When East Meets East: Exhibiting UAE-Based Artists In Japan

Introduction

The year 2022 marks the 50^th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the United Arab Emirates and Japan. Both countries have witnessed an impressive expansion of economic ties in recent years, which has led to growing cooperation in the creative and cultural sectors. This essay aims to highlight the potentialities for artistic partnerships between the two countries, based on research of exhibitions in Japan from the past decade that featured UAE-based artists. From 2012 to 2022, a few key exhibitions, both at the institutional and independent levels, were launched in Japan and connected the two societies through the voices of their contemporary artists. Many more efforts need to take place to reach the full potential of this promising creative dialogue.

How do we bridge gaps between two countries that share much in common yet are so geographically distant and culturally dissimilar? As the curator of the East-East: UAE meets Japan exhibition series, which I started in 2016 during my studies at NYU Abu Dhabi and later developed at Tokyo University of the Arts, I have compiled research from artists and curators who generously shared their points of view in this essay.

I truly believe that contemporary art exhibitions offer a medium like no other to connect countries to individual stories, while at the same time empowering a generation of arts practitioners to delve deeper into building stronger cross-cultural connections. The international art scene needs to include more dialogue between agents of the so-called Global South or Global East – cultural dialogues that are not necessarily mediated, or facilitated, by European or North American structural powers.

While the UAE has seen a number of recent exhibitions of Japanese contemporary art and design, including the Sharjapan exhibition series curated by Yuko Hasegawa at the Sharjah Art Foundation,¹ this essay will concentrate on the less-commonly studied history of exhibitions of UAE-based artists in Japan.

UAE–Japan: Cultural Perceptions

Japan is one of the UAE’s main economic partners.² While the UAE exports crude oil and natural gas to Japan, Japan exports motor vehicles, electronics, machinery, and equipment to the UAE. Indeed, Japanese car models, such as the Toyota Landcruiser or Nissan Patrol, have gained such prominence on UAE roads that artists have started to reflect on their place in the UAE’s popular imagination.³

Despite these strong ties between the two countries, from a cultural standpoint, few studies have delved into the perception of Japan from the Arabian Gulf, and even fewer have been carried out about the perception of the Arabian Gulf from Japan. An insightful study stands out, conducted in 2019 by Arab News Japan in partnership with YouGov.⁴ Highlighted in the study are the traits and products that Arabs associate with Japanese people. The strongest associations with Japan are “car manufacturing,” “samurai,” and “sushi,” and the most popular traits are “hardworking,” “punctual,” and “organized.” Overall, the public opinion on Japan is very positive. 87% of the surveyed sample (Arabic speakers residing in the Arab World) stated they would like to visit Japan, and only 1% would describe the relationship between Japan and countries of the GCC as negative.

For the purpose of exploring artistic exchanges between the UAE and Japan, two other interesting data points stand out. First, 71% of the sample surveyed believed that Japan produces better products than China, South Korea, and the United States combined. This illustrates that material products coming out of Japan, which include artworks, are perceived to be of high quality. Second, 75% selected Captain Majid, the Arabic-dubbed version of Captain Tsubasa, as their favorite anime.⁵ The fact that most of the sample was familiar with Captain Majid, a famous anime playing on Arabic cartoon channels, speaks volumes about the impact that Japanese anime had on the 1990s generation living in the Arab World.

From the Japanese side, however, strong positive impressions of the Arabian Gulf were far less prevalent. Mizuho Yamazaki, Curatorial Assistant at the Mori Art Museum and Independent Curator, explains that the lack of awareness Japanese people have of the Gulf, and of the UAE in particular, is an educational issue at its core. “For an average Japanese, the images that would probably come to their mind first are desert, traditional clothes, and oil,” she explains. “Modern and contemporary art of the Arab World seem ‘too far’ for most Japanese people,” Yamazaki continues, “There are literally no professors in Japan – at least that I know of – specializing in Arab modern and contemporary art. This lack of academic interest translates into a lack of popular media interest. For exhibitions with media sponsors, which make up a sizeable portion of major art exhibitions in Japan, curators from the private sector prefer to show works from an easy-to-understand, eye-pleasing, apolitical European Impressionist than an exhibition of an unknown Arab artist.”⁶

Some of the most powerful cultural insights come from contemporary artworks, as artists are at a unique vantage point to capture the geopolitical and socio-economic climates they operate in. They share those insights with a global audience through the universal language of art. Large exhibitions of visual and performing arts can change the ways one perceives a certain country or city. Fashion and architecture design are also important elements of cultural appreciation, and exhibitions including different aspects of a country’s visual culture can often be the catalyst for pedagogical learning across multiple audiences. In this way, art carries the ability to create educated images in the minds of new audiences. Certain curators’ disinterest in exhibiting lesser-known artists from the non-Western world thus forgoes the potential to craft objective and nuanced perceptions in their audience’s minds about cultures they are not already familiar with.

Artistic exchange between the UAE and Japan can alleviate the lack of awareness and education in the latter about the Gulf region and its rich history. As such, some key exhibitions of UAE-based artists in Japan over the past decade have, in their own ways, tried to tell individual stories to shift narratives about the UAE and the wider Gulf region. While this list is non-exhaustive and might omit some important artistic interventions, I hope it will be a starting point for further academic and archival research and serve as a base for future art exhibitions linking the UAE and Japan.

Artistic Interventions: Exhibition History of UAE-Based Artists in Japan

The time frame of 2012-2022 comes from the first large-scale group exhibition dedicated to Arab contemporary art in Japan at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.⁷ Co-curated by Nanjo Fumio, Director of the Mori Art Museum, and Kondo Kenichi, Associate Curator at the Mori Art Museum, Arab Express: Latest Art from the Arab World was held in commemoration of the 40^th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan and the UAE, the Kingdom of Bahrain, the Sultanate of Oman, and the State of Qatar.

It is interesting to note that before 2012, one of the very first international showcases of Emirati culture took place at the Abu Dhabi Pavilion at Osaka Expo 1970, a year before the UAE was formed.⁸ Also noteworthy is the exhibition of UAE-born designer Khalid Shafar held as part of Tokyo Designer Week in 2011. Entitled Dubai Futures, supported by Brownbook and Falcon and Associates, the exhibition introduced Shafar’s furniture design work to the Tokyo art and design crowd for a multi-day event held at Meiji Jingu Gaien Park.⁹

In 2012, with the support of embassies and major Japanese and UAE companies, Arab Express featured artworks from 34 artists and artist groups from over a dozen Arab countries, with a focus on the Arabian Gulf. Out of the 34, seven were either born or based in the UAE, which makes up a 20% representation of the exhibition and one of the highest single-country proportions of artists in the show.¹⁰ With works mainly produced after the 2000s, this was the first exhibition in Japan showcasing contemporary Arab art “at a large scale,” as co-curator Kenichi explained in the exhibition catalogue.¹¹

While museums in Europe might have been quicker to exhibit works from contemporary Arab artists, Japan’s stance took perhaps a bit longer but remains even more historically relevant. Indeed, both Arab and Japanese artists have had to navigate through Western Orientalist framing and projection. Placed inside a shiny lacquerware box or delicate porcelain vase, Japan was imagined to be a nonmoving and idealized land that could be described as both strange and attractive. Kenichi’s metaphor perhaps best describes the Western world’s fascination of the “East” that has driven much of the artistic and media output about this region to this day: “In the same way that Japanese are uncomfortable about certain scenes in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), people in the Arab region must watch the portrayal of Arabs in American and European media with a mix of resentment and ridicule.”¹²

In the postcolonial “Asian century” we currently inhabit, I truly believe that Arab and Japanese societies could be powerful cultural allies. Kenichi also sees that “clear opportunities” exist. “[I]t is for the very reason that Japan has not historically been an enemy of the Arab region that it should be able to observe it in a more objective way. In this sense, it could be argued that Japan is in a more advantageous position to understand Arab culture [than Western countries].”¹³ This desire to disassociate from Western intellectual preeminence is one that is increasingly shared by academics, curators, artists, and cultural practitioners worldwide, especially so in the context of UAE-Japan cultural dialogues.

While no other major exhibitions solely dedicated to contemporary Arab art have since been organized in Japan, other notable exhibitions of UAE-based artists took place in Tokyo and Yokohama from 2018 to 2020. In June 2018, Dubai-based photographer Cheb Moha had a solo exhibition at Midori.so, a gallery in Commune 2nd, a popular spot in the Omotesando district of Tokyo. In collaboration with Resala and Arts Council Tokyo, “衣食住 [Clothing, Food, Housing]” was an exhibition of film photographs depicting daily life in the UAE and throughout the Gulf.¹⁴

Furthermore, in 2020, the Yokohama Triennial, one of the major triennial exhibitions of Japan, featured the works of two artists associated with the UAE art scene: Lantian Xie, a conceptual artist who has previously exhibited at the UAE Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennial and has been a long-time resident of Dubai, and Farah Al Qasimi, a photographer and artist who was born in Abu Dhabi and is now based between the UAE and the US. A year later, Al Qasimi’s photograph Lady Lady (2019), which depicts a woman watching an Arabic-dubbed anime on her smartphone, made the cover of the Spring/ Summer 2021 issue of IMA Magazine, one of Japan’s leading photography magazines. Interviewed by Miwa Susuda, Al Qasimi was featured as one of the photographers to watch for IMA’s selection of “Millenial to Generation Z” international photographers.¹⁵

From July to August 2021, I curated the fourth volume of the East-East: UAE meets Japan series, entitled East-East Vol.4: The Curio Shop, with a total of 15 artists in Tokyo: eight based in the Arabian Gulf and seven based in Japan. The show traveled to three venues. First, we opened this group exhibition at HB.Nezu, an independent curatorial residency space in Nezu, in close proximity to Tokyo University of the Arts Ueno campus, second, at ILY Hub, a co-working space and gallery in Ebisu, and third, at Block House, a multi-floor art space located in the heart of Harajuku. The exhibition took the theme of a Meiji-era curio shop, a type of souvenir shop built in the 19^th century for newcomers and travelers after Japan’s centuries-long isolation. The curio shop represents a place to redefine exotic strangeness and the relationship between art and commerce. The show featured the works of Yoshi (Aisha Al Ali), Aliyah Al Awadhi, Almaha Jaralla, Arthur de Oliveira, Christopher Benton, Hashel Al Lamki, Salman Al Najem, and Khalid Mezaina on the UAE and Gulf side, and works of BIEN, DAISAK, Heijiro Yagi, Koiichiro Tada, Rintaro Fuse, Nimyu, and Tomoki Kurokawa on the Japanese side. This was the first time that all of the selected UAE and Gulf-based artists were exhibiting in Japan, and many shared with me their enthusiasm to participate in a community-led, independently-funded exhibition with a young curator.

Emirati artist Aliyah Al Awadhi shared that the East-East: UAE meets Japan exhibition series “symbolized an empowering movement in which countries in the Global South band together to formulate a narrative that exists outside the confines of an international art language, which often caters to the tastes of a larger imperial and colonial power structure that commodify the Romanticized East.” She expanded to think about international exhibitions of artists from the Arab world and Japan: “It means to me that the truth can be widened, that experimentation outside themes of the ‘Orient’ can not only be possible but widely accepted. To me, it means humanization and the freedom to control our own stories.”¹⁶

Another finding of this exhibition was the imprint that Japanese anime left on Emirati youth. Yoshi, otherwise known as Aisha Al Ali, visited Japan for the first time in 2018 and has been inspired ever since to unpack the similarities between Emirati and Japanese pop culture. “[When I traveled to Japan,] I realized how much the Japanese pop culture influenced the Emirati pop culture,” she shares. “As a child, I used to watch anime every single day, and buy Japanese snacks without knowing their origin. My hairstyle was Japanese too. The game center I used to visit had imported games from Japan. The stationary I bought was similar to what Japanese children had.” Reflecting on this, she continues, “Through my work, I want Emirati youth to realize that Japanese popular culture has very much shaped our collective childhood.”¹⁷

As her graduation project for Zayed University College of Arts and Creative Entreprises, Yoshi premiered an installation called Yesterday’s Inspiration (2020) at Manarat Al Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi. Her following artist statement on the concept of “J-Emirati” is very insightful to understand the intricacies linked with the importation of Japanese consumer goods and media into the UAE in the early 1990s: “In the early 1990s, Japanese animation and cartoons were being dubbed in Arabic in countries like Lebanon and Syria, and then exported to other Arabic-speaking countries. These animations, although dubbed in Arabic, still had a Japanese cultural sensibility; the animation style, the names of the characters, the storylines, and social customs all remained distinctly Japanese. These elements had a great influence on the youth of the Emirates, where they slowly started to adopt many of the sensibilities seen in the animation, and even became interested in learning the Japanese language. All of these elements have shaped a generation of Emirati youth, who have integrated these sensibilities into their forms of expression. A form of expression which I call: “J-Emirati Pop-Culture.”¹⁸

Other artists have shared the deep-reaching influence of anime on the way they perceive colors in both photography and painting. I may be drawing far-reaching conclusions about the impact of Japanese anime on younger generations of UAE-born artists, but it is a fact that is in conversation about childhood and visual learning that makes it an important topic worth uncovering in more depth in academic research or exhibition context. 

Conclusions

Some key findings arise from this brief history of UAE-based artists exhibiting their work in Japan in the past decade.

Manga and anime have left an important mark on younger generations of UAE-born artists. Exhibitions of Japanese art in the UAE could further focus on this aspect and include illustrators, manga artists, graphic designers, fashion designers, artists, and other cultural practitioners involved in the development of Japanese anime from the 1990s to the present day— including digital renderings and 3D animation. This would be both educational and engaging for the new generation of artists from the UAE, and I foresee many cross-cultural collaborations happening around this topic and medium.

There is also a clear imbalance in the perception of Japan in the UAE versus the perception of the UAE in Japan. More exhibitions dedicated to showing contemporary UAE-based artists in Japan should be prioritized and supported by both Japanese and Emirati cultural agents. This will only lead to deeper cross-cultural understanding, especially as bilateral trade between the two countries is expected to grow in the coming years. While large-scale exhibitions such as Mori Art Museum’s Arab Express have left a legacy to be continued, most exhibitions of UAE artists in Tokyo have been independent, small-scale projects. These curatorial activities are vital to the growth of youth-driven, cross-cultural networks, but they need to be sustained for longevity and further educational value. I saw first-hand the genuine interest and curiosity that young artists and curators in Tokyo had towards the Dubai, Sharjah, and Abu Dhabi art scenes but the average Japanese still has a lot to learn about the UAE’s intricate culture: not only about its history, but also its values, its natural landscapes, its architectural history, its urban fabrics, and the key elements that make up its multifaceted and multicultural identity. Both countries share a fascinating balance between deep-rooted familial traditions and future-looking modernity, a similarity that could be put at the forefront in the context of international exhibitions.

This wave of curatorial efforts should be understood, by both the UAE and Japan, as part of East-East and Global South narratives. To gain cultural prominence on the global stage, both the UAE and Japan would benefit from increasing their creative cooperation, by investing in cultural bridges between West Asia and East Asia. Both Abu Dhabi-based and Tokyo-based artists and curators, quoted earlier, see a lot of potential for the Arab World and Japan to comprehend each other in more depth. They both agree that stereotypical images of both the UAE and Japan have been created through Western scholarship and media and the time has come to promote new narratives. I feel this sentiment is also becoming a priority with museum board directors in both countries, and I await to see more institutions giving space to emerging artists and curators to build a more interconnected Asian continent, from the Gulf to Japan.

With strong economies and great outlooks toward technological developments, the UAE and Japan share a lot of the same reference points. In the age of decentralization, it is my hope that another key theme bridging the UAE and Japan will include digital cultural production and diffusion as well. Both countries need to push for increased cultural mobility, including joint artist residencies, traveling exhibitions, and study exchange programs. With Osaka Expo 2025 on the horizon, and in celebration of the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations, I cannot think of a better time to amplify and elevate creative ties between the UAE and Japan.

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The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author, and do not represent Fiker Institute.