There really is no place like home, and this is fully evident in the Tokyo Opera City Gallery's hot summer show, "My Home Is Yours/Your Home Is Mine."
The exhibition, curated by the ad hoc French-Chinese pairing of Jerome Sans and Hou Hanru, debuted in Seoul late last year, aiming to explore the evolving identity of "the home" in an age of global migration and nomadism -- to examine what Sans and Hanru term "a merge of home and working spaces and the relationship between the private and the public." The 11 participating artists and artists' groups created new works for the Tokyo incarnation, and Opera City's Mami Kataoka came on board with a few site-specific ideas of her own.
The first thing visitors encounter is a row of fluorescent lights and thick semitransparent plastic sheets hanging over the gallery's doorways, fundamental materials that establish boundaries and set a steady low-note counterpoint to the vibrant improvisations inside. Not as immediately evident are the curtains seeming to hover high overhead, these borrowed from people's homes by Junya Yamaide. There are scores of curtains hung throughout the exhibition space, which, like the hundreds of grainy office-building surveillance photographs plastered over the top section of all the gallery walls, help make the Opera City a more accommodating gallery. Smart touches like this are everywhere in the show.