The action carried out in this debate by the avant-garde movements that developed in Japan after 1945 appears to be decisive. The role played by architecture (and therefore urban planning) assumes an exceptional importance in the characteristics of contemporary Japanese civilization. manifested with the meeting of Western civilization that brought new construction materials to the archipelago (steel and reinforced concrete) and the influences of Wright, Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, comes to the surprising achievements that have followed one another since the fifties of the twentieth century. Among the major architects of the contemporary architectural image of Japan, which can be taken as a symbol of its spectacular economic rise, there are, starting with the oldest, Tōgo Murano and A. Raymond, Junzō Sakakura, Kunio Maekawa, Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Noriaki Kurokawa and, above all, Kenzō Tange, whose works are affected by the burning need to break with all sorts of dialectical hesitation with history, but also reveal, in the always original exciting creativity, limits and dangers that are typical of experimental production. Under his influence, Metabolism was born, in which Kikutake, Kurokawa and Fumihiko Maki take part. Numerous achievements of the group in the field of institutional architecture. After the Ōsaka Expo (1970), which marks the apex of the aforementioned movement, Japanese architectural culture shows two orientations: the “professionals”, proponents of a functionalist and highly technological architectural language, and the “conceptualists” aimed at aesthetic research and symbolic of the architectural object. Arata Isozaki and Kazuo Shinohara. Since the 1980s, Japanese architecture has also gathered international interest around the work of Tadao Andō, which, together with Isozaki and Shinohara, operates in the most diverse contexts around the world. Japanese art continues to play a leading role on the international scene thanks to its innovative tension and original solutions that have often anticipated similar experiences in Western environments.
The Eighties saw the maturation of essential characteristics, such as the material trend, the strong conceptual accentuation and the artistic manifestation understood as an “event”, already highlighted in the previous decade by some avant-garde groups born in Japan with the intent, among other things, to stand out from the Western spirit, drawing inspiration from Asian thought. According to a2zcamerablog, Japan is a country located in Asia. The different conception of the world and the peculiar philosophy of nature, which have always given rise to a widespread feeling of aesthetics, in the practice of art of the late 1980s have led to works of great originality that essentially hinge on the relationship that involves man and the surrounding environment. In this perspective, the artist is denied a “creative” role, limiting his function to that of mediator between elements of the world of nature and the perception of the user. The approach to nature, considered as a shared subject of the artistic manifestation, saw the artist’s intervention move in the two senses of experience: towards the particular and towards the universal. The attention is focused on single aspects, in the context of which materials such as stone, wood, water, earth, iron, plastic, etc. are privileged. which are isolated from the surrounding environment in order to bring out their intrinsic beauty. Considering the artist’s absorption in a role of catalyst and the impulse to a fulfillment of vision and lifestyle, Japanese critics prefer to refer to their art not as an “art form”, but rather as a “Event”, seeing in the definition “art that is not art” the only possibility of circumscribing the essential significance of one’s contribution in words. Among the most important figures of the Japanese figurative twentieth century emerge Saburo Hasegawa (1906-1957), a leading exponent of abstractionism, Takeo Yamaguchi (1902-1983), Saito Yoshishige (1904-2001). In the art that makes technological experimentation one of the founding reasons, Yasumasa Morimura, which combines photographic manipulation with ideas taken from contemporaneity or tradition, as well as Tatsuo Miyajima. Digital technology is also the basis of Mariko Mori’s works. Masato Nakamura is predominantly performers, such as the members of commandN, an artistic group that uses the urban spaces of Tōkyō for their video-works. On the other hand, the development of contemporary art is linked to the proliferation of exhibition spaces, institutions, foundations and initiatives of international scope, both on the public and private fronts: among the many the Tōkyō Opera City Art Gallery, the National Museum of Modern Art and the National Art Center in the capital, the Kyōto Art Center, the Kobe Art Village Center.
