Looking Back, Looking Forward: 10

As is the seasonal norm, and in a daily series of postings, ArtReview's critics and columnists pick their favourite exhibitions, performances, books or events from the past year, and look forward to those of 2012.

Joshua Mack is a contributing editor to ArtReview, based in New York, from where he offers these recollections and recommendations:

'Exemplary in its scholarship and accessible in its presentation, The Avant-Garde of Nihonga 1938–49 at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo elucidated the vigorous aesthetic dialogue between 'classic Western' Modernism and 'traditional' painting in Pre-War Japan. In doing so, the show did far more than reveal that a school I had considered kitschy, conservative, and local – think wan latter day versions of carp and monkeys in hazily rendered and spatially indistinct pools and trees – also produced work that was aesthetically innovative and, given the climate in the late 1930s, politically daring if not foolhardy. It also demonstrated how artists working in a Western idiom – oil on canvas, geometric abstraction – did not crib from the so called centres of Modernism. Rather, understanding European trends through their own cultural conditions – much the way Van Gogh did Japan when he made paintings after ukiyo-e – they created conceptually rich and aesthetically innovative work that could only have been made in Japan. These epiphanies continued, for me, the process of smashing inherited assumptions about originality and derivation, center and periphery.

For similar reasons I am looking forward to two shows in the next year, roughly speaking. In the fall, MoMA continues its engagement with the, for it, non-canonical, mounting an exhibition about Post-War Tokyo curated by Doryun Chong. Then, in February comes the Guggenheim’s survey of Gutai organised by Alexandra Monroe, the senior curator of Asian art at the museum, and the scholar, Ming Tiampo. Ming’s recently published Gutai: Decentering Modernism is a concise and conceptually trenchant look at the movement and a tonic to the prejudices which have facilitated a wide spread – although diminishing – failure in the white world to understand and appreciate work created outside 'the centre'  – whether determined by location or skin tone. The above example of Van Gogh comes from her text. Doryun organised the retrospective of Tetsumi Kudo at the Walker Art Center in 2008. (I have worked with Andrea Rosen on three Kudo exhibitions. Doryun and I have overlapped several times in Japan.) He works with intense sensitivity and curiosity and without received ideas. I want these shows to be great because I am convinced of the art and of the organisers.'