start with Doryun.

DORYUN CHONG: Thank you very much, Mami, and thank you to everyone for taking time out of your precious schedule to join us for this conversation. I wanted to set the stage by talking a little bit about what M+, this new museum project, is doing in Hong Kong. To introduce myself again, my name is Doryun Chong. I have the title of deputy director and chief curator at M+. I’ve been working on this project for about 6 years and it’s been going on for the last 10 years or so. Just to set the stage a little bit and give a sense of context, I will just talk about what this new museum building project is.

But to talk about M+, I need to talk briefly about West Kowloon Cultural District project. It is initiated by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government. It’s a massive cultural district building project. You see here a picture from an aerial view of a very large piece of land that was created about 20 years ago. I will show you a diagram of this piece of land that is shaped like a hammer. And you see that there is an urban park in the hammerhead and the buildings that are indicated as blue and pink are the ones that will appear in the next 10 or 15 years or so. The pink part is the first phase and some of them are already finished. M+ is part of this first phase. The blue is the second phase and what is indicated as grey are either private developments or private-public partnerships, which will bring in long-term revenues for the cultural district to operate for many years to come.

As many of you would know, Hong Kong is a very well-visited city and the district in the end will have a very good connectivity: from the airport, a high-speed rail that connects Hong Kong to mainland China, but also by ferries in the Pearl River Delta Region as well as within Hong Kong. Last year, almost 75 million visitors came through Hong Kong Airport, one of the busiest airports in the world. And then last year also saw the completion of the terminal station that connects Hong Kong to Guangzhou, the third largest city in China. You can get there now within an hour. And the district is also very close to one of the busiest shopping districts that bring almost 80 million people annually. So these are the natural potential audiences.

But now to get immediately to the M+ building. Here is a rendering of the building, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, who are based in Basel, Switzerland. Of course, they are very well known for their Tate Modern project as well as the Olympic Stadium in Beijing, and, of course, in Tokyo, the monumental Prada store. This is what the actual building construction looks like as of last month. So now things are quite watertight and it’s going to be another 6 months or so of massive fit-out project inside the building. And just to give you a sense of this very uniquely shaped building... It’s quite a large piece of architecture, 65,000 square metres altogether. And that includes 17,000 square metres of exhibition spaces, which consists of thirty-three galleries as well as many other kinds of display spaces. But most of our galleries are indicated in the diagram as a gallery floor, which is the second floor. It’s a very horizontal space that is 110 metres by 130 metres, the size of two football fields and containing most of our galleries. I’ll quickly show you an animated rendering of what the building would look like. From the outside, it looks very simple, almost radically simple. But inside, there are many sculptural features with these cutouts that create a transparency from the second basement floor all the way to the second floor and even looking into the thirteen-storey high tower.

But what is the museum about? M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture These are the four main areas: three disciplinary areas plus one thematic area. And we are a contemporary museum that covers the 20th and 21st centuries So one of the things that we have been doing over the last few years in addition to building the building is to build in different aspects of infrastructure, including the collection. So over the last 7 years of collecting efforts, we have gathered almost 6,500 works and objects of these different disciplines and more than 30,000 archival items which are related to architecture.

The very beginning of the collecting effort was kicked off by a very large donation of over 1,500 works by a private collector named Mr. Uli Sigg from Switzerland. This is a collection of Chinese contemporary art from the late 1970s to the 2010s. This collection within the larger collection makes M+ the most important public collection to tell that story of how contemporary art was born and developed following the Cultural Revolution. Here’s another rendering that gives you a sense of what one of our collection galleries would look like containing this M+ Sigg collection. So while we are well positioned to tell that very important history within Asia, it’s important for me to also note that the collection is not just Chinese or Hong Kongese. It’s broadly Asian but also beyond Asia as well. This is just a map of the nationalities of the artists and makers currently represented in the collection.

And then, just to give you a quick sense of the diversity and internationalism of the collection, I will show you some representative works. We don’t have time to go into them individually, but we have, for instance, work by Lee Bul, an artist who had a very important mid-career survey here at Mori Art Museum. We have this monumental sculpture by Chinese artist, Liu Wei. Another important Chinese artist, Huang Yong Ping, who has actually now become a French citizen. An artist named Siah Armajani, an Iranian-born American artist who recently had a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. A complete archive of more than several hundred works by Internet art pioneer Korean American group named Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries. A Vietnamese artist group called the Propeller Group. A pioneering Indian artist named Nalini Malani, now in her seventies. So these are some of the monumental works in the visual art section of the collection.

But we also collect design and architecture, the effort that is led by Ikko and her team. So, from looking at Hong Kong architecture and urbanism, Japan plays a very important role in all of our areas but especially in design, where it is very strong. So, for instance, here represented by a postmodern chair design by Ohashi Teruaki. An American visionary named Buckminster Fuller, whose influence was everywhere global including Asia. And last year we were able to finalize a large acquisition of almost complete archive of the work of Archigram, the British experimental architecture group from the 60s and 70s.

Another thing that we have been doing over the last few years is also to present exhibitions and other programmes. So I think people often just equate a museum with its building but, in fact, the museum is all about its content and what goes inside the building or even outside the building. So this is what the site I showed you earlier, the picture of the museum construction. That’s what it looked like just 6 years ago, where we did an exhibition of very large inflatable sculptures. And then over the last 3 years we have been using a small exhibition hall about 300 square metres, perhaps no bigger than this room. And we were able to show and organise by now nine exhibitions and many of them are focused on different aspects of the collection to really show to our colleagues as well as the public the multifacetedness of the collection that we are building. So, for instance, we did an exhibition that is focused on our design collection. Much of it was, of course, Japanese materials. Another exhibition focused on Southeast Asia to position the museum as somewhere between East Asia and Southeast Asia. And one of the last exhibitions was a conversation between Isamu Noguchi and a younger artist, Danh Vo, who was born in Vietnam and grew up in Denmark.

So that’s a very quick rundown about this ambitious museum building project. And just a few words about the initiative called M+ International. The museum is scheduled to open at the end of 2020 next year or the very beginning of 2021. And as one of the largest contemporary museums to be built in Asia, if not the whole world, it is very important for us to, of course, get our visibility up. But at the same time no museum is an island. We all exist in an ecosystem of international partners and colleagues. So M+ International is an initiative that we started before the opening of the museum to build and expand a network of collaborative partners with whom we want to have long-term relationships. Mori Art Museum is one of those partners and the reason we wanted to organise this first official M+ International event with Mori is because we wanted to look at the long and illustrious history of Japanese museums and collections. And this is a very important foundational benchmark for all new museums that are coming up in Asia but arguably this very rich and deep history is not so well known outside of Japan. So we want to help build a channel to reach more information about more-than-a-century-old Japanese history as known to our Asian colleagues but, as part of a new wave of big museums being built across Asia, we also want to be a kind of a prompt or catalyst for Japanese museums. So that’s what M+ International initiative is about.

Then I think I’ll go right into talking about the first session of the three internal sessions or workshops we had over the last 2 days. Session 1 focused on public museums. We had in addition to myself three presenters and participants. Seki Naoko-san from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, also known as MOT, gave us a presentation on the multi-layers or strata of history of this museum that I believe many of you know intimately and I’m sure you go there quite often. The museum building in Kiba opened in 1995 but, in fact, there were previous incarnations. So Seki-san gave us a quick presentation on how it started in 1926 as Tokyo Metropolitan Art Gallery and how after a few decades it evolved into Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in 1975, until 20 years later the new building opened. And then, as the institution existed and mutated and evolved into different incarnations, collections also came in from different sources, from private collections and also a large donation of prints, for instance, in the 1970s. In the 1980s – and this is a topic that comes up again and again – during the bubble era and with the boom of building many public museums, Japanese museums had very generous budgets to work with. So, for instance, MOT has a very good collection of American art including figures like Warhol and not just American but actually Western, David Hockney or Christian Boltanski. All of those works were added to the collection in the 1990s in the run-up to the opening of the museum. Since then, the same budget is not available but through special exhibitions organised by the museums, important works by Japanese artists as well as some Asian artists could enter the collection. So to summarise, that really tells a story of how a museum, public museums and perhaps private museums as well, is like an organism that as contexts change, as the environments change, evolves and adapts and it’s never one complete, unified picture but it is really like an organism that changes and grows and sometimes loses its way, you know.

Then the second presenter was Mr. Kuroda Raiji from Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, which he calls a comparatively small and humble museum but within our field is a museum that is very highly respected for its very clear focus and mission dedicated to telling this story of modern and contemporary Asian art broadly. Arguably there is no other museum like it, until Horikawa-san starts speaking perhaps. And it is a museum that is not only collecting modernist or contemporary art but also pays attention to other parallel traditions of folk art, ethnic art, and popular art. And it is incredible really to have this resource in Japan not in the larger cities but in Fukuoka, with a collection that is almost 3,000 pieces of artworks from East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. And it’s really a resource not only for Japan but also for Asia and even beyond. Perhaps the same challenge faces the museum, that there used to be a lot more budget for acquiring a good collection in the 1990s and that kind of money is not there any more. But the museum continues its activities in different forms, for instance, continuing to do residency programmes that give opportunities to contemporary artists to spend time in Fukuoka making exhibitions, and some of the works that are made during the residencies and exhibitions can also go into the collection.

So I think that’s perhaps a good way to hand it over to Horikawa-san, who had experience of working at Fukuoka Asian Art Museum but has been an instrumental figure in establishing a very important museum called the National Gallery Singapore, which is also a kind of a model for us I would say as well.

HORIKAWA LISA: [Japanese] At the National Gallery Singapore, I work as deputy director of the collection and as senior curator. Let me begin. It will be compact, but as I’d like everyone to know the environment surrounding museums in Singapore. I’ll make a simple presentation.

This is the exterior of the museum. It combines the former Supreme Court and City Hall constructed during the 1920s and 1930s when Singapore was under colonial rule. This new museum opened in November 2015. With a total area of 64,000 square meters, the museum’s size is similar to that of M+. Speaking of its position within a Southeast Asian context, our modern and contemporary art collection is the largest in Southeast Asia including Singapore. We have about 9,000 artworks in total. The building looks like this from the side and two permanent exhibitions form the centre of the museum. The Singapore Gallery and Southeast Asia Gallery both have sizeable floor areas. The Singapore Gallery occupies the entire second floor of the former City Hall, and the Southeast Asia Gallery occupies floors three to five of the former Supreme Court. Every visitor says it takes at least 1 day to view everything thoroughly. I moved to Singapore 7 years ago and what I noticed then was that the value of permanent exhibitions wasn’t really recognized in Singapore, and emphasis was placed on blockbuster exhibitions. Even though the museum already had a collection, there was no facility where visitors could view the collection at any time or trace the contemporary art history of the entire Southeast Asia region. So we prepared for the opening exhibition while aware of the need to build a foundation that enabled visitors to trace the art history not only of Singapore but also of the entire Southeast Asian region through the permanent exhibitions.

I am going to briefly explain the history that museums in Singapore have traversed. The Raffles Library and Museum, which was a colonial museum, marked the beginning of the history of museums in Singapore. Speaking of the history of museums, in 1976 a part of the National Museum of Singapore became a space for art exhibitions as a kind of a museum, and it was considered to be the country’s first national-level museum. It was also in 1976 that a white cube first came to exist in a national exhibition facility. Later, the National Museum Art Gallery was developed into Singapore Art Museum. Singapore Art Museum (SAM) continues to exist today and 9,000 artworks from the National Gallery Singapore’s collection come from our predecessors, NMAG and SAM. We inherited most of their collections, which contain artworks produced in the modern and contemporary era up to the 1950s, and constitute the core of the gallery’s collection.

Our endeavour to build our own collection started in 2009, 6 years prior to the gallery’s opening. While continuing collections established in the past, we are simultaneously and actively building a collection that matches the gallery’s identity, which is a very unique way of building a collection. This slide shows the first piece in the collection. It is a tiny work about this size and it is a self-portrait by a Malaysian artist who made Batik paintings. The collection of 110 artworks including this work was built by Dato Loke Wan Tho, an entrepreneur in Malaysia and Singapore. He was also a philanthropist, and the collection started due to his donation to the country at a time when there was no art museum in Singapore. Interestingly, while other national museums in Southeast Asia only exhibit their own art history, what’s unique about Singapore is that its perspective includes the entire region. This feature is evident in the first collection of Dato Loke Wan Tho, as seen from the inclusion of Indonesian artists, and it is good to point out that the DNA from which this broad perspective looking beyond Singapore descends was there from the beginning. This slide shows the current collection according to region and country. Seventy per cent of the collection comes from Singapore, so even though our museum specialises in Southeast Asia the number of artworks from Laos, Cambodia, and Brunei are very limited.

In terms of managing the museum’s collection, what is characteristic of Singapore is that, while our collection belongs to the National Gallery Singapore, it also belongs to the much larger system of the national collection of Singapore. In addition to the National Gallery Singapore, other museums such as SAM, Asian Civilisations Museum, and the National Museum of Singapore are all part of this national collection. At the Heritage Conservation Centre, art restorers and registrars manage all of its artworks. This creates a situation where there is no repository inside museums, making artworks inaccessible from the standpoint of curators. So it has both good and bad aspects. One interesting thing about this system is that this self-portrait by John Singer Sargent, for example, belongs to the National Museum of Singapore’s collection. But for ‘Artist and Empire’, a special exhibition we organised two years ago, we borrowed this work from the National Museum of Singapore. So loaning works within the national collection system is designed in such an easy way. Hidden within this system is the possibility to open up the ownership of museums to the outside and physically expand. This is one aspect of Singapore and the Southeast Asia Gallery.

Our museum is still very new, which means that in our collection the number of artworks from the 19th century is very limited. So even when making a permanent exhibition, 20% to 30% of the artworks are loaned to us on a long-term basis, allowing us to somehow maintain an exhibition. For example, we borrowed artworks for 3 years from Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Additionally, museums in Southeast Asia and Europe that have a strong relationship with us due to the colonial past also loan artworks to us for long periods of time Just to give you an unusual example, when we held a large exhibition by Raden Saleh, an Indonesian artist from the 19th century, we discovered that the Smithsonian Museum in the US has two large artworks by the artist. So we asked the Smithsonian to extend the loan not only to show the works in the special exhibition, but also the subsequent permanent exhibition at the Southeast Asia Gallery. So when you come to our museum in Singapore, you can view works from the Smithsonian Museum. The values of artworks from Southeast Asia that ended up overseas are probably not recognized in Europe and North America. Looking for these ‘blind spots’ and connecting them to the context of art in Southeast Asia is very important to us.

We commissioned three artists to respond to our collection. When entering the exhibition space, visitors can use an app to view and experience artworks created by contemporary artists in response to the collection. Lastly, next month on 12 October, the Rotunda Library & Archive inside the Southeast Asia Gallery will newly open. To coincide with this, we plan to launch a website that visitors can use to search our entire collection and book archive. I hope you will visit the website.

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] Can you respond to Session 1?

HORIKAWA LISA: [Japanese] In response to the first session, the word ‘narrative’ came up during the discussion. In addition to the narratives woven from within each museum, we discussed how to make these narratives accessible to the outside world and to others, both viewers and experts. We discussed how we can make our collections accessible in such a way that their subjectivity can be shared not just within museums but also externally, leading to the utilisation of museum collections.

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] Now we’re going to move to Session 2. Session 2 focused on private museums. With the economic growth of emerging Asian countries, new art audiences in these countries are also growing while art markets have also been developing simultaneously. Private collectors in these countries are gathering art and making their collections accessible to the public. This is out of a sense of urgency to develop contemporary art rather than for personal gain, especially given that national museums there are a little behind. The emphasis on public interests in these collections was also discussed. New museums have opened in succession in order to cultivate the next generation. The session discussed how contemporary art is considered beneficial because it offers the experience of diverse values through art, especially in Southeast Asia, where ethnicity, culture, language, and religion are all different. In this session, MACAN in Indonesia and MAIIAM in Chiang Mai, Thailand, were introduced as cases in Asia.

In Japan, as mentioned by Doryun at the beginning, private museums have led contemporary art for a long time. Historically, many private museums were based on collections made available by individual collectors. One famous example of this is the Tate Modern, which began its collection using the revenue from the sugar trade. Likewise, the Guggenheim Museum in New York used the revenue from the coal and gold mining business to start its collection. Many collections began out of the strong will of individuals. For Japanese collections that deal with contemporary art, we referred to the Ohara Museum of Art, which opened in the 1930s, as the oldest example. This will be discussed later, but the opening of the Bridgestone Museum of Art in 1952 is a very interesting case in relation to how it started to collect modern and contemporary art right after the end of World War 2. Notably, the Ohara Museum of Art and Bridgestone Museum of Art have continued their endeavours for many generations. Pola Museum of Art opened in 2002 and has mainly collected modern art, but this summer it invited contemporary artists to collaborate for the first time with the museum’s modern art collection in what was an excellent exhibition. I paid attention to this project to see how the collection was utilised.

When we think about art collections in a broader sense, there are cases such as Benesse Art Site Naoshima that originally started as a private collection. Instead of remaining as a private collection, Benesse uses the collection to transform the entire town or island. Echoing the words of Mr. Fukutake of Benesse that ‘Art is a weapon for social transformation’, there are greater examples of how art contributes to the revitalization of depopulated areas. During this session, Mr. Yanagisawa from the Ohara Museum of Art, which celebrates its ninetieth anniversary next year, commented that during discussions about how collections from the past have become relevant to contemporary society, the fact that the Ohara Museum of Art has continued to research the history of museums for more than 40 years explains why the museum has continued to exist to this day across generations.

I’d now like to invite Kasahara Michiko briefly to give an overview of the Artizon Museum, which has also continued for three generations. Even among private art collections that don’t become art museums, artworks may become dispersed due to the current generation not having an interest in the collections of their fathers and mothers. Passing art on and maintaining it is one of the biggest challenges. I’d like Ms. Kasahara to talk about this issue.

KASAHARA MICHIKO: My name is Kasahara Michiko, vice director of the Artizon Museum. I still almost mistakenly introduce myself as Kasahara from Tokyo Photographic Art Museum [laughter]. I left Tokyo Photographic Art Museum 18 months ago and moved to the former Bridgestone Museum of Art. As all of you know, the Bridgestone Museum of Art originally started from the private collection of Ishibashi Shojiro, the founder of Bridgestone Corporation. In 1952, a museum was built inside the company’s headquarters, marking the beginning of the museum. The way that Ishibashi created the collection was through his Western painting teacher, Sakamoto Hanjiro. Sakamoto asked him to buy Aoki Shigeru’s collection, and he became very close to Fujishima Takeji, and supported him. So he was a sort of a patron of contemporary art at the time. Such connections grew as time went by, and he earnestly collected modern art produced after the Meiji period. Later, Western art and Impressionist art in particular was brought to Japan and received much attention, so he collected such works to prevent their dispersion or their return to the place of origin since they had travelled all the way to Japan. He donated this vast collection to the Ishibashi Foundation in 1962, which he had established earlier in 1956. His entire collection went to this foundation in 1962. What surprised me the most after moving to the Bridgestone Museum of Art, and this is as someone from Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, a public museum, is that generally, a museum has a lot of money before its inauguration, but once it opens, it runs out of its project budget as well as collection budget, which is our general concern. For three generations, the Bridgestone Museum of Art has held exhibitions and educational outreach programs, its Saturday lectures being famous. In addition to educational activities, it has continued to collect art, which is what makes the museum special.

I will only talk about a few topics so as not to make my presentation too long. The Bridgestone Museum of Art closed in 2015. With its new building finally completed on 5 July, we moved to the new location on 1 September. It hasn’t stopped collecting artworks since 2015 till today. Our inaugural exhibition will open on 18 January. As part of the museum’s ongoing collection activity, it enhances its modern and Impressionist collection, but also expands to include antique art, post-war abstract art, and contemporary art. Those of you who loved the Bridgestone Museum of Art might ask why we changed the name to the Artizon Museum and why someone like me who doesn’t understand France or Impressionism but who specialises in photography serves as vice director. That’s what is so admirable about them [laughter]. We moved to the new location upon completion of the Artizon Museum.

I’ll talk about the museum’s new building. Before the completion of this main building, another building was completed in 2015 in Machida City. It’s called the Art Research Centre. Since many natural disasters and so on occur in Japan, repositories inside museums face risk, especially when located in a city. And so, we created an annex building to house the Art Research Centre, a repository, library, and space for educational outreach. We conserve artworks and research documents there. The new museum comprises this facility together with the new main museum building. Let me briefly talk about the Artizon Museum. Museum Tower Kyobashi is an office building consisting of twenty-three floors. In contrast to the former Bridgestone Museum of Art that was forcibly constructed inside an office building, Artizon was constructed with the aim of creating a museum from the start. The first floor has a main lobby, the second floor a museum shop, and the third floor houses a lecture room, all of which are free and open to the public. After going through a metal detector, you can also visit the sixth floor. There are exhibition spaces from floors four to six, each 700 square metres. The fifth and sixth floors are for special exhibitions while the fourth floor is for permanent exhibitions. The details of the construction were carefully designed. For example, quake-absorbing structures are common, but here it is fully enforced throughout the building. There isn’t a single large pillar installed in the wide 700-meter-square exhibition rooms. For lighting, too, we collaborated with Yamagiwa Corporation to invent a special lighting system allowing us to modulate features such as colour temperature. We thought about many different systems.

Why was the name changed to the Artizon Museum? While weaving our past traditions, we want to run museum activities that look to the future. We aim to combine the building, educational outreach, and collection instead of treating them separately. Artizon is a coined term derived from ‘art’ and ‘horizon’. Many museums in the world use the names of founders and regions, but there are a very few museums that use a museum’s concept in their names. This very ambitious museum will open on 18 January. For our opening exhibition, we will use all three floors. We picked about 200 artworks from the Ishibashi Foundation collection, which includes 2,800 artworks and 1,000 artist photos, the portrait collection. Thirty artworks among the 200 selected are items newly acquired since 2015. Some artworks might surprise visitors, so please look forward to it.

YOKOYAMA IKKO: [Japanese] Good evening, everyone. As introduced by Doryun, I am Yokoyama Ikko, lead curator of architecture and design at M+ Museum. In Session 3, we discussed design and architecture collections. Architecture and design exhibitions are frequently held, and architecture exhibitions are a very popular genre. When it comes to museum collections, though, only a handful of museums collect architecture and design works. The reasons for this will also be discussed by Mr. Sugaya. One of the factors is that design and architecture are directly incorporated into daily life and shape our living, so they tend not to remain. But at M+, we collect design and architecture the same way we collect art. This necessity derives from the fact that, just as there is art history, there are histories of architecture and design. Instead of collecting masterpieces of respective countries, M+ feels the need to include design and architecture when looking at Asia because these fields have served in the reconstruction of Asia in the post-war period, and helped build a new future. In addition to Mr. Sugaya, Jihoi Lee from the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, which celebrates its 50-year anniversary this year, talked about the museum not having an architecture department until 2011. But naturally, as architecture is also an art form, a new building that includes design, architecture, and crafts was created.

Ota Kayoko, an independent curator, discussed the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). Among the institutions with architecture archives, CCA doesn’t merely conserve its archive but experiments with new ways of using, interpreting, and communicating it in the most progressive manner. Ota, who works as a guest curator at CCA, mentioned something that we are concerned about, that while there are many design and architecture archives in Japan, they are dispersed. They are spread out not only among museums but also in archive centres of big construction companies and universities. They exist in various places and we don’t know exactly where they are. Talking about the current circumstances of Japan, Ota pointed out the importance of creating a network between such archives so as to utilise them in meaningful ways, among other issues inherent to archiving design and architecture. The significance of having both an archive and a collection is that, as they are vast fields, each museum has to make its narrative specific to its local area and region, and this can serve as an axis for narrowing down a focus. It involves design and architecture but also links to art and local regions, and the question of how we create a historical narrative. At the same time, by building an archive that is open we can learn from researchers and gain their new perspectives in relation to the materials in an archive. The Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka will collect both items relating to design and art, which is rare in Japan. I am looking forward to hearing from Mr. Sugaya about it.

SUGAYA TOMIO: [Japanese] I am deputy director of the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka planning office. Thank you for inviting me to this symposium. The museum will open at the end of 2021. The building is currently under construction. The construction has already started and much progress has been made, but the concept itself and the planning office were formed in 1990. Various changes followed, but I’m not going to talk about them today. The museum started with the aim of creating a collection that gives a general overview of art in Osaka, Japan, and the world from the end of the 19th century to the contemporary era. First and foremost is the collection of Saeki Yuzo’s work. As written in our collection policy, what triggered the idea of founding this museum was the donation by Saeki’s family of over 30 artworks by Saeki Yuzo. In this sense, a private collector played a part here, too. We have been able to collect so-called masterpieces, including Japanese modernist works and Japanese paintings from Osaka. We collect artworks from the early 20th century, an era represented by artists like Modigliani and when Saeki Yuzo was in Paris. As for contemporary art, Basquiat’s work is currently on show here. When it comes to the artworks of Gutai Art Association, especially works by Yoshihara Jiro, the group’s leader who was born and raised in Osaka before moving to Ashiya, but whose family company stayed in Osaka, we have about 800 artworks by him thanks to different connections.

Based on these artworks, we also collect design works, and collecting design was part of our collection policy from the outset. Originally, we used the phrase ‘art in everyday life’ to refer to design. This extended from works of modernist design to contemporary design, and our concept at the time was that design was an art form in everyday life, and thus the most familiar to us. At the same time, we considered what shapes our lives. Our lives are actually shaped by these design products that surround us. They can even influence how we move our bodies. We collect such design products. There are about 200 works of this kind, and we additionally borrowed 18,000 works from the poster collection of Suntory Holdings that have been entrusted to us for use in exhibitions. Our tableware collection and graphic collection consisting of posters are, internationally speaking, one of the most extensive collections there is. Additionally, given that the museum is located in Osaka, collecting design works produced after the war required us to consider the companies formerly known as Matsushita and SANYO, and Sharp, which all began in Osaka. Since their products shaped people’s lives in the latter half of the 20th century, we thought about collecting home appliances, but it’s not feasible to collect fifty washing machines, thirty vacuum cleaners, and countless refrigerators. Even a repository the size of a gymnasium can’t keep everything. We ask each corporation to keep these products, and we archive the data relating to them as a digital platform. This archive is available on our website and it is one form of archive. There are many different forms of archives and we have many archives consisting of documents related to works. Particularly in relation to building a design collection, it is shaped not only by so-called works that have a material form, but also simultaneously through the creation of an archive. This is how we have come to think as a result of trial and error.

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] As I said in the afternoon session, it is rare in Japan for a museum to have an art collection alongside design and architecture collections. M+ is also heading in this direction.

SUGAYA TOMIO: [Japanese] There are a few museums in Japan. Toyota Municipal Museum of Art and Utsunomiya Museum of Art have both collected quite extensive design works. At any rate, we have a long history [laughter]. This kind of idea wasn’t so common 30 years ago. The reason that was considered important is because design was relatively familiar in our daily lives, while I also feel it is distinct to Osaka.

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] The museum will finally open after 30 years of running the planning office. You have been there from the beginning, right?

SUGAYA TOMIO: [Japanese] More or less, yes. The office was created in 1990 and I started working there in 1992.

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] As I discussed earlier, the office had a sizeable budget in the beginning and you were actively buying works. Right now, you are perhaps making the final adjustments?

SUGAYA TOMIO: [Japanese] Yes, all museums around the 1990s such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum, and, of course, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum had overlapping markets. These museums were competing to collect works while wondering which work had been acquired by which museum. These museums had sizable budgets. Speaking of the situation in Osaka, it took 30 years to build this museum, mainly because the city’s financial situation worsened but I think other museums also faced a similar situation. At that time, the museum’s planning office had the policy that the foundation of a museum is its collection, and designing architecture suitable for the collection was considered the correct way to build a museum, and that’s the approach Osaka City adopted. This meant that we didn’t start designing the museum building parallel to the creation of the planning office. First, we gradually built a collection, and then created a building to fit that collection. As the city’s finances worsened in the midst of such discussions, the project was postponed, and has now finally resumed. But I don’t think we were wrong in our approach to the museum [laughter].

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] In the meantime, the value of Gutai rose a lot in the past 30 years.

SUGAYA TOMIO: [Japanese] Yes. The location of this new museum is Nakanoshima Yonchome. Gutai Pinacotheca, the base of the Gutai Art Association, is the storehouse that the family of Yoshihara Jiro owned. Yoshihara renovated it to make the group’s base. It is located in Nakanoshima Sanchome, only 50 meters and one traffic light away from us. We were able to collect his artworks thanks to his family.

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] Ms. Kasahara, you are collecting a lot of archive documents including design-related documents. Can you talk about the scale of the research centre in Machida that was built in addition to the main museum building?

KASAHARA MICHIKO: [Japanese] We moved our repository to the building in Machida. In the case of an urban museum, it is difficult to have a repository in a city due to the high rent, but it is also safer to have a repository in a separate location due to the risk of natural disasters and accidents. Besides that, we need a spacious repository. I think museums in Japan and all over the world have similar concerns about repositories, but moving to another location solved our problems. We have many books and documents, so we need a library for these as well as a public library function. We are using the research centre for educational outreach in the form of organising workshops and lectures.

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] In what year did you open?

KASAHARA MICHIKO: [Japanese] It was established in 2015 and partially opened to the public in 2016.

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] Is the research centre that’s open to the public located in the same place as the repository?

KASAHARA MICHIKO: [Japanese] Yes, but the repository is, of course, not open to the public. Given that Machida is home to many universities, we organise workshops for them and share documents with researchers. We are not open every day, but we are working on digitising the archive and organising documents. We’ve been working on many projects during the closure, and the IT project of digitising our archives is something we’ve particularly put a lot of time and energy into. Consequently, we plan to create a digital touch-panel wall to make the Artizon Museum collection widely available online to general museum visitors during their visit. We’re also going to show detailed documents at the information booth.

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] We talked about archives through three topics in this session. Ms. Horikawa previously talked about how to make narratives. There was also a discussion about how the M+ Museum collection gathers works of architecture, art, and design while focusing on certain narratives rather than collecting everything comprehensively. The National Gallery Singapore has also put a lot of effort into archiving and exhibiting its archives. Can you talk a little bit about that?

HORIKAWA LISA: [Japanese] Since opening, we have a facility called the Resource Centre, which is open by appointment only, and we have shown our archive there. We have about 20,000 works and documents, though this number includes not only physical objects but also digital archives. We don’t create these digital archives by purchasing actual works from owners or asking them to donate works to us, but by borrowing and digitising them. We give part of the digital files to the owners so that they can also utilise them.

Speaking of archives in relation to the art market, the value of artworks has been soaring, especially the Southeast Asian art market, and that makes it harder for public museums to compete with private collectors. Yet no market has been established for archives and documents. That said, however, some regions in Southeast Asia have a very rich archiving culture such as the Philippines, which is known for its scrap culture. There are many people who have beautiful scrapbooks that could move you to tears. Even though their market value hasn’t been established, there is the potential for museums to use and exploit them, which could lead to the creation of a market. In order to avoid that, we consider digitisation as a friendly archiving tool, and that’s how we approach it. When it comes to building a database, during the sessions yesterday and today speakers from Indonesia and Thailand mentioned that Singapore is an exception within Southeast Asia [laughter]. For sure, Singapore has a well-developed infrastructure, but we have many challenges in terms of building a database and there are so many things that aren’t well organised. In this sense, I think the challenge is quite formidable.

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] I’d like to hear about Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, which loaned artworks to your museum. Fukuoka Asian Art Museum separated from Fukuoka Art Museum. Fukuoka Art Museum began an Asian collection in 1979. Twenty years later in 1999, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum became a separate institution and has continued its activities. The method the museum has used to collect artworks is to take its time through the organisation of exhibitions. That sounds like an ideal way to build a collection. Can you talk about that?

HORIKAWA LISA: [Japanese] I think the collection of Fukuoka Asian Art Museum represents how a collection is supposed to be. It has collected artworks mainly through exhibitions while taking several decades to build the collection’s logic, and some sort of philosophy. That’s how the museum’s collection has developed. What surprised me most after moving to Singapore is that, despite the museum owning 9,000 artworks, there was no background information available to curators who worked at the museum, such as the history of who bought or donated artworks. While referencing the model of Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, we are in the process of understanding the background of our collection little by little. Fukuoka Asian Art Museum always exists as our reference point.

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] The National Gallery Singapore’s permanent exhibition has a timeline depicting the history of museums in Asia. I was moved when I saw Fukuoka Art Museum’s name under 1979.

HORIKAWA LISA: [Japanese] I am happy to hear that, since few visitors noticed the timeline [laughter]. So thank you. We actually made a lot of effort to create it. We created a timeline of the art history of Southeast Asia to coincide with the museum’s opening. The exhibition ‘Modern Asian Art’ by Fukuoka Art Museum appears on the timeline depicting events after the 1970s.

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] Speaking of the M+ collection, I heard that the museum collects not only artworks but also all kinds of visual culture including neon signs. You previously said the museum started collecting without following strict categories. Can you talk about this policy?

DORYUN CHONG: So it’s important that we identify ourselves at M+ as not a fine art museum but as a visual culture museum. And it’s not a completely new idea, actually. Thinking about art history within the larger matrix or context of art visual culture has been around for a few decades now. So it’s actually a combination of at least two different things. One is that, as the history of mostly modern art museums has developed over the 20th century – and, of course, the most important institution in this regard may still be the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA in New York – it has become in a sense too rigid and structured, where artists maybe painters but they don’t really think within the bounds of painting. They are absorbing and responding to the larger visual culture that may include design and architecture, or cinema or newspaper-printed matters and what not. And there are some inherent shortcomings in the museum structure because, of course, museums by definition are about collecting and preserving for eternity, for perpetuity. And the different materials have different conservation needs and then that has now sort of fossilised into a rigid structure. And so there has been a lot of thinking, criticism, and movement in making the structure more fluid. So entering the 21st century, we have absorbed the lesson that we don’t want to set up a very rigid departmental structure. So that’s part of it.

The other part of why we have defined ourselves as a visual culture museum is also responding to the lack or absence in Hong Kong and in the region. Hong Kong does have some museums. There is actually an art museum. There is also a culture museum. There is also a history museum. But there was a feeling that there are no proper museums that can deal with contemporary fields of visual culture. So instead of just making a contemporary art museum, or contemporary design museum, there were so many expectations that we needed to respond to. So it was really a combination of the history of museums around the world but mostly in the West and Japan really. So that trend, after almost a century of modern museums, we were responding to the most recent trend, but also responding to specific local needs to have one very large encompassing museum that can deal with all of these issues. So that’s a really transparent answer but I think we really think of it as an opportunity to be able to tell a really fascinating, multi-layered, multifaceted history of the present and the last few decades of how visual culture has evolved in Hong Kong and in China, and in our region as well.

KATAOKA MAMI: We are trying to show your amazing diagram of multiple gems of your collection. [Japanese] We were discussing how a collection looks when categorising artworks. We were looking at collections consisting of works that can’t be classified into conventional categories of modern museums such as photography, sculpture, architecture, and design, and it was such an interesting discussion. Putting together all these opinions discussed in the three sessions, we talked about what we can do as museums while utilising museum collections. The larger narrative discussed before is that in Japan, the history of museum collections started relatively early. Before the art market soared and when Japan still had money saved during the bubble economy era, museums across Japan had quite impressive collections. Now we’ve entered an era in which we must consider how to utilise them. But it is not Japan but other Asian countries that are growing rapidly. How can these new museums increase their collections, and in what way can they collaborate with museums in Japan? There are some precedents, for example, but do we show the collections of Japanese museums in Asia or is it possible to create something collaboratively? We also discussed the possibility of expanding some rare cases in the future.

DORYUN CHONG: Actually at the very beginning of this discussion, I said why we wanted to have this event in collaboration with Mori Art Museum. It’s, of course, coming from our own institutional interest but by inviting other colleagues from Korea and other South Asian countries to at least send a message to our Japanese colleagues that this history that you have all built together is very, very important for us. But at the same time, I said that I also hope that these new museum projects that are happening outside of Japan within Asia will be a kind of a stimulus and catalyst. So what I would actually like to propose the question to my Japanese colleagues. You don’t have to be only positive. It can be constructive criticism, also, After 2 days of discussion, what are your thoughts and hopes and ideas that you may have vis-à-vis these other non-Japanese institutions that were represented?

SUGAYA TOMIO: [Japanese] As mentioned before, it took 30 years for the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka to open. I don’t think these 30 years were wasted. These years did bear fruit, to some extent. We have corrected the direction of our museum. The activities of M+ are very stimulating and it’s not just about the museum’s scale or its extensive collection. Apart from its scale, it made me think about our collection in terms of its categories and general state. I think our approach has been slightly rigid. We are a public museum, so there are complicated bureaucratic processes, but to be very frank, I think our museum as a whole, or I myself, didn’t update properly. But I don’t consider that period to be wasteful. Hearing from everyone yesterday and today, it is a matter of whether we can execute what’s discussed, because each museum has a different locality and history. It’s about how we can elevate ourselves in our environment. In that sense, it was very stimulating for me

KASAHARA MICHIKO: [Japanese] Since moving to Artizon, I’ve been in an environment completely opposite that of the past. There is a difference in terms of the budget. I keenly sense the difficulties faced by a museum that is considered to have an excellent collection. While utilising that collection, we also need to do something new. This is something seen at M+, too, but what we shouldn’t do is organise identical exhibitions and projects. I don’t want to do that. I want to do something that is only possible here at Artizon. I think everyone here knows what such identical exhibitions look like. And at M+, for example, they are trying to do something that is only possible at M+. The Artizon Museum will open on 18 January and I am very scared about how visitors will receive our museum, but we are at least trying. I think our drive and direction are very similar to that of M+.

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] I think what Ms. Kasahara said about organising an exhibition that is unique to each museum is very important. The same goes for M+. On the other hand, I haven’t talked about the collection of Mori Art Museum. The collection became accessible online from June this year, so I encourage people to take a look. The museum as a non-collection museum, namely, we started in 2003 as a museum without a collection but 2 years after opening, we organically started to collect artworks through our exhibitions. We finally made the collection open to the public online, but we don’t have millions or thousands of artworks. We have a very limited number of artworks.

Over the last 2 days, I thought that we could collaborate more with other museums and do something. For example, I talked to Ms. Seki from the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Instead of looking at each other’s strategy while thinking what other institutions in Tokyo are doing, it would be interesting if we share what we want to do and the topics that curators in each institution are interested in. It might be interesting to organise different events simultaneously. Museums competing with each other to be unique is one vital aspect, but there was also discussion about how it would be positive to see museums working more and more collaboratively in the future. In fact, I realised after the start of yesterday’s session that people from major contemporary art museums in Japan and those from newly established museums in Asia have few chances to discuss the theme of museum collections in depth as we have over 2 days in this conference. We participated in this joint initiative at the invitation of M+ International, and whatever form it may have taken, it would be great if we continue to organise this gathering.

There are few chances to see the collections of all the museums online, so it’s better to gather like this in person. For example, some archives may not have been digitised yet and other archives may have very rare works. And works that aren’t necessarily the major pieces in a museum collection but which attract certain experts can be found in different places, such as a university museum collection. If a museum like Mori Art Museum, which has comparatively high visitor numbers, can share these artworks, then a lot of people will take notice of them. With so many ideas emerging over the past 2 days, it has been very stimulating for me, too. We are now running out of time, but we are happy to take questions from the audience. If you have a further question for each museum. Ikko, do you have any questions?

YOKOYAMA IKKO: [Japanese] It is not a question, but I learnt a lot over the last 2 days. I am working at M+ Museum as a person from Japan. I entered this field and cultivated my interest because I grew up surrounded by Japanese museums such as the Sezon Museum of Art. How we generate this kind of drive in the next generation was something we discussed. I think a museum collection is like a toolbox, so collecting works beyond general categories such as design, art, and architecture is important. Collections will remain even after we are all gone and people will come and go, so we have to leave hints or ‘tags’, in today’s parlance, so that future generations can decipher collections. In terms of how many hints a museum can be expected to leave, I learnt that the collections of each institution and the information they retain is very important.

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] Any other questions?

AUDIENCE: [Japanese] I always enjoy exhibitions at Mori Art Museum. Art is connected to other academic fields such as science and cosmology, and to concepts such as love. And that’s what I like about exhibitions there. I sometimes wonder whether art museums could organise exhibitions in collaboration with non-art institutions. For example, replicas are often used in a dinosaur exhibition. While real dinosaurs are in big museums in the US, we exhibit their replicas here, and so on. The difficulty of collaborating with other academic fields might be that loaning precious objects can be tricky, but regular visitors don’t know about that. I imagine there must be complicated reasons for this. I would like to know about the difficulties and challenges you face when organising exhibitions.

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] First, regarding an exhibition that transcends genres, the director of Mori Art Museum, Fumio Nanjo, who is sitting over there, is an expert. The exhibition ‘Future and the Arts’ will start from 18 November, and it includes science, new technologies, and architecture. These interdisciplinary exhibitions are happening everywhere. For example, attempts to show art with ethnology and anthropology are being undertaken in many places.

Nevertheless, a work of art is a one-of-a-kind item, so when it comes to loaning them, they are strictly managed by registration and conservation in each museum. Otherwise, they will steadily deteriorate. Each museum has a large conservation department in order to preserve artworks for the future. And there are rules to sustain the physical durability of artworks such as resting a work for 2 years or half a year once it has been loaned. This can lead to difficulties. Additionally, in relation to works of Impressionism or works made prior to that era as can be found in the collections of the Ohara Museum of Art and Artizon Museum, for example, the estimated value of the artworks is extremely high. Even if we can pay for their transportation costs, we might not be able to pay for their insurance. There is a system where the national government compensates the cost if something happens to an artwork, but I will talk about that on another occasion. So while we may talk about ‘loaning’, there are financial and physical constraints that prevent us from just borrowing artworks as soon as we conceive ideas.

Also, some museums loan artworks on an exchange basis, so for a museum like Mori Art Museum with a small collection we borrow more than we loan. Ideally, by creating an equal relationship, museums can loan works from one another, but this is another difficulty. This isn’t an issue that was raised at this event, but a new idea of jointly buying artworks has emerged in Europe. For example, the Tate Modern and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney have been working with Qantas Airways as a sponsor on a 5-year joint project. The project involves travel costs for a curator from the UK to research contemporary art in Australia, which can be quite expensive. This kind of research cost as well as the budget for the purchase of artworks and the cost of their transportation are sponsored by Qantas Airways. In this way, artworks from Australia could travel to the UK and it results in the joint ownership of artworks. This is a new approach, but as the price of individual works is soaring to such an extent, it seems that there are now other alternatives to each museum trying so hard to buy just a few works. I think a system like this will spread to museums in Japan and other countries.

DORYUN CHONG: So all these issues of budget and logistics and conservation are, of course, a huge part of what museum curators and directors do, even though that’s a part that’s not so visible to the public.

But let me just say something as a way of closing that it just strikes me sitting here and after 2 days of discussions with colleagues from Japan and outside, it makes me realise how lucky we are and also how fortunate the public and the audiences are to have access to all these different kinds of museums and collections.

So, for instance, Artizon and its very strong collection of not only traditional art but Impressionism. Because these Impressionist artworks are time capsules of memories, right? You know, you can experience late-19th-century or early-20th-century Paris. There’s still this vision of romance. You can do that, and you can go to Mori, and also be part of this remarkable journey of an artist from Japan to Germany. So it’s not just visually striking but it is really an experience of accompanying somebody’s incredible life of creativity. And when Nakanoshima opens, then there will also be many masterpieces that will take you to different times, places and cultures. So I think this is something that everybody knows but that’s really the magic of what these collections are about.

And I hope the audience members here also think of this new museum in Singapore which tells an incredible history, as the title of the collection display says. Stories of independence and declarations and resistance and resilience of all these different countries in Southeast Asia. And then that’s also quite a journey that you can have if you haven’t been to Singapore yet. And I think that’s also what M+ will do, so it is really an incredible fortune for all of us to be working with collections and to be sharing with the public and ultimately that’s what it’s really all about – that we’re having this discussion.

KATAOKA MAMI: [Japanese] Lastly, I want to talk about how to enjoy a museum collection. In Japanese art museums, special exhibitions have been the main focus until recently, while permanent exhibitions existed as something people might visit when they have time. But each museum is putting more energy into permanent exhibitions, making specific themes connected to their collections. I’d also like people to pay attention to this aspect.

When viewing museums and special exhibitions overseas, we tend to focus on captions right away. Captions indicate the owners of artworks. It is quite interesting to link information, and see which museum owns which artwork. MoMA’s captions indicate the year the museum acquired each work. In addition, the information includes the type of fund used to purchase works. Interestingly, there is what’s called a ‘promised gift’ in the US, which refers to a collection on show at a museum that has been promised to the museum by the owner after their death. A museum is inseparable from its collection, but there are many diverse relationships among them. Lots of information is written about works on small caption labels, such as information about who donated or deposited the work, for example. By checking this kind of information in a museum, visitors are able to discover narratives embodied in artworks, especially in relation to the history of a collection. I think people can enjoy collections in this way.

Because of this unusual theme, it might have been difficult to ask questions, but we will continue to think about museums in different ways in the future. Thank you so much for attending this event today.

(applause)