Otherworldly assets: Contemporary art remains both surreal and lucrative

livemint.com:

One of the most commented upon displays at Asia’s biggest art show, Art Basel Hong Kong, was a video art work called Cut Suits by Fuyuhiko Takata. It featured half a dozen male models solicitously bending over each other with scissors in their hands and cutting up their suits till they end up bare chested with their clothes in tatters. It looked as if an otherwise disciplined Japanese executive had suffered a mid-life crisis and lost even his sense of propriety.

In the foreground to this video, with Tchaikovsky playing as its soundtrack, was a pile of shredded suits. Every visit to Art Basel Hong Kong, which was back at full force this year, taking over downtown Hong Kong’s largest convention halls, leaves me convinced that contemporary art is a surreal theatre of the absurd. The huge installations of pop art in East Asia, heavily influenced in some cases by Hello Kitty, only heighten this view.

Takata’s Cut Suits sought to signify that the fabled 70-to-80 hour a week slogging Japanese ‘salariman’ was finally throwing off his shackles. Like so much of contemporary art, the Hiroshima native’s debut at Art Basel was thoroughly derivative, a homage to Yoko Ono’s work six decades ago. I couldn’t help thinking that Takata was having a hearty laugh at everyone on his way to the bank—at the ‘salariman’ as well as the art world.

And don’t get me started on the gigantic circus tent of a red dress by Japan’s Sunayama Norico that stood out at Art Central, the supposedly edgier art show that also ran in Hong Kong at the end of last month. This work allowed children and adults to crawl under it and discover sketch pens and paper to create their own art. Maybe this was an effort to further democratize art? Who knows? As light