慶應義塾大学アート・センター　Keio University Art Center

Research Project on Tokyo Biennale 1970

  • 2016年 「東京ビエンナーレ'70 再び」展
  • 作家位置検討作業に使用されたシート

The 10th Japan International Art Exhibition (Tokyo Biennial), held in May 1970, was the tenth of eighteen international art exhibitions held between 1952 and 1990, in principle, every other year. However, with Nakahara Yusuke as commissioner, the 1970 exhibition with the theme of "Between Man and Matter" was a special exhibition.


The Keio University Art Center was entrusted with the materials belonging to Minemura Toshiaki Minemura, the Mainichi Shimbun bureaucrat who was responsible for the realization of the exhibition, and thus launched a research project to study the exhibition.

  • From April 2015

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Research project on 'Tokyo Biennale 1970' and reconstructed plan of the composition of the works

The 10th Japan International Art Exhibition (Tokyo Biennale), held in May 1970, was the tenth of eighteen international art exhibitions held between 1952 and 1990, in principle, every other year. However, with Nakahara Yusuke as commissioner, the 1970 exhibition with the theme of "Between Man and Matter" was a special exhibition. The selection of artists by a single curator and the abolition of country-by-country selection of artists and prizes were the attempt to show the state of the art world at the forefront of the time. It was a response to the tendency of the new contemporaneous art exhibitions, such as Harald Szeemann's "When Attitudes Become Form," which was the first of its kind to be curated by a single person. The exhibition was changing from one in which the organizers selected the works and placed them in the exhibition space to one in which the artists were actually there and deeply involved in the exhibition. For the Tokyo Biennale 1970, in addition to the 12 artists living in Japan, 17 artists visited Japan, therefore 29 of the 40 artists were actually committed to the exhibition.

Keio University Art Center has been entrusted with materials belonging to Minemura Toshiaki Minemura, the Mainichi Shimbun's bureaucrat, who was responsible for the realization of the exhibition, and has launched a research project to study the exhibition.

Since its opening in 1970, the exhibition has been covered by many newspapers and magazines, and there have been many photographs of the exhibition, and the organizers have published a collection of photographs of the exhibition, but the composition of the exhibition was never fully verified. Therefore, a research project was launched, and the results were presented as "Introduction to Art Archives XIII: Tokyo Biennale '70 Revisited" (at Keio University Art Space, 2016). Since then, as the research progressed, the reconstruction plan of the exhibition has been modified.

The reconstruction plan is not yet complete, but will be revised with further research and testimony from those involved. In order to do so, we would like to open the reconstruction plan to the public and ask for the help of many people to verify it.

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