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NowHere Bets On the Japanese Artists New York’s Gallery System Has Overlooked

In Tribeca, founder Kentaro Totsuka is showcasing the work of both overlooked Postwar figures and a new generation of Japanese artists.

Along the border between Tribeca and Soho, there is a wave of young Japanese fashion brands, many appearing only temporarily in some of the neighborhood’s most expensive storefronts. Meanwhile, Issey Miyake has just unveiled an expansive new flagship near Madison Square Park, launching with a collaboration with Brooklyn-based Japanese artist Tomokazu Matsuyama as the first chapter of the New York store’s art program. (All this just as the yen reaches its lowest level in more than 40 years.) The takeaway is that there’s a new generation of young creators with very international backgrounds helping open Japan to the world while promoting the richness of its creative culture abroad.

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It’s happening not only in fashion but also in art, as Japan attempts to catch up with its neighbors, particularly South Korea, where government support has helped drive the global prominence of its cultural and creative industries, including contemporary art. More Japanese artists are now finding international representation after years in which only a handful of megastars, Takashi Murakami and artists connected to his Kaikai Kiki studio, Mariko Mori and, of course, Yayoi Kusama, managed to reach the global stage. Even then, you could count them on one hand, particularly when limiting the selection to artists based in Japan.

The most prominent recent example is Yu Nishimura, whose market and institutional profile has risen dramatically in just a few years, culminating in representation by David Zwirner and a new auction record this May at Sotheby’s. His Leaves Carpet (2017) sold for $998,400, more than eight times its low estimate and surpassing the previous record set only a few months earlier, in November, when Thicket (2020) sold for $711,200.

Even so, Japanese artists remain significantly underrepresented in the art world’s major hubs, particularly New York. Only recently have Japanese galleries begun appearing more regularly at fairs across the city, especially on the younger end of the market. New York has very few Japanese galleries specializing in Japanese art and almost none devoted exclusively to championing contemporary Japanese talent. One of the exceptions is NowHere, which relocated this June from Soho to a larger space at 40 Lispenard Street in Tribeca.

The inaugural show is a two-part exhibition dedicated to Toshihisa Yoda, a Soho-based Japanese abstract artist who has worked and exhibited institutionally in the United States, Japan and internationally for more than six decades, despite never securing gallery representation capable of building his market. The first chapter, presented in June, featured works from the 1960s through the 1990s: early geometric abstractions that reveal how Yoda adapted the disciplined, meditative mark-making of Japanese tradition into a contemporary language close to the optical abstraction or hard-edged paintings explored by artists working at the same time. Echoes and affinities one could identify span Frank Stella to Carlos Cruz-Diez or, later, even Peter Halley. The repetition of his rigorously........

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