The Japan Foundation proudly presents Omnilogue, a series of three co-curated exhibitions of contemporary Japanese art that will take place in Perth, New Delhi and Singapore (under discussion)in 2011-2012. Each exhibition has a different curatorial theme and title, specific to its local, cultural contexts. The Omnilogue series, which aims to open up new possibilities of multi-directional discussions on cultural exchanges through contemporary art, will culminate in a publication featuring material on all theexhibitions.
The year 2012 also marks the 60th Anniversary of Japan-India Diplomatic relations. Following the historic signing of the Japan-India Peace Treaty in 1952, the two countries, celebrate 60 years of ever-strengthening bilateral relations with a view towards revitalising this friendship. In keeping with this spirit of nurturing empathetic cross-national ties, the Omnilogue exhibition, in New Delhi, titled, ‘Journey to the West’, explores the politics of culture, nationalism, friendship, otherness and the Asian imagination within the narratives of travel and dialogue occurring across different periods and locations.
As a curatorial exegesis, the show employs two historic trajectories to initiate a discursive practice surrounding contemporary Japanese art; one is an examination of the intellectual exchange that transpired between the Japanese curator, Tenshin Okakura, and the Bengali poet and thinker, Rabindranath Tagore, as a cultural-historical lens to examine the complexities of nationalism across Asia in the early twentieth century. On the second trajectory, the show revisits a well-known, sixteenth century Chinese classic, Journey to the West, which is based on a real account of a Buddhist monk Xuanzang’s pilgrimage to ‘Tenjiku’ (literally meaning ‘the center of heaven’) in India, in search for enlightenment.
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