ADELE SCHLOMBS
Shifting Borders The Exhibition’s Ambitions
Did you know that field hares have no fears? They are known as masters of eroticism, but not as strategists. (…) They spring joyfully here and there, always changing directions. They spring from border to border And break the established linear system. This exhibition and catalogue are the fruit of a dialogue spanning many years that seeks to scrutinise the borderlines between Western and Oriental art, and between ancient and modern art. As her work reveals, Leiko Ikemura persistently cuts across borders. Her art, uniquely redefining the boundaries between Japanese and Western styles, also redraws the demarcation lines between art from earlier periods and contemporary work. As recently as twenty-five years ago it would have been virtually inconceivable to devote a major monographic exhibition to Leiko Ikemura’s oeuvre in the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst (Museum of East Asian Art). At most it might have been possible to stage one of the frequent “interventions” that aimed to shed new interpretative light on ancient Chinese and Japanese masterpieces from the perspective of contemporary artists, handing over the museum’s interpretative authority to the artist for a limited period. Conversely, Leiko Ikemura would have found it inappropriate or even preposterous to decide, just because she was born in Japan, to adopt an ethnographic framing and show her work in the Museum of East Asian Art, for she has consistently positioned herself as an international artist since the beginning of her career. Audiences and art critics might well have misunderstood that kind of show and sidelined her by mystifying her as a “traditionalist from the land of the rising sun”.
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