Two views of the Tokyo International Forum. Richard Long: Hemisphere Circle, 1996. Photo Saito Dasamu. MOT, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo Yoshiko Shimada's Balloon Bomb, Rising Sun. Yoshiko Shimada. The Ebisu crew (l. to r.): Satoru Shiraki, Yoshiyuki Shiina, Michiyo Kamata, Atsushi Kashiwagi and Daisuke Miyatsu. Asako Tokitsu at work.

letter from tokyo by Kay Itoi ART AT THE TOKYO FORUM Before the grand opening this month of the Tokyo International Forum, a new multipurpose complex of theaters and auditoriums, the city's art dealers, artists, collectors and journalists were invited to preview its 134-piece art collection. The enormous $1.6-billion facility, designed by American architect Rafael Vinoly, is sited in the middle of Tokyo's business district and was paid for by Tokyo taxpayers. We were divided into several groups of two dozen or so people to explore the Forum's large seven-story glass hall and four adjacent theater buildings. Each group was led by a well-informed official from NLI Research Institute, which helped organize the installation of the collection under the guidance of art critic Tatsumi Shinoda. Shinoda's overall theme for the collection, "A Boat of Diversity," reflects its diverse and cosmopolitan character. With 34 conference and convention rooms, as well as several lounges and lobbies, the Forum offers ample space to decorate. On view are works on paper by Jennifer Bartlett, Zao Wou-ki and Sean Scully, paintings by Gerhard Richter, a horse sculpture by Deborah Butterfield and flower photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. One of the most popular works was Hemisphere Circle, a seven-meter circle of 22 basalt stones that Richard Long placed outside the glass hall. In the Forum catalogue is a photograph of the artist in his kitchen, explaining his work using boiled potatoes. By the end of an hour-long (and exhausting) tour, I saw many beautiful and interesting things. But Forum officials don't like discussing the financial aspect of the collection. I knew it cost $5.3 million as a whole, but when I asked how much each work was, they just gave me a phone number of the Tokyo metropolitan government office. I called, but a city official said he would not fax a price list, though if I came over he would read me the prices. No, not on the phone. I have not had the chance yet, but maybe I'll visit them some time. NO MORE MOT MONEY Devastating news for the two-year-old Museum of Contemporary Art (which asks to be called MOT, though nobody knows what that stands for): it will no longer enjoy the luxury of an acquisitions fund, thanks to cutbacks by the debt-ridden Tokyo metropolitan government. Set up in 1988, the acquisition fund has enabled Japan's largest museum to buy art worth $66 million, including works by Hockney, Stella, Warhol and Wesselmann. The most memorable purchase has proved to be Roy Lichtenstein's Girl with a Hair Ribbon, bought for $6 million in 1994, which prompted some politicians to ask loudly why an enlarged cartoon should cost so much. Museum officials are understandably furious about the loss of their funds. MOT chief curator Kunio Yaguchi complains that it "will destroy many of our long-term plans," such as the purchase and placement of open-air sculptures. But the Tokyo government, whose deficit will reach $4.5 billion this year, says that the remains of the fund--some $21 billion with accumulated interest--will have to be used for "more urgent things than art," such as welfare. From next year on, the museum will have to ask for government approval for every purchase, which previously was not required for items costing less than Y200 million ($1.8 million). Imagine yourself explaining why a canvas filled with Campbell soup cans should cost millions of dollars to a group of artistically challenged Japanese politicians! YOSHIKO SHIMADA IN NEW YORK The New York Public Library recently bought two etchings by Yoshiko Shimada, Japan's premier feminist artist. Since her theme--the role women played during World War II--is often considered sensitive in Japan, most museums here are too scared to touch her work. Lately, though, some brave ones began presenting her in such acclaimed shows as last fall's "Gender Beyond Memory" at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Still, the library's acquisitions,Balloon Bomb, Rising Sun(1993), which features wartime school girls below a Japanese flag-like red balloon, and House of Comfort (1993), which depicts a building in which women were forced to serve as sex slaves, were the first Shimadas to make their way into a public collection. The two etchings were most recently seen in a small but well-organized one-woman show at Tokyo's Keio University Research Center for the Arts in December. Among her works on view, the one that might have made conservative Keio scholars nervous was an installation of hundreds of condoms to indicate how many times a month a sex slave had to service Japanese soldiers. It was prominently displayed right under the full-length portrait of Yukichi Fukuzawa, the Keio founder whose face graces a 10,000 yen banknote. THE EBISU ART-NET PARTY HOMEPAGE If you hang out at gallery openings, have art catalogues piling up in your living room and feel strongly about new artists, then you probably want to visit this new art Website, too. Last fall, seven 30- something art-loving Tokyoites launched a colorful homepage called Ebisu Art-Net Party, which is surprisingly relevant and informative, finding many fans among Japanese art professionals. The highlight of Ebisu Art-Net Party, most recently updated in early January, includes color pictures of Cindy Sherman being mobbed by admirers at an October opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, a profile of new anime-punk artist Masakatsu Iwamoto (images of his works can be downloaded from the site), and a lecture given by Yasumasa Morimura. "We love art, but art magazines are filled with knotty art jargon. We wanted to offer something more," Daisuke Miyatsu, an ad director who doubles as an investigative reporter for the site, starts to explain. But Atushi Kashiwagi, a freelance writer, stylist and leader of the group, says it's not as formal as that. "Okay, okay," Miyatsu tries again. "We just wanted an excuse to meet artists and then brag about it." Kashiwagi's colleague Yoshiyuki Shiina, and Satoshi Shiraki and his wife Michiyo Kamata, who both work for an ad agency, are also on the site's staff. They have already interviewed artists Dennis Oppenheim, Christian Marclay, Jean Francois Brun, Jan Fabre and Paul McCarthy and are working to put the translated texts on the site. Though the Ebisu Art- Net is currently only in Japanese (they hope to bilingualize it in near the future), Shiina, the technohead of the group, is trying to use Shockwave so the visitors can hear the artists' actual voices. "We'll be using one technologically new thing after another to make the site more interesting," he says. Among other attractions, art-industry gossip is a treat of the site. According to the Ebisu Art-Net, the second artist to work for designer Issey Miyake's "Pleates Please" series would be photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, which Miyake's office is yet to confirm. Pretty soon, art writers here will be heavily quoting the Ebisu Art-Net Party homepage. ARTIST TO WATCH IN 1997 Asako Tokitsu, a 31-year-old Tokyo native, was one of the most visible new Japanese artists last year, with a string of solo shows at places big and small. A two-month one-woman exhibition through December was appropriate to mark the end of her breakthrough year. It was at the Saito Memorial Kawaguchi Museum of Contemporary Art, a private museum noted for its support for new artists. The show featured her signature charcoal drawing installations in various scales and forms. A small woman full of energy, Tokitsu draws by swinging her arm in great arcs. Her lines, while sharp and stoical, have beautiful rhythms and movements. So it is no wonder that some dancers took notice of her work. She will be collaborating with a dance company in February to provide a stage setting. Then after a group show, titled "Art Scene 90-96," at the Contemporary Art Center of Art Tower Mito, she will have several more exhibitions. At the same time, Tokitsu is seeking an opportunity to work in the United States later this year. Why leave now, when people are starting to see her work? "Well, I don't think those opportunities (in 1996) came up necessarily because people really understood and appreciated my work--I was more or less a pinch-hitter in a situation or two," she explains. "Besides, I feel a need to see myself in a different environment." STARTS PARTY Who said there's no audience for Japanese contemporary art? If that was true, then who were those 600 people who stormed a one-day-only group show, which was more like a party complete with a bar, thrown by nine marketing-savvy young artists on Oct. 27? The artists--Daisuke Nakayama, Izuru Kasahara, Tetsuya Nakamura, Keiichi Bando, Yukiko Onoue, Yuriko Matsushita, Takahiro Fujiwara, Yoshihiro Suda and Isao Sato, who are all in their late 20s, fashionable, soft-spoken and surprisingly likable--organized a show called the STARTS Exhibition to mark the move of Studio Shokudo, which they have shared (but had gotten too crowded) in Tachikawa, a Tokyo suburb. Of the 600 visitors, who came despite an ambitious 2,000-yen ($17) admission fee, most were "fans," many of them art students, in their teens and early 20s. The place was actually too jammed to view artworks, which were displayed in a rather amateurish way. But this obviously did not bother the young visitors. We saw a teenager shrieking, "I talked to him, I talked to him!" Such wild enthusiasm was everywhere. In this country's conservative art world, the Shokudo artists have sometimes raised eyebrows because of their knack for publicity and marketing. That is probably why the art establishment here largely ignored the event (except for a piece written by an art student in an art magazine Bijutsu Techo). But one should not overlook the impact of this group. In 10 years, some of them will be representing Japanese art. A handful of the Shokudo members are already making their mark: Nakayama's beautifully polished work is currently on view in Hamburg and will be featured in a group show in Budapest in March (then he will head for New York on an Asian Cultural Council Fellowship Grant in November). Suda, noted for his delicate wooden sculptures, will be showing in Berlin and Tokyo this spring. And in 15 years, who knows how many of the youngsters (who did not mind paying $17 to get in) would turn out to be wealthy collectors? They could make a sizable market. KAY ITOI is a Tokyo-based journalist who writes about art, technology and lifestyle.