Cultivating Creators and Collectors
Set to speak at the Club this month, Tetsuji Shibayama explains how an office lobby painting led to three decades of fostering Japanese artists and collectors.
Tetsuji Shibayama remembers the painting clearly.
“It was a very big piece with white on top, green below and a sharp diagonal line,” he says. “It was behind the reception desk, so I saw it every day when I got off the elevator. At the time, I knew nothing about art, but it was really unique, and I was drawn to it.”
Shibayama, who had recently earned his MBA from Harvard Business School, was working at the wealth management firm Rockefeller & Company in New York City at the time. The office walls were lined with works by new artists, but Shibayama admits he barely gave them a passing thought during his first two years with the company in the early 1990s.
But it was the piece by Japanese artist Shoichi Ida in the reception area that opened his eyes.
“[Contemporary art] is unbranded, new art,” he explains. “Unlike with a Picasso, Hokusai or Rembrandt, I looked at the work itself rather than the name of the artist. That’s one of the great things about it.”
Shibayama began to educate himself about art movements, styles and the artists behind the works. A position as managing director with Sotheby’s Japan auction house in 1995 was a chance to both return home and immerse himself further in the world of art.
Shibayama’s 10 years with Sotheby’s saw him become a skilled bilingual auctioneer. Yet, as he brought down his gavel on artworks from around the globe, he was struck by the paucity of pieces by young Japanese artists. In a country that graduates upwards of 20,000 artists a year and whose citizens visit art exhibitions in droves, Shibayama wondered how local artists found buyers for their creations.
“In New York, there are tons of galleries that deal in no-name artists who gradually become successful,” says Shibayama, 64. “In Japan, that bottom of the pyramid didn’t exist. There was no way to see or find their work. I thought if this existed in New York, why couldn’t it be possible in Tokyo?”
In 2006, Shibayama founded Art Gaia, a consultancy with a mission to establish a vibrant art market in Japan. He visits art schools from Okinawa to Hokkaido to teach students how to navigate a marketplace worth more than ¥230 billion a year. He also cultivates collectors, from individuals and corporations to nonprofits and local governments, helping them to see art as worthy of investment.
“By encouraging collectors, it’s a way to give new artists the financial support they need to survive and develop,” says Shibayama, who likens artists’ challenges to those of entrepreneurs. “Oftentimes, they are not understood, and no one pays attention to them because they are quite new. The art student supported today might be a [Yayoi] Kusama in 20 years. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
Words: Joan Bailey
TAC Talk: Tetsuji Shibayama
June 9 | 6:30–8pm
