Culture | The purpose of art

In Japan, festivals are boldly taking art into the countryside

The trend represents a reappraisal of what art can do—and whom it is for

Jan 15th 2022|CHIBA

A COSMONAUT SAT for most of the winter on a platform at Kazusa-Murakami station in Chiba, a rural Japanese prefecture next to Tokyo. As they waited for trains, local grandmothers would chat with the inanimate installation, the work of the Russian artist Leonid Tishkov. Visitors to an abandoned clothing factory in the nearby village of Ushiku found a multimedia labyrinth assembled by the Japanese artist Nakazaki Toru, using objects and memories retrieved from the site: old sewing machines, mannequins draped in fabric samples and recorded interviews with the family that once ran the place. These were two of over 90 pieces created for a triennial festival known as Ichihara Art x Mix, held in the Ichihara area of Chiba in late 2021.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “By the people, for the people”