Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

What contributions has contemporary art made to address the world’s environmental crises? This was the question posed by co-curators Martin Germann and Tsubaki Reiko in the four-chapter group exhibition of 34 artists at the Mori Art Museum, “Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living.” The private museum atop a Tokyo skyscraper was, paradoxically, an appropriate venue for this subject, as the postwar industrialization of the global economy that has produced such massive urban structures and surrounding megacities like Tokyo—and, in the process, so much of our catastrophically fatal pollution and the planet’s sixth great extinction—originates largely from the post-World War II economies of the United States, Japan, and Western Europe. Within 25 years of the war’s end, as these intertwined economies boomed, they also produced contemporaneous environmental, antiwar, and countercultural movements, in which avant-garde art served as site of vocal resistance.