Jeffrey Rosen, Co-Founder of Misako & Rosen.
Misako and Jeffrey Rosen. Photo: Mie Morimoto
Tell us about how you got started in Tokyo? What has your gallery’s journey been?
My wife Misako and I have always been at the same address in this neighborhood of Otsuka—a residential district—as we inherited the old Taka Ishii Gallery space, where I was a director and continued to work through the beginning of the gallery’s existence. We’ve always been a destination gallery because there’s good street style food in the neighborhood, gyoza and things like that. But otherwise, it wasn’t thought of as a destination for contemporary art galleries.
How has the neighborhood changed since you started?
For about a decade, we’ve made an effort to help foster a non-competitive art dealing community: this resulted in our friends XYZ Collective, an artists-run space, moving their project to Sugamo, which is in walking distance from our space. Subsequently, the young gallery Kayokoyuki opened in Komagome, which is one stop from XYZ Collective on the train. And then 4649, a younger artist-run gallery, decided to kind of partner with XYZ on the space, and they rotate exhibitions in the same building.
Installation view: J. Parker Valentine: Hypnic Jerk, MISAKO & ROSEN, Tokyo, May 25-June 23, 2024. Photo: Kei Okano.
Would you say it’s the most vibrant gallery neighborhood?
Well, it’s a good alternative to the experience that people get when they visit Roppongi. There’s two different buildings, the main one being reminiscent of the old school: Taka Ishii, my old boss, Tomio Koyama, Misako’s old boss, ShugoArts, also of that generation. The more established, I would say, more commercially-oriented galleries of the first generation are mostly over in Roppongi. They all have satellites in a neighborhood called Tennozu. Tennozu is a bit off the beaten path, but it’s connected to the Terrada Art Warehouse, which has gotten a little bit of press recently. But the main heart of the Tokyo art world can actually be geographically situated—our neighborhood is associated as sort of being the “kids,” and I flatter myself as being a middle-aged one.
It seems that in Japan, you can be considered a newcomer for a long time.
Right? I always say we’re blessed with eternal youth, because in Tokyo, we’re so far outside of the center of the international market. Especially for homegrown Japanese artists, they’re sort of perpetually new in a way which is not totally negative, because it’s been beneficial to their practice’s development that they don’t have the pressures of the market hanging over their heads. However, that’s definitely shifting, among younger Japanese artists and older ones too.
How so?
Yeah, there’s a not too subtle interest in the market. I don’t know how long this will last. I would say the only comparable thing I have experienced was the Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara moment in the nineties.
So there’s a boom in interest in emerging art. How are galleries keeping up with demand?
I mean, we have lots of friends across generations. We’re most comfortable with galleries that would just be right now graduating from Liste to Basel, if you follow that old-school way of growing a gallery. We’re more friendly with this younger generation, having done so many condos, and having organized our own with Onsen Confidential, our hot spring project, where we invited galleries from abroad to come and hang out. That’s something which tends to resonate more with galleries who are probably 10 years younger than us.
From your perspective, can you give us the lay of the land on the more established galleries that are?
Before there was the contemporary art world in Tokyo as we know it today, you had SCAI The Bathhouse. Then, you could kind of see Taka Ishii and Tomio Koyama as being kind of like number one and number two, if you want to think about it in terms of the most important or most internationally active galleries from Japan. Taka didn’t train with anybody, but Tomio was working at SCAI The Bathhouse.
It’s also important to mention that just one neighborhood over from Roppongi, in Azabu-Juban, is Take Ninagawa. Nina [Atsuko Ninagawa], who runs Take Ninagawa, is from our generation, but she’s become the most prominent commercial gallery of our group, basically. She sits on the Art Basel Selection Committee now, and used to sit on the Art Basel Hong Kong Committee, and she’s responsible for bringing Art Week Tokyo into the world. That’s her baby.
Installation view: Ken Kagami: Modern Art, MISAKO & ROSEN, Tokyo, Sep 2-Oct 1, 2023. Photo: Kei Okano.
How do you see yourself in relation to the Asian art market at large? Do you feel mostly like a local gallery?
Well, we weren’t actively participating in the Asian market outside of Japan until three years ago. What changed was our participation in Art Basel Hong Kong. We never did it in the past, we didn’t aspire to do it. We always kind of prided ourselves on prioritizing the cultural side of our gallery… and we certainly didn’t expect to do any business based upon our program. I’m not sure if I was wrong about that, I don’t think so. Actually, the reason we did Art Basel Hong Kong was very simple: it aligned with our principles. It was the moment when it seemed like, with Frieze Seoul, all the political strife in Hong Kong, and COVID, that there was a sense that Hong Kong was not going to be the place any longer. You got the sense that everybody was fleeing a sinking ship, and that’s when we decided to take part.
That logic would seem backwards to a lot of dealers.
I felt like I was meeting people who really were invested in developing the contemporary art culture there, and that something was happening. It was finally realizing itself in a form that I didn’t imagine was possible via the fair on its own. Everybody was getting ready to jump ship because the going was getting difficult, and all of a sudden it was politically problematic. It was no longer clear that you could go to Hong Kong without having to take into consideration the political implications of your presence. I thought, “This is really interesting now. It’s morally ambiguous.” And if we are really interested in culture first, then we can lend our presence to that context.
Did that mean Chinese collectors started banging on your door?
Well, it seemed that the collectors knew who we were, what we were doing and were ready for us—but no, that didn’t happen. However, it really helped strengthen relationships. We started to build connections through the international fair circuit outside of Asia with galleries in Seoul and galleries in Indonesia. The relationships we developed with most of those people started in Europe really, but our presence in Hong Kong and in Seoul helped strengthen them. So our route to the collectors is through our collaborations, and the projects we’re doing with our colleagues in other parts of Asia. At first it didn’t really seem like we had peers with the same interests as us, in terms of our aesthetic. Now, I think that’s changed. It exists in this generation, we’re comfortable collaborating with them, and tangible things are happening.
So where do you see the future of Tokyo’s art market going? It sounds like there are some people who would like it to remain its current size, and not necessarily compete with the other big cities in Asia like Seoul and Hong Kong.
I think that on the ground, it’s a mixed bag. I mean, should Tokyo be gunning to be the art world capital of Asia? Is the presence of Pace a good thing or a bad thing? Is Tokyo Gendai, which clearly has ambitions to be a major fair, a sensible thing to be happening right now? For us, the model is our little initiatives and Art Collaboration Kyoto, which is more of a boutique fair. The outsider spirit has been really beneficial to developing something unique. I think even the more powerful Japanese galleries probably don’t have the chops to defend their position if Tokyo becomes such a central place within Asia. I think being on the periphery is a strength, not a weakness.
One thing I’ll point to is an interesting phenomenon—which I think is real, not just my ideology or fantasy—is that if you look at our generation and you look towards those younger than us, you see an almost entirely artist-run art world. You don’t have a crop of third generation galleries, you have a crop of third generation or first and second generation artists-run spaces. These artists-run spaces are run by people who grew up being very much aware of and participating in the market from an artist’s perspective. You can imagine several little Queer Thoughts from the next generation of the market in Japan. I think that’s beautiful, and necessary as a counterbalance to the profit-driven mega gallery model.
