Ichiro Fukano, Collector and Producer of CaM by Muuseo.
Ichiro Fukano.
So how long have you been collecting in Tokyo?
I started to collect in 2011—just after the big earthquake in Japan—so thirteen years. It’s changed a lot.
How so?
The main changes have come from the financial situation, not only in Japan, but all over the world. Just before COVID, the government started to introduce new monetary supply policy. They started to supply huge amounts of money in the markets of the US, Japan, and also in Europe. This has had a very positive impact on some sectors, including this one.
People started to build portfolios, and these portfolios consisted of not only cash or stocks, but also property and contemporary art as a commodity. They started to connect that contemporary art could be an asset. They loved to collect mainly paintings that are figurative by mainly market-oriented artists. That’s when the market really changed in Japan.
We’ve also read that the tourist economy in Japan has changed the luxury commodities market a bit. There seems to be a lot of wealth coming in from China.
Yeah. I recently visited my friend’s studio, an artist named Meiro Koizumi. At his studio, I met several Chinese collectors. They are all very young, and according to Meiro’s dealer, they are not just collectors but artists as well. That was a bit of a surprise for me, because as far as I know, most of the market is made up of entrepreneurs and those who had benefited from this monetary supply policy. These collectors are outside of that cluster, and Meiro’s work is also totally different from the market-oriented artists that other collectors have gone for.
How does Tokyo’s art market set itself apart from other major Asian cities?
Tokyo is very unique and different from cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, or Singapore. We are always calm and quiet, not in such a fever with our movement. It’s slower.
But the dealers outside of Japan started to have interest in Japanese painters, young Japanese painters, and have started to sell their work. Japanese art dealers and Japanese collectors have been surprised to see this trend. It’s happening outside of Japan and within Japan at our main auction houses. Some people say that the artists who sell work in other Asian cities are “Auction artists.” It has a negative connotation. They’re mostly not really in my scope, but one of these “Auction artists” I collected many years ago, he’s my friend. For collectors like me, it’s complicated because the price went up very high.
We wonder if you think that the growth in the market means that the art fair structure in Tokyo is going to change soon.
Yeah, historically we have had one very traditional art fair, Art Fair Tokyo. It’s a bit unique because there’s not just contemporary art, but there are also antique dealers, so it’s not 100 percent contemporary. Then, some alternative players arrived like ACK Kyoto and Tokyo Gendai. These two fairs have different tastes from Art Fair Tokyo, market-wise. In Asia, we already have Basel, so I don’t think we need the same kind in Tokyo, because collectors in Tokyo are very domestic—they are not so much interested in, say, Gagosian or White Cube.
