My Tokyo fix

The night before I departed for Tokyo, my travel agent rang me: "Uhm, Yason, sorry but I gave you the wrong baggage allowance." I looked at my packed-and-sealed luggage and murmured, "Uhm, Miss Lousy Travel Agent, sorry but I want to give you a lobotomy right now."

A much-violated suitcase later, things still felt heavy. Ookee – it’s just the computer, two cameras and books forming a huge hunch on my back. Given that I have scoliosis, had two hours sleep and will stand around for at least two hours, this trip was on a roll, plus a rock lounging in my vertebra.

My flat has tiny but efficient, in an expat neighborhood that is Minami-Azabu. Snobbish and boring. Down my balcony was a lovely cemetery surrounded by foreign embassies and international schools – a utopian image of the dead and the dying.

The hosts were wonderful: Fumio Nanjo, deputy director of Mori Art Museum, introduced me to the museum staff during his birthday party; MAD director Roger McDonald played the Smiths and the Cure in the office; AIT director Yuko Ozawa got me pretty much everything that I needed; and my fellow guest artist Katja Strunz who, despite her bragging that she just had an exhibit at the super hip New York gallery Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and was featured in last month’s Artforum Magazine, was absolutely kooky and smart.

At the Shanghai-Gwangju-Singapore Biennale Conference held in the Japan Foundation HQ, I don’t know if it was the combination of coffee and sashimi but the vision of a heroine/ the grand dame of polka-dot and phallus fame Yayoi Kusama just blew me away. It was like an apparition of a Marian kind – I was Judiel, Kusama the Virgin Mary in a bright orange wig. Like Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp, she was her own art. She sat behind me like a guardian angel in drag. What advice would she give a young emerging artist? "Sorry but yellow is not your color?" I felt less awkward when the artist beside me, Mariko Mori, kept twitching in her seat like a silly schoolgirl. She was probably as nervous. Mariko’s big and famous, sure (the artwork she’s showing at the Biennale was purchased by Prada), but nowhere near the legendary status of Yayoi Kusama. Other Japanese artists in the show are Hiroshi Sugimoto and bad-boy Makoto Aida, whose video of him dressed up (and so drunk) as Osama Bin Laden is so politically sexy.

The non-art stuff didn’t disappoint too much either. Japan’s Bjork UA performed at the Earth Day Concert in Yoyogi Park; unfortunately the comparison begins and ends in the eyes. The real Bjork and Matthew Barney were also in town, probably enjoying the attention afforded their lovemaking scene and costume design in Barney’s latest art video epic Drawing Restraint 9 screened at Cinema Rise. In the same theater my friend and I watched Gus Van Sant’s homage to the late Kurt Cobain via Last Days, starring Michael Pitt, Lukas Haas and Asia Argento and cameos by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, Gummo’s Harmony Korine and real Mormon twins. The death metal scene is very much alive, no pun intended, thanks to international bands like Disavowed, Internal Suffering and Putrid Pile performing at the Tokyo Deathfest two weekends ago. For punk and indie rock lovers, there’s Anti-Knock and Club Quattro. I checked out Shinjuku Loft for their anniversary gig, with international Japanese bands like the 5,6,7,8s (of Kill Bill fame). The Japanese love music, as evident in the abundance of record shops, as much as they love their fashion – think Fruits magazine meets Visionaire, with a dash of Tema Celeste and you have conceptual art/clothing schlock. I took a picture of a bunch of American tourists looking more alien than the Lolita Goths, cyber punks and proto hippies that guarded Meiji shrine three Sundays ago – thank goodness it still is a crazy planet despite global capitalism and liberal democracy. Translators be warned: first learn where to place the proper accent in "Where the hell are we?"