Emily in Japan (ATOM Study Guide)

Emily in Japan takes us behind the scenes of the blockbuster exhibition of paintings by the Indigenous artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye which toured Japan in 2008, attracting record crowds. As we follow the preparations for this exhibition we learn about Emily and how she expressed her connection to Country through her paintings. At the same time we follow Indigenous art curator Margo Neale as she negotiates complex sets of relationships to bring the Japanese project to fruition.

Synopsis

Emily Kame Kngwarreye was an Aboriginal woman from a community named Utopia in central Australia who began to paint on canvas when she was about 78 years old. In the eight years before her death in 1996, she produced a staggering output of some 3,000 canvasses, some of which are now valued more highly (in monetary terms) than the work of any other female Indigenous Australian artist.

The exhibition of Emily Kame Kngwarreye's paintings which toured to Osaka and Tokyo, Japan, in 2008 is arguably the biggest, most comprehensive single artist exhibition to travel internationally from Australia.

It may also be the last comprehensive exhibition of Emily's work anywhere in the world, due to the large scale of key works, their increasing fragility, and the high cost of moving them.

Emily in Japan is the story of the making of the exhibition: the work behind the scenes that put it all together and took it on the road. It's a story of cross-cultural transactions – from the red desert of central Australia where Emily lived, to Canberra where the exhibition was curated, and to Japan.

The driving force behind the exhibition is Margo Neale, an Indigenous art curator and historian, who mounted an earlier, smaller retrospective exhibition of Emily's work for the Queensland Art Gallery in 1998 and which toured nationally.

This earlier exhibition attracted the attention of a visiting Japanese scholar and art critic, Professor Akira Tatehata, and it became his personal mission to bring such an exhibition to Japan. The working relationship and friendship between Margo Neale and Professor Tatehata who share a deep passion for Emily's work, is at the core of the film. Margo is an Indigenous woman from a background of poverty and hardship and Tatehata a 'Bohemian' aesthete from a privileged arts background.

The film follows Margo as she visits Emily's community in the Utopia region, some 270kms north-east of Alice Springs, to consult with Emily's family members about the exhibition. It also follows her in equally complex negotiations with the Japanese sponsors of the exhibition (including the media giant Yomiuri) and with the two galleries which will host the exhibition in Japan – the space-age National Museum of Art in Osaka, and the magnificent National Arts Centre in Tokyo, one of the world's major galleries.

Margo, with her small team of consultants and staff from the National Museum of Australia, selects the 200 works for the exhibition from the 3,000 or more that Emily painted, and gathers them from some 60 collections around the world, from a myriad of private collections, corporations and galleries. Given the value of the paintings, crating and freighting them is a complex process of checking and security – a process to which the film crew is given privileged access.

The exhibition in Osaka and Tokyo turns into a major media event and attracts huge crowds, more so than the sponsors and organisers hoped for. It is visited by then prime minister Kevin Rudd and federal ministers from Australia, as well as the Empress of Japan and other Japanese royalty and celebrities. It breaks the record held for the previous ten years by Andy Warhol as the most popular contemporary art exhibition to show in Japan.

The success of the exhibition in Japan signifies the achievement of one of Emily's dreams that Margo undertook to realise: that her work, her stories, be seen