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Jonathan Watkins

Conversation with Jonathan Watkins, former Director, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

Conversation with Jonathan Watkins, former Director, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

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Similarly, projects such as Beppu Project and Breaker

Project, Osaka, amongst others, aim to renew a sense of

citizenship through cultural activity, art with a social

purpose. How do you view such projects and do you

believe they offer sound models or approaches to creative

practise and could they play a leading role in developing

arts practice, as well as defining it?

JW: I have heard about them, met the people who have

co-ordinated them, but have never actually been and wish

I had. It is an interesting phenomenon and reflects the

tendency in Asian cultures – pervasive before European

contact in the 19th century – not to treat artworks as

discrete objects. And cultural memory is not so short.

There hasn’t been such an established obsession in Asia

with the discrete art object produced by a sensitive

“artist” genius, in the same way, there has been in the

west. It was much more about shared experience. Now we

show Ukiyoe on walls, framed and glazed, but it was

originally made for people to collect and they enjoyed

passing it around, sharing it amongst groups of friends

and acquaintances.

KW: You curated an exhibition at Ikon of Ukiyo-e prints

by Utamaro.

JW: Yes, most recently, Utamaro. Of course, there was

some Western influence in Japan before him, but still, the

Japanese art world isn’t one in which relational practice is

simply a repudiation of modernist tradition – and the

notion of the artwork as a discrete gesture – but it is

arguably a continuation of an earlier tradition. That’s my

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