Mami Kataoka

Art in Transition: Where and by whom should art be evaluated?

The history of postwar art has been accumulated mainly in the West, in the cities such as New York and London, more precisely, for quite some time. Contemporary art from Japan and Asia was presented out to those centers for a number of times, but those exhibitions were not necessarily received as intended by the organizers/curators. The evaluation of them all altered in accordance with the economic influence and political presence of the country or region rather than the artistic merit, and furthermore, the region-specific modernism(s) in non-Western countries gradually came to be understood from the global context from the 1990s onward. On the other hand, there is a certain limit to taking or evaluating expression of contemporary art within the framework of nations or regions, and some believe that regional exhibitions have already fulfilled their role. In this Talk, the relationship between the constantly-shifting evaluation axis and the respective, social background will be analyzed by examining the major exhibitions in Japan and Asia presented to Europe and the United States since the 1950s and how they have been received.


Art Week Tokyo’s online talks program is organized by Arts Initiative Tokyo, a curatorial collective and alternative arts education initiative.

Mami Kataoka

Mami Kataoka is director of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. She joined the museum in 2003 and took on the role of director in 2020. From 2007 to 2009, Kataoka was the first international curator at the Hayward Gallery in London. She has also acted as the co-artistic director for the 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012) and the artistic director for the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018), and she is the artistic director of the Aichi Triennale 2022. Kataoka is the president of CIMAM (International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art) and has been a board member of the organization since 2014.