*This is a translation of an interview originally published in the Tokyo Artpoint Project annual report Artpoint Reports 2022→2023 (March 25, 2023).
What kind of year was 2022 for people working in the cultural sector? Mori Tsukasa describes the gradual recovery from the pandemic and his attitude toward the future.
Instead of Responding, the Courage to Take the First Step Forward
Q. What kind of year was it for people running cultural projects in Tokyo?
Over the past two years, cultural projects were forced to remain on standby due to the pandemic, always having to respond to a seesawing situation. But in 2022, international and domestic travel rebounded and, if we put aside for now the issue of changes to how we record infection numbers, society nonetheless seemed to transition more fully into a mode in which COVID is accepted as a fact of life. Under such circumstances, people in the cultural sector had to adopt a mindset of “let’s take the first step forward.”
In September, it was announced that Tokyo would host the 2024 Deaflympics, a multi-sport event for deaf athletes. Looking ahead to this, Tokyo Metropolitan Government formulated the Tokyo Cultural Strategy 2030 in March, which will steer cultural policy for the next few years. It advocates building an environment in which anyone can enjoy arts and culture. I am involved in Creative Well-being Tokyo, an initiative by Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture to promote this. It feels like we’re seeing an acceleration socially in efforts to hold cultural programs more open to different sorts of people by improving accessibility that is grounded in diverse backgrounds.
Q.Well-being will become increasingly important. How do you define or understand its principles?
Well-being is not an easy thing. People are physically different, they are different ages. Though the conditions for what makes someone “well” vary, society still fundamentally functions on the basis of competition. Disability is something that arises from an individual’s relationship with society, so if we truly want to achieve well-being, then we have to recognize individual diversity. Well-being and diversity are interrelated issues.

Diversity was originally something that culture excelled at. Recently, more and more people in the hard-pressed medical and health care sector want to make use of cultural diversity. But culture has become so fixated on conventional values that it can no longer respond to the demands of other sectors. This is a major challenge that we face.
Last year, something really eye-opening happened: a social worker at a community support center for people with dementia told me that instead of programs for people with dementia, they rather want places where people with dementia can go. In other words, instead of direct support for people affected by something, somewhere that just accepts whoever comes and should a problem arise, professionals are on hand to deal with it. When I heard this, I realized how presumptuous it would be for people in the cultural sector to do something intentional, and that we must first accept people and gain experience, that it’s about getting used to things rather than worrying. Dementia is not something really special, there are already lots of people living with it, so it’s first about accepting them. We need to have a certain flexibility to change through that experience and that’s the kind of meaning included in the mindset of “let’s take the first step forward.”
Emulsifying Culture and Other Sectors
Q. In 2022, were there any projects where you sensed that kind of flexibility?
Yes, in Metote Lab, KINO Meeting, and Karoku Recycle, which all kicked off in 2022. For example, Metote Lab tries to develop new ways of communicating. The members had things they wanted to do but weren’t sure how to go about doing it. They just had to very consciously “wander around.” They went to meet lots of people, talk to them, come into contact with things, fail, and gradually make progress. It was a fine way to wander.
Unlike entertainment, which heads toward a fixed goal, art projects feel self-propelled at certain moments. I think a project is working well when it seems to be carrying you along with it. You become nurtured by your own project.
The three projects I just mentioned all feel like that, and I think it’s related to the qualities of the people involved. Signers are central to Metote Lab, while KINO Meeting’s Abe Kota is a designer who spent time doing research on the streets of Brazil, and Karoku Recycle’s NOOK is a team of people who spent ten years working in Tohoku after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, deepening their relationships with others whose experiences differ from their own. In both a good and bad way, artists who act spontaneously are self-reliant, while the NOOK team is, in a good way, reliant on others. Interacting with these project organizers, I got a sense of a new kind of project organizer, one who opens themself up to others and changes through that relationship.
Q. Are initiatives appearing that don’t rely on preexisting forms of art?
Yes. I think 2022 was a year that saw increasing expectations for culture from people not from so-called art fields. Put another way, unless we try to understand the reason such people now have expectations about culture, conventional mindsets in the cultural sector will become dated very quickly. Let’s presume that people from the art world have areas they regard as their forte, but the people now newly interested in art see its appeal in different areas. We have to discard our preconceived notions and values or these two sides will remain incompatible.
The phenomenon of two liquids ordinarily not miscible—like water and oil—nonetheless blending together is called emulsification. The initiatives I mentioned before are examples of a kind of emulsification, where art and the everyday or other fields emulsify. The people involved are perhaps not even conscious that they are creating art. But for me, contemporary art is the attempt to explore and aspire for such intermixtures that they intuitively sense are possible.
Strategies to Make Culture as Shelter
Q. Are society’s expectations of art and culture growing?
There seems to be momentum. It feels like we are living in a time of unprecedented expectation for culture as something socially engaged, as something more valuable that what we consume or own. But after the two world wars of the twentieth century, culture also really blossomed, so perhaps something bad is lurking behind this momentum. In other words, lots of people have an animalistic intuition that something is wrong and are starting to seek shelter in culture.
Culture is changing position and meaning, and becoming more and more necessary. In the midst of this, the question of how to run projects so that culture can function as a kind of shelter becomes important. At the risk of singing my own praises, I’m proud that Tokyo Artpoint Project has launched such initiatives while society is still healthy, and has assembled a versatile team and array of techniques.
On the other hand, given the extent to which society has changed, the ways in which we design projects also must change. More concretely, future planning has to embrace backcasting—meaning to identify a desirable future from the start and then work backward to decide how we act in the present. Because our previous experiences and precedents won’t serve as the foundation for achieving that.
At Tokyo Artpoint Project, as we have pursued our projects through a backcasting approach, we came to see the importance of having hypotheses and provable indices, and introduced process assessments. In order to arrive at the futures we envisage, we set a timeline of when we want to achieve what, review the situation and problems with our partners, and share things on an equal footing, and so endeavor to valorize the projects we do.
Of course, some cultural projects don’t fit that way of thinking. And that’s precisely why we have to resolve problems that can be resolved logically. The times are quite amorphous and unpredictable, so I want us to build the criteria and core of projects ourselves. As we shuttle back and forth between the vision of the future to which we aspire and the present reality that confronts us, I want to take steps forward, one at a time.

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Mori Tsukasa|Director, Tokyo Artpoint Project (Arts Council Tokyo)
Project Coordination Division Chief, Arts Council Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)
Special Guest Professor, Joshibi University of Art and Design
Adjunct instructor, Tama Art University
Born in 1960 in Aichi, Mori Tsukasa worked from 1989 to 2008 at Mito Arts Foundation, where he was involved as a curator in the opening of Art Tower Mito’s Contemporary Art Center. He was responsible for curating various solo and group exhibitions, including Christo (1991), Tadashi Kawamata DAILY NEWS (2001), Katsuhiko Hibino: Hibino Expo 2005 (2005), and Tatsuo Miyajima | Art in You (2008).
In 2009, he joined the Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture, where is involved with running art projects in communities in partnership with nonprofits as the director of the intermediary support program Tokyo Artpoint Project, and also oversees the Tokyo Metropolitan Government & Tokyo Municipality Collaboration Project.
From 2011 to 2020, he was director of Art Support Tohoku-Tokyo, providing help to areas of northeast Japan affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake through arts and culture. From 2015 to 2021, Mori was project director for the official Tokyo 2020 Cultural Olympiad programs Tokyo Caravan and TURN. He is currently involved with promoting Creative Well-being Tokyo and improving the Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture’s accessibility.