IKIRO / Be Alive

The exhibition is curated by deputy director Jaap Bremer, who turns 65 and thus bids farewell to the museum. The reason for the exhibition is the official celebration of 400 years of relations between the Netherlands and Japan. But the Kröller-Müller Museum itself has a special relationship with the Asian country. Helene Kröller-Müller already acquired Japanese art, and this sub-collection grew under Hammacher and Oxenaar with works by modern and contemporary Japanese artists. Moreover, the museum has been in regular contact with Japan for loan exhibitions since the 1950s. ‘We usually bring art from our collection to Japan’, says Bremer in his opening remarks, ‘but today we show what we have brought here from Japan’.

IKIRO / Be Alive features art from the past twenty years, by two generations of artists. Ufan Lee, Isamu Wakabayashi, Susumu Koshimizu, Fujio Akai, Shigeo Toya, Toshihiro Kuno, Kimio Tsuchiya and Hisaya Jojima belong to the older generation. Spirituality and the experience of nature play an important role in their work. For the younger generation, Tatsuo Miyajima, Rieko Hidaka, Minako Saitoh, Osamu Kanemura, Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Mariko Mori, Yoshinori Kon, Takahiro Suzuki, Shimabuku and Tabaimo, the unifying theme is not nature but ‘life’.

A link between art and life is discernible in the work of the selected artists. Their work expresses their view of human existence. The central theme in the work of Takahiro Suzuki is the convergence of art and life. Every day he repeatedly writes the term ‘Ikiro’ – which means ‘live’ – on sheets of rice paper, as a form of meditation. This action has since become a performance that he carries out every day of the exhibition at the Kröller-Müller Museum.

The exhibition is inaugurated with a tea ceremony performed by the ‘Master of Tea Ceremony’ Hiroyuki Nakazawa. Together with 30 assistants in colourful clothing and in front of a special décor, he pours Van Straaten, Bremer and the other guests a bowl of tea.

Unfortunately, the three-part sculpture Otterlo mist by Isamu Wakabayashi, which he made especially for this exhibition, cannot be seen. The work is in the sculpture forest, which is inaccessible due to the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.