AWT BAR
AN ArT SPACE FOR ALL THE SENSES
The pop-up AWT Bar provides the city’s art community with a convivial gathering place and multisensory art experience during the four days of Art Week Tokyo. The platform entails three commissions: an emerging architect designs the bar space, a rising chef produces new edible creations, and selected artists conceive cocktails that reflect their artistic practices. It also hosts sound and performance events, deepening Art Week Tokyo’s ties with other creative scenes.
ARCHITEC-
TURE:
ICHIO MATSUZAWA
© ichio matsuzawa office
Spaces You Sense
Can a space be created that holds no fixed form but instead emerges from light, air, landscape, and people’s movements?
The design for the AWT Bar employs sheets of highly transparent acrylic glass to create a formless space that can only be sensed from moment to moment. Bent into a variety of irregular shapes, the acrylic glass is so thin and transparent as to be almost immaterial. It only makes its presence felt when it catches the light or produces distorted reflections. And it is only upon perceiving those fleeting images that someone there can get a sense of the space they are in.
The images will appear and disappear with the shifting of the light, the breeze blowing through the trees outside, or the movements of other people, so that new, mirage-like spaces will constantly emerge one after another. In this continuously transforming environment, each visitor will experience their own unique space based on their own sensations.
—Ichio Matsuzawa
ABOUT THE ARCHITECT
FOOD:
SHINOBU NAMAE
In conceiving my edible creations for the AWT Bar, I wanted to convey the reality of contemporary food practices in an art context. By combining Japan’s seaweed culture with a classic French sandwich, finger food becomes a platform where disparate cultures and temporalities intersect. Meanwhile, thinking about the presentation of materiality and symbolism in art led me to take a more conceptual approach to the financier cake, the name and form of which invite associations with gold, value, and capital. In both cases, I wanted to reinterpret familiar forms to make edible artworks in which taste expands thought.
—Shinobu Namae
ABOUT THE CHEF
Seaweed Jambon Beurre
Made with local ingredients, this new take on the jambon beurre features ham from Okinawa, homemade suji aonori seaweed butter, and two kinds of seaweed pickles on a whole-grain baguette. The depth of its flavor comes from the combination of the seaweed’s texture and the butter’s aroma.
Gold Financier
Retracing the French cake’s etymological and visual association with gold bars, this special financier made with locally grown wheat is topped with a sprinkling of gold leaf. Turmeric mixed into the batter heightens the gold hue and adds a subtly spicy fragrance.
ARTIST COCKTAILS
1.
CHIM↑POM FROM SMAPPA!GROUP: GOLD EXPERIENCE COCKTAIL
When we discover a new aspect of something we previously thought of as trash, it can overturn our values and open our eyes to the significance and history of that thing. This hot cocktail is conceived as a gateway to that kind of experience.
Although grappa is now marketed as a sophisticated Italian spirit, it was originally a cheap liquor distilled from the leftovers of the wine-making process. In this cocktail, it is mixed with a soup made of vegetable scraps from the kitchen at Wall. The heated stones used to warm the cocktail are fragments from a sculpture we once made of a garbage bag; in fact, they are pieces of Bianco Carrara quarried from the same mountain that supplied the marble for Michelangelo’s David (1504). The seasonal plants in the garnish are typically dismissed as weeds in Japan but enjoyed as herbs in other cultures.
One of the inspirations for this cocktail was the image of space debris. The product of humanity’s drive for progress, all that untreatable junk floating in space resembles nothing so much as nuclear waste. But doesn’t it get your imagination going when you take a moment to consider that some of that junk could have broken off from a Sputnik satellite or one of the Apollo missions?
ABOUT THE ARTIST
2.
TSUYOSHI OZAWA: PANGAEA
Look for the red ring
Look for the other colors too
Long ago there was only one continent
Unlike today, the world was undivided
Six continents make a majestic twilight ocean
Now drink them down and dissolve them into one
ABOUT THE ARTIST
3.
MIWA YANAGI: ELEVATOR GIRLS
This colorful cocktail is inspired by a photograph I made of uniformed elevator attendants, known as “elevator girls” in Japanese, submerged in water. The bright red of the miniature high-heel shoe set afloat in a glass of emerald-blue soda looks artificial and toxic, but a bite into the gelatinous form will be met with a burst of condensed cranberry sourness. Experiencing that gap between image and flavor is part of this drink’s fun.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
VISIT
LOCATION
emergence aoyama complex
5-4-30 Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku
HOURS
November 5–9, 10am–10:30pm (last order 10pm)
ADMISSION
Free
