Japan Once Dominated the Art Market. Is the Country Ready for a Comeback?

Yuko Mohri thought she knew what the Japanese government wanted from its artists: something conservative and quiet. It certainly wasn’t a renegade punk rocker with a penchant for moldy fruits.

“It started out as a joke,” she said during a recent interview in her Tokyo studio. She was explaining how memories of a school science experiment that turned lemons into makeshift batteries had spurred the idea for a proposal to fill the Japanese Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale with hanging lights plugged into pieces of fruit that would eventually rot. The exhibit was a critical success.

But the real story of her success happened behind the scenes, where government officials, gallerists and business leaders formed a financial network capable of supporting a Japanese artist like her on the international stage. It was part of a larger movement in Japan to reclaim the cultural clout that the country enjoyed in the 1980s, when it dominated the global art market.

Those were the days when Japanese corporations regularly bought European treasures, helping transform the art market from a rich person’s hobby into an investment vehicle. A strong currency and a government campaign to promote foreign spending to expand Japanese business abroad led to jaw-dropping auction sales for Impressionist paintings by Renoir, Monet and Cézanne. From 1987 to 1991, official trade figures showed that Japanese collectors spent more than $8.7 billion ($16.5 billion in today’s dollars) on art. The trend peaked with the 1990 sale of van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” for $82.5 million, the highest price paid for an auctioned artwork at the time — roughly $200 million in today’s dollars.

Then the financial markets collapsed, leading to a period of economic stagnation in the 1990s known as the “Lost Decade,” until issues persisted for so long that some people renamed it the “Lost 30 Years.” Museums that had opened in the corporate skyscrapers dotting the Tokyo skyline had their acquisition budgets slashed, and bankrupt collectors sold their masterpieces offshore because of the crash.

Art and money collided in the boom days of the Japanese economy to help some Japanese artists find a global audience. And though today collectors don’t have the same kind of buying power as they did in the 1980s, it was enough last year to help fund Mohri’s exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Additionally, this time around, the government was getting involved.

Yasuta Hayashi joined the country’s cultural affairs agency in the shadow of the crash. It was 1994, and programs supporting the Japanese art market had evaporated. It would take another 20 years for the government to have meaningful programs to cultivate new generations of artists and dealers, whichHayashi helped spearhead.

“The agency of cultural affairs decided to hold special meetings to decide how to promote Japanese contemporary art outside of Japan,” said Hayashi, now the agency’s director of arts and culture, adding that promotional plans were drawn up in October 2014.

There was a long list of priorities, and the government has made progress over the years, especially in its attempts to make buying art more appealing through tax incentive programs. For example, in 2018 the government decided to exempt 80 percent of an artwork’s value from inheritance tax for collectors if they lent works to museums for at least five years; in 2021, the rule was expanded to include contemporary art.

Hayashi said that his office is also working on additional proposals that would provide more tax breaks.

“We have been working on the infrastructure,” he added. “The next phase is that we need to invigorate contemporary art activities going forward to make the art market more active.”

Many gallery owners are hoping the changes come soon. Record-high numbers of tourists and programs like Art Collaboration Kyoto and Art Week Tokyo have raised the profile of the Japanese art world. And the arrival of Pace Gallery, a luxury art dealer from the United States, has signaled that the Japanese art market may be on the rise.

According to a recent report by the economist Clare McAndrew for the Japanese government, there was an 11 percent increase in the value of Japan’s art market from 2019 to 2023, growing from $611 million in total sales to $681 million. The percent increase was much higher than the global market as a whole, which expanded by only 1 percent over the same time period.

Tim Blum, who has operated a gallery in the Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo for the last decade, said that he saw positive changes in the business. “There have been really dramatic changes here with more collectors who have become savvy,” said Blum, whose headquarters are in Los Angeles. “It doesn’t mean that Japan is the largest collecting class in the region, but it does mean that everyone in Asia comes to Tokyo. I have many Chinese clients that have second homes here.”

Blum said that Japanese collectors are more circumspect than Western collectors in their approach to choosing works for purchase. And there is reluctance to spend money with foreign dealers, especially after the value of the yen crashed this past summer. Many collectors are still loyal to the country’s major department stores, which have a history of selling fine art.

“In Japan, department stores for my parents and my grandparents were the place to go,” said Kyoko Hattori, who leads Pace Gallery’s Tokyo outpost. “The department stores would come to you, bringing fashions for the fall and paintings for the house. For wealthy people, it was like having your own butler.”

But the department stores are a closed system that caters to domestic clients; few artists represented by the stores draw international attention.

“There is a very famous proverb,” the collector Ryutaro Takahashi joked. “‘It is the end of the world once the department stores start selling the artists.’”

Takahashi, who has built one of the country’s most important art collections over the last three decades, was the subject of a recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Trained as a psychiatrist, he was an early collector of Yayoi Kusama and decided to focus his spending on Japanese contemporary artists including Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Murakami and Akira Yamaguchi. He then turned to a younger set of artists — like the Japanese art collective Side Core — who were inspired to create political work after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

He is skeptical that new tax incentives or the arrival of more Western galleries will improve the lives of Japanese artists.

“The Western art world has deteriorated because of financialization,” Takahashi said during a tour of his exhibition at the museum. “There is no point giving a tax break to the limited number of rich people who buy art. We should be looking for a better environment so that young artists can make a living and promote their artworks.”

But efforts to support Japanese artists like Yuko Mohri are still nascent. For example, the initiative to fund the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was started by Takeo Obayashi, a prominent Japanese collector. He saw an opportunity to use Mohri’s exhibition at the art world’s version of the Olympics to make a statement about the rise of contemporary art in Japan.

“Increasing the number of people connected to the cause will ultimately lead to an increase in the number of art fans,” said Obayashi, the chairman of one of Japan’s largest construction companies. In an interview with Art Beat Tokyo, he explained that he “realized that in order for Japan, which has become a mature nation, to make a breakthrough and demonstrate a stronger economy and increase its national power, it will need creativity in addition to the excellent technological development capabilities that Japan already possesses.”

Even with the financial support, Mohri said that 70 percent of her time preparing for the Venice Biennale was spent on administrative tasks related to fund-raising and logistics. But she hoped that would be an investment in the future, and that Japan’s next biennale artist would have a better road map, with necessary support along the way.

“Opportunities are very limited,” Mohri said, explaining why only a few Japanese artists find an international audience. Raised in a family of teachers an hour outside of Tokyo, she joined an experimental punk band during college in the 2000s, taking part-time jobs serving meals on the bullet train and catering to businessmen in a hostess club to support her career. “I really enjoyed the conversation, and mostly I learned about human desire,” Mohri, now 44, said with a raised eyebrow.

In 2014, when she participated in the Yokohama Triennial, her artistic career began to gain traction. She taught herself English — rare in the insular Japanese art scene — and started networking with international curators, which helped raise her profile around Asia, Europe and the Americas. In 2015, she won the Grand Prix at the 2015 Nissan Art Awards for “Moré Moré (Leaky),” a kinetic sculpture that was inspired by the improvised ways that Tokyo subway stations patch leaks with anything on hand, including plastic tubing, umbrellas, tarps, funnels and buckets.

The sculpture was included at the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale alongside her moldy fruit installation, “Compose,” which featured more than 400 rotting oranges, watermelons, grapes and apples.

Government officials said they were interested in building a more experimental arts sector, one that could match the resourcefulness of Mohri’s sculptures.

“The Japanese are not so good at appreciating our own culture,” said Hayashi, the cultural affairs director. “We recognize the value of those artworks appreciated by the West.”

He added: “We need to change this practice so that we can have our own appreciation of the arts.”

Hisako Ueno contributed reporting.