Tsuyoshi Ozawa

What do a milk crate and an eggplant have in common and what could they possibly do together? As improbable as any other, the answer came from the streets of Tokyo’s Ginza district in 1993: an art gallery. An anti-establishment gesture by artist Tsuyoshi Ozawa protesting the pay-to-play gallery rental system prevalent in the Japanese capital’s art district, the Nasubi Gallery (Eggplant Gallery) consisted of a rotating display of commissioned art projects in a blue milk crate affixed to a tree trunk across from the Nabis Gallery (pronounced “Nabisu”). Reversing the last two syllables of this well-known rental gallery’s name, Ozawa aimed his arrow directly at the heart of a system he deemed deleterious to art. By contrast, Ozawa invited up-and-coming artists to fill his teeny-weeny space, dubbed the “world’s smallest gallery,” with site- and above all size-specific works. Relaunched in 1997 as the New Nasubi Gallery, with ambitions as big as Marcel Duchamp’s portable personal museum La Boîte-en- valise (1936–1941), Ozawa’s participatory project went global, presenting miniature works by international artists. The gallery later became itinerant and traveled the world with Ozawa’s growing list of invitations to feature his project, most notably in Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s canonical interdisciplinary touring exhibition Cities on the Move (1997–1999).

In the year 1998 alone, a blue soap (Jinran Kim) and a large egg (more ostrich- than chicken-sized, Dagmar Tinschmann), or a cut-out paper theater (Kathrin Schiffbauer) and a miniature lifejacket (Li Koelan), among other such singular secular art altars, were displayed. Showing them as part of the Artists’ Street commemorates Ozawa’s exhibition at Asian Fine Arts Gallery on Sophienstraße in 1998, during which the works were presented “on the street” and in the neighborhood of Sophiensæle parallel to the opening of the first Berlin Biennale.

Text: Claire Tancons