Like the character Bill Murray plays in the latter film Lost in Translation.

Like the character Bill Murray plays in the latter film Lost in Translation, the Mori Art Museum, which render free of accessed in Tokyo last fall, feels from a mild case of dislocation. As a privately scour contemporary-art venue with international ambitions, it will help herald the accomplishments of of the like kind Japanese art stars as Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Takashi Murakami. The museum is also suppos to function as a tourist destination, the jewel in the garland of real-estate developer Minoru Mori's newest contrive Roppongi Hills. The upscale multiuse community features condominium apartment buildings, a luxurious Grand Hyatt public-house the new headquarters of Asahi Television and a shopping compound packed with boutiques of the caliber of Louis Vuitton, Issey Miyake and Baccarat.

The chiefly prominent structure in Roppongi Hills is the 53-story Mori Tower, designed by way of Kohn Pedersen Fox. It is the same of the tallest buildings in this earthquake-ridden city and houses the Mori Arts Center forward the top five floors. In addition to the museum, the center contains a private cudgel with numerous restaurants and meeting swings a continuing-education facility and Tokyo City View, an observation cover with a deck that provides a 360-degree panorama of the neon-laced metropolis below. Gluckman Mayner Architects designed the sword glass and sandstone museum, as well as the street-level note structure, a 98-foot-tall beehive shape secreteed in glass shingles.

Visitors ride high-speed elevators to reach the 31820 square feet of exhibition space located upon the 52nd and 53rd floors. The galleries themselves are in extent corridors with windows at the closes Mori, who calls his favorite project "Artelligent City," envisions a scenario where tourists and local residents can mix shopping and sightseeing, entertainment and the viewing of contemporary art, in ways that boost the bottom line of his entire jeopardy As one of the wealthiest businessmen in Japan, he is blatantly commercial about his goals, stating candidly at the pre-opening pres conversation that he only became interested in contemporary art when his niece, artist Mariko Mori, mentioned that her work was selling for more, for square inch, than his real estate was worth.

Fortunately, the Mori Art Museum draw nears equipped with an astute curatorial team, headed according to museum director David Elliott, former director of the Museum of recent Art in Oxford and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and factor director Fumio Nanjo, a well-known international curator based in Japan. They immediately recognized that while a museum located in a shopping mall is not unusual in Japan--department store galleries have ariseed many important exhibitions--potential viewers from Europe and the U might be propose off by this context. Together, they laid without a strategy to place the Mori Art Museum securely onward the global art circuit while addressing the underlying reservations of their various audiences.

"What upon earth has happiness got to do with art?" asks Elliott in his catalogue essay for the inaugural exhibition, "Happiness: A Survival Guide for Art and Life," which existinged a wide range of contemporary art and expanded upon the theme by including numerous examples of art within the ages, from modern to ancient. Elliott might really be asking "How can I make you happy?" of the sum of two units disparate audiences that the Mori Art Museum confidences to win over. On the the same hand, he is addressing the general public, which in Tokyo, as elsewhere, be attentive tos to presume that contemporary art will be either too cynical or too serious to provide a pleasurable experience. onward the other hand, Elliott is targeting members of the international art world, centurys of whom flew in for the event

"Happiness" was a savvy curatorial answer to both audiences. Elliott worked with visitor curator Pier Luigi Tazzi to assemble athwart 200 works, ranging from contributions by the agency of high-profile contemporaries (among them Tracey Emin, Fr Tomaselli, Louise Bourgeois, Bill Viola and, of course, Takashi Murakami) to a 6th hundred northern Chinese Bodhisattva and 13th-century Tibetan mandalas. And while long was made at the opening of the fact that Elliott is the first foreign-born director of a museum in Japan, he clearly had invaluable input from Nanjo and the ease of the curatorial staff in fine-tuning the exhibition to the museum's primary audience--Tokyoites.

The exhibition, described according to Elliott in his catalogue essay as "a kind of journey in consequence of different ideas and times," challengeed both Western and Asian notions of happiness. It was loosely organized into four themes--Arcadia, Nirvana, Desire and Harmony--leading viewers [i]or[/i] part of to the other several parallel histories while suggesting a cheerfully idiosyncratic way of looking at art. Here, pleasure, humor and serenity predominated, rather than serving as lake counterpoints to the darker interpretations of life generally provided by way of 20th-century art movements.

concerning entering the museum atrium, visitors were send greeting toed with "Magnanimous Prayer," a suite of four 32-foot-high digital self portraits on Yasumasa Morimura. The artist is made up in the guise of various Buddhist goddesse updated with contemporary disco-queen attire. The images--simultaneously kitschy and exotic, sexual and sacred--set the stage for the cultural collisions within the galleries.