A Virtual Museum Visit of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art

IAFOR Chairman, Joseph Haldane in Conversation with Yutaka Mino

This is a virtual tour of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, a contemporary and modern art museum designed by world-renowned Japanese architect, Tadao Ando. The museum was built after the 1995 Kobe-Awaji earthquake, and has since become a symbol of the city’s resilience and recovery. The tour will feature an interview with Museum Director and Chinese pottery specialist, Dr Yutaka Mino, who will discuss the museum’s history and few select pieces in reference to the conference theme, “Asia at the Crossroads”. Dr Mino will weave the museum’s history with his philosophy on the role of art and museums in society, creating a virtual space where a museum becomes more than a showcase of physically viewing artworks. In this tour, the cultural, the artistic and the personal will coalesce for a rewarding museum experience.

The interior of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art is remarkably minimalistic. The entrance hall heightens the senses and invites meditation via its calm atmosphere. The austerity in the use of colours and materials (concrete, stone, steel and glass) stresses the majesty of space and light, which Ando manipulates to provide users with numerous sensations of scale and tone. Each area of the architecture has its own expression rich in light and shade. The expansive sea in front of the museum and the huge maze-like architecture blend together to produce a variety of changes in light.

The Ando-designed Green Apple was inspired by “Youth,” a verse by the American poet Samuel Ullman. The work represents the architect's will to challenge themselves and grow, while keeping a youthful state of mind.

The museum, designed not only for the display of artworks but for the integration of various types of art, achieves a complex and diverse spatial experience with a plain and simple structure.

The museum boasts a collection of around 9,000 pieces ranging from traditional Japanese works to foreign sculpture to modern and contemporary paintings.

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Yutaka Mino

Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan

Dr Yutaka Mino was born in Kanazawa, Japan, in 1941, and received his PhD in Art History from Harvard University, in 1977. He was appointed associate curator in charge of the Asiatic Department at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in 1976, the curator of the Oriental Art Department at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, in 1977, and the curator of the Asian Department at the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1985. After Returning to Japan, he was named as the director of the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art, in 1996, and as the founding director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, in 2004. In 2007, he became the Vice Chairman, Sotheby’s North America, the Chief Executive Director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and the Honorary Director, Osaka Municipal Museum of Art. In April 2010, he was appointed as the director of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, and in 2012, the director of Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2013, he was named Honorary Director, Abeno Harukas Museum of Art. Yutaka Mino has organized many exhibitions, and also published individual books and catalogs such as Freedom of Clay and Brush Through Seven Centuries in Northern China: Tz’u-chou Type Wares, 960-1600 A.D. in 1980, and Hakuji (White Ware), vol.5 in the Chugoku Togi (Chinese Ceramics) series in 1998.

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Joseph Haldane

IAFOR, Japan

Joseph Haldane is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of IAFOR. He is responsible for devising strategy, setting policies, forging institutional partnerships, implementing projects, and overseeing the organisation’s international business and academic operations, including research, publications and events.

Dr Haldane is a founding Co-Director of the IAFOR Research Centre, an interdisciplinary think tank situated at The Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP), Osaka University, where since 2015 he has also been a Guest Professor, teaching on the postgraduate Global Governance Course.

A Member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network for Global Governance, Professor Haldane’s research and teaching is on history, politics, international affairs and international education, as well as governance and decision making.

In 2020 Dr Haldane was appointed Honorary Professor of UCL (University College London), through the Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management. He also holds Visiting Professorships in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade, and at the School of Business at Doshisha University in Kyoto, where he teaches Ethics and Governance on the MBA programme. He is a Member of the International Advisory Council of the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Dr Haldane holds a PhD from the University of London in 19th-century French Studies, and has had full-time faculty positions at the University of Paris XII Paris-Est Créteil, Sciences Po Paris, and Nagoya University of Commerce and Business, as well as visiting positions at the French Press Institute in the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas, The School of Journalism at Sciences Po Paris, and the School of Journalism at Moscow State University (Russia).

Dr Haldane has given invited lectures and presentations to universities and conferences around the world, including at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, and advised universities, NGOs and governments on issues relating to international education policy, public-private partnerships, and multi-stakeholder forums. He was the project lead on the 2019 Kansai Resilience Forum, held by the Japanese Government through the Prime Minister’s Office and the Cabinet Office in collaboration with IAFOR.

From 2012-2014, Dr Haldane served as Treasurer of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (Chubu), and since 2015 he has been a Trustee of the HOPE International Development Agency (Japan). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2012, and the Royal Society of Arts in 2015.

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