Gallery on the Move: Ozawa Tsuyoshi’s ‘Nasubi Gallery’

In 1993, a wooden delivery milk box was mounted on a tree in front of Nabis Gallery, a long-established rental gallery located in Tokyo’s Ginza district, with an eggplant pierced with sticks placed inside. This was an artwork created by the Japanese artist Ozawa Tsuyoshi for a guerrilla street art event known as ‘Ginburart’ that year, which critiqued the ‘pay-to-show’ system in Japan at the time. Artists, especially those who were emerging, could organise exhibitions in rental galleries for a fee that normally covered a seven-day display period. Appropriating the name from Nabis Gallery, commonly pronounced as ‘Nabisu’ in Japanese, Ozawa titled the work Nasubi Gallery, ‘Nasubi’ meaning ‘eggplant’ in Japanese, to satirise Nabis Gallery’s commercial authority.

Born in 1965, Ozawa Tsuyoshi bases his practice on interactions and communications. Always full of humour and witty observations, his work focuses on the sociopolitics of everyday life, and Nasubi Gallery is one of his most iconic works. It comprises two embedded layers. First, displaying a common vegetable within a miniature gallery reframes it as an art market item. Second, as a whole, Nasubi Gallery could also be regarded as an artwork in its own right, establishing Ozawa as both an artist and a gallerist. As an alternative gallery for emerging and lesser-known artists who might not have the financial support to get in the mainstream, Nasubi Gallery was a distinctive counterpoint to the rental gallery model in Japan and the power dynamics within the art market. While Nasubi Gallery adopted a fifty-fifty payment model, with proceeds from a show split between Ozawa and an exhibiting artist, the project operated in the spirit of collective art-making that evolved through the years.

Perhaps the smallest art gallery in the world, Nasubi Gallery has the concept of mobility and circulation built into its existence. For the following two years, it hosted solo exhibitions for then-emerging artists like Takashi Murakami, Masato Nakamura, Fukuda Miran, and Ujino Muneteru, whose New Club Venus (1993) turned the milk box into a mini nightclub filled with bottles of alcohol, glasses, and electroluminescent lighting. On its opening day, Ujino’s ‘club’ became a busy attraction among crowds of youths and homeless people on the streets of Ginza.

In October 1993, Nasubi Gallery departed from its original base in Ginza and began to travel across Tokyo, with milk boxes appearing in locations ranging from a shelf in a bookstore to a movie theatre, as well as in other cities in Japan like Fukuoka and Nagoya. In December 1995, Ozawa closed Nasubi Gallery to rethink its direction, then he relaunched it under the name New Nasubi Gallery in 1997, the same year the inaugural Cities on the Move exhibition opened in Vienna, where Ozawa also presented his new gallery. Taking a similar approach to engage artists in collective art-making while expanding its presentations internationally, New Nasubi Gallery was an ideal addition to an exhibition that responded to the context of the 1990s. At the time, capital flowed into Asian cities amid a surge in urbanisation, leading to the rapid construction of skyscrapers and commercial landmarks, which threatened the ability of alternative art spaces to survive financially unless they moved to less desirable locations like industrial zones. Under these conditions, Ozawa’s portable exhibition model provided a platform for artistic ideas and artworks as a ‘gallery on the move’.

Fittingly, Ozawa invited Mexican artist Pedro Reyes to show with New Nasubi Gallery as part of Cities on the Move. Known for large sculptures, performances, and participatory projects that address sociopolitical issues, Reyes framed and scaffolded the exterior of the box with a crude wooden structure and painted the gallery’s refined white walls a cement grey. Thus, while Ozawa originally transformed the milk box into a miniature white cube, Reyes reversed the site into an industrial-looking space, and its roughness seemed to offer a humorous commentary on what constituted a gallery at the time.

The number of artists that collaborated with New Nasubi Gallery continued to increase in the 2000s. When Ozawa was invited to show at the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 2006, he extended invitations to participating artists from the triennial, including Jitish Kallat. From then on, Ozawa also invited figures from his network such as Lin Yilin, Yang Zhenzhong, Ken Lum, Song Dong, and Eko Nugroho to create works for his mobile exhibitions. Ozawa’s innovative concept of redefining a gallery and exhibition space allowed artists to expand their conceptual boundaries within a tiny milk box, establishing new communities and practices in the contemporary art scene.