For a few wine-toasted moments, it almost felt like a New York City art night. Sure, Tokyo is half a world away, but there were three new shows up in a big old warehouse, critics and collectors floating about, photographers snapping the smiles on the faces of the beautiful people and, most of all, the art was untamed and good -- shades of West Chelsea in an otherwise dismal little Koto Ward neighborhood called Saga.
Saga's Shokuryo Building, a three-story brownstone that used to be a rice market, is home to a trio of Tokyo's best contemporary art spaces: Tomio Koyama, Taro Nasu and the largest, the just-opened Rice Gallery, which has moved into the site vacated by Kazuko Koike's Sagacho Exhibit Space.
There was some concern that the Rice Gallery would not be able to fill the gap left by its previous tenant. I stayed away from the Rice's first show, held earlier this year, because it promised nothing more exciting than selections from the collections of a couple of long-established Ginza gallerists -- Shugo Satani and Atsuko Koyanagi -- and this ran counter to the spirit of experimentation fostered by Koike during the 17 Sagacho years.