Opened in 1999, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum is one of only a few museums in the world to systematically collect and exhibit modern and contemporary Asian art. The inspiration for this museum and the Triennale came with the Asia Art Exhibition that had been held every year since 1979 when the Fukuoka Art Museum opened in Ohori Park. Asian works of art, grounded in distinctive cultures and traditions, have attracted great interest recently, but it was the Fukuoka Art Museum that took notice of the art 30 years ago.
Local governments throughout Japan have built many notable museums of art and natural history since the 1970s, and the construction of art museum has also been important for Fukuoka City. The Asia Art Exhibition that commemorated the opening of the Fukuoka Art Museum was part of a plan calling for art museums to be a symbol of the city. The plan was based on Fukuoka City’s close historical and geographical ties with Asia. The city has long been a gateway to Japan for Asian culture.
From the latter half of the 1970s to the 1980s, however, American contemporary art became the pacesetter in international artistic circles, and plans for exhibitions and museums for Asian art had difficulty gaining acceptance. Those supporting such exhibitions and museums literally had to start from scratch, yet the committee organizing the first Asia Art Exhibition brought together 471 works from 13 countries.
For that first exhibition, museum curators traveled throughout Asia to select the artists and the work to be represented, and discovered many unknown artists in the process. These activities to promote international exchange with those Asian countries became a major part of the museum’s mission.
Holding the Asia Art Exhibition every five years enabled the establishment of on-site research and exchange activities. By the 1990s, when the growing interest in other Asian countries had spread throughout Japan, the Fukuoka Art Museum had already developed one of the richest collections of modern and contemporary Asian art in the world. That is how the concept for a new museum devoted to Asian art was born.
Originally published in Fukuoka Now magazine (fn129, Sep. 2009)
