１９９８．８．８　The Japan Times Hara Museum Hara Documents 5 The Image Itself-Works by Katsuo Tachi MONTY DiPIETORO 「Painter Tachi lays it on thick」 Jast before the recent "G7" art-showcase exhibition opened at the Spiral in Tokyo's Omotesando, Hidenori Ota,director of the participating Ota Fine Arts,remarked that his gallery was art one of only a half dozen serious art spaces in the city that were small,ambitious and solvent Regular gallery-goers will recognize the names of the others-Wako Works of Art, Rontgen Kunstraum,the Taka Ishii,Koyanagi and Koyama. For those looking to find a healthy mix of established and up-and coming artists,the aforementioned spaces are tough to beast.Although there are but a handful of good galleries scattered around the world's largest megatropolis (one could find a similar number of on-par spaces in a single New York City blook),several private museums glimmer on the Tokyo art map,an otherwise uninspired piece of cartograrhy dominated by hit-and-miss rental galleries,exhibitions and touring blockbuster shows. The Hara is arguably the most curious of Tokyo's private museums. A three-story 1938 Bauthaus-style building with sculpture gardens surrounded by vine-covered walls,tha Hara Museum of Contemporary Art is situated on a quiet residential street in Tokyo's Shinagawa Ward.With its 20th anniversary next year,it has done much to promote contemporary Japanese art. The latest installment in the Hara's ongoing series of small exhibition is "Hara Documents 5:The Image Itself-Works by Katsuo Tachi,"and once again curators have bucked trends by presenting a show of works in that almost abandoned and now nearly quaint artistic medium;oil painting. By the looks of it,Katsuo Tachi, 34,loves to paint.The Osaka-based artist's works are a wonderful mess of thick impasto and thin,pale washes that describe biomorphic struggle-the Hara's Atsuo Yasuda lovingly calls them "failures"-in a paletteknife frenzy of purples and yellows set against earth tones. The canvases are fairly large-some almost 2 meters high-and all seven on display stubbornly adhere to the same basic composition:paint thick and arclike on the left,and thin and oval on the right, with wings,or leaves,or something suggesting freedom and life sprouting out from the center and up toward the top. These are pictures that celebrate painting and the expressive possibility inherent in minerals and oil worked onto a stretched sheet of canvas. Yasuda,who curated the show,believes that Kansai artists are more emotionally expressive than their Kanto counterparts. "Especially during the 1980s,Tokyo art journalists discovered and became very interested in the very active and aggressive Kansai-based artists like Yasumasa Morimura and Tomoaki Ishihara, "he says. While Tokyo suffers from a shortage of progressive art spaces,says Yasuda,the situation in Osaka is worse.What attracted the attention of Tokyo art writers over 10 years ago was the above-mentioned Kansai artists' attempt to do something to improve their local gallery scene.A movement called "Yes Art" grew out of the sympathetic Ken Toriyama's Gallery Haku in Osaka. Tachi was one of the younger and most aggressive of the Yes Art,and it was soon after that he and his group began mounting shows in ad hoc spaces in and around Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto that the gang made their first foray into Tokyo with a show at one of the capital's most respected avant-garde art spaces,Sagacho.In 1994,Tachi was awarded an encouragement prize at the Vision of Contemporary Art competition at the Ueno Royal Museum in Tokyo.The self-promotion,which included lectures delivered in an exaggerated Osaka accent,had paid off. "Kansai artists are passionate and like to present themselves as performers,and are a little wild,"Yasuda, who is also Osaka-born,says with a laugh."I think Kansai artists are basically more chauvinistic." The energy in Tachi's paintings attests to this,but it would be nice to see him try something new for a change,as he has been painting the same basic form (rather well)for years. This is the first major show of Tachi's work in Tokyo,and is complemented by "The Painted Vision," which features several dozen paintings from the Hara's excellent permanent collection of over 600 works.Highlights include a de Kooning and Rauschenberg.Also,don't forget to have a look at what Morimura did to the museum's firstfloor bathroom,and for the seedy,lock the door behind you in Nobuyoshi Araki's three-room porno hutch. While the Hara plans a show of German photography for the fall,until then it's mostly oils at one of Tokyo's most unique art spaces.For fans of new painting,"Hara Documents 5:The Image Itself-Works by Katsuo Tachi"is a worthwhile exhibition at a museum that is always well worth checking out.