Tim Blum Reflects on 30 Years in the Art Business

BLUM's anniversary exhibition, a survey of Japanese art going back to the 1960s, opens in Los Angeles on 13 January and in Tokyo on 20 January.

Tim Blum and Jeff Poe co-founded influential gallery Blum & Poe in Los Angeles back in 1994. The gallery was renamed BLUM when Poe stepped back last year, but its 30th anniversary exhibition signals not a new direction but a return to its roots.

Thirty Years: Written with a Splash of Blood is co-curated by Blum and Japanese art historian Mika Yoshitake. Featured works include Yukinori Yanagi's Study for American Art — Three Flags (2019), a deconstruction of Jasper Johns' Three Flags (1958) made with the assistance of ants burrowing through painted sand.

Yoshitake said the work 'not only decenters the Euro-American narrative of Pop Art, but also destabilises the outmoded role of political and cultural nationalism on the international stage.'

Yoshitomo Nara's Ennui Head (2020), a 1.3-metre-tall urethane on bronze sculpture is another highlight.

'The eyes of the sculpture are gouged with the artist's fingers while its whip cream softness offers an emotional ambiguity that is vulnerable and stone cold,' Yoshitake offered.

The exhibition, which will travel to New York in the fall, features work by key artists from important art movements including Gutai, Mono-ha, and Superflat.

We asked Blum how his gallery has evolved over the years, and why he wanted to focus on Japanese art for the 30th anniversary.

What were you setting out to do when you opened the gallery in 1994, and how has its direction changed over the decades?

In 1994, I moved back to Los Angeles after spending five years in Japan. I set out to open a gallery that represented a global group of artists, initially with a focus on artists based in Japan and Los Angeles. Since that time, it's incalculable how much has changed—for Los Angeles, for Japan, for contemporary art, for artists—in terms of globalism, awareness, information, accessibility, and more. The gallery has changed along with the world, and is constantly adapting. This new chapter as BLUM, too, is an adaptation and moment of growth.

BLUM's anniversary exhibition is a survey of Japanese art from the 1960s to today. How does the title, taken from Yukio Mishima's 1969 novel Runaway Horses, relate to the show?

I was pondering my relationship to Japan, which is far from exclusive to art—it's also literature, music, film, architecture, and design. Mishima has always been an important figure for me—early on in my life, his writing inspired an interest in Japan, an interest that resulted in my move there. The quote feels apropos to this transformative juncture for me and the gallery: 'Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.' The reference to Mishima is critical, and further interpretation of the line I will leave open.

BLUM shows many artists who are not Japanese. Why did you want to put on such a big, ambitious show exclusively about Japanese artists for the 30th exhibition, and why now?

My relationship to Japan has always been an integral part of my life and a vital aspect of the gallery from the beginning. The impact Japan had on me at such an early age was tremendous, living and working there—it influenced the way I see the world. It has now been forty years since my first visit there, thirty years since we opened the gallery, and ten years since we opened the Tokyo location. This is a moment to acknowledge this particular history—it's not the whole history—but it's very important to me, and a story I wanted to tell at this time. —[O]