About

History

P3 art and environment began its history when urban and regional planner Takashi Serizawa was invited to participate in a project to build a new temple for Tochoji Zen temple in Yotsuya, Tokyo, commemorating its four hundred year anniversary. Serizawa designed an auditorium in the basement of the temple, and suggested a plan to explore cultural activities, mainly in the area of contemporary art. Responding to that suggestion, Tochoji established an institute, P3 Alternative Museum Tokyo, as a cultural part of the religious organization, to plan and execute exhibitions. We began to have exhibitions in P3, in the auditorium of Tochoji Temple, in April 1989.

In February 1991, after having several exhibitions, we had Cai Guo Quiang's Primeval Fireball: Project for Projects, and changed the name of our group from P3 Alternative Museum to P3 art and environment. "Alternative museum" did not really describe all of our activities, involving art, environment, and related issues. The conventional sense of "museum" did not correspond to our real activities.

Since then, P3 art and environment has conducted or hosted forty contemporary art exhibitions and seventy lectures and workshops. However, as our activities became more diversified, and the use of the auditorium became limited due to Tochoji Temple's expansion of their religious activities, we changed our organizational form. In December 1995, P3 art and environment became an independent entity from Tochoji Temple. As a part of P3 art and environment, we established P3 Management Ltd. and became a corporate body. Our last exhibition at Tochoji auditorium was Cine Nomad's Three Windows. From that exhibition to the present, we have been exploring various forms of projects in different sites.

Activity

The activity theme of P3 art and environment can be described in two words: "mind and landscape." This indicates a dynamic interactive formative process between people and the environment, as well as people and society. The spirit of time, renewed by continuous interaction between people and the surrounding environment, is revealed by excellent artists. P3 believes in the possibilities to be found in art and presents what is created through collaboration with artists.

Not limiting itself to related genres, P3 presents different works in various fields in different appropriate forms such as: exhibition, publication, digital contents, research and study, and regional planning.

Takashi Serizawa

Born 1951 in Tokyo. After graduating from the Mathematics Course at the Faculty of Science, Kobe University, and the Architecture and Building Science Course at the College of Engineering, Yokohama National University, he joined Regional Planning Team Assoc., Inc., where he was engaged in studies and projects related to ecological planning. His involvement in a project to build a new temple for the Tochoji zen temple in Yotsuya, Tokyo, inspired him to establish P3 Alternative Museum Tokyo (today “P3 art and environment”) in 1989. Initially based in a lecture hall in the basement of the Tochoji temple, since 1999 P3 has been involved with a variety of art and environment-related projects on an international scale, without having a fixed site itself. Serizawa served as general director for the Tokachi International Contemporary Art Exhibition “Demeter” (2002), secretary general for the Asahi Art Festival (2002-2016), curator for the Yokohama Triennale 2005, general director for the Beppu Contemporary Art Festival “Mixed Bathing World” (2009, 2012, 2015), director for the Saitama Triennale 2016, and supervisor for Saitama Triennale 2020. Between 2012 and 2021, he headed the Design and Creative Center Kobe (KIITO).

Publications include This Nomadic Planet (Iwanami Shoten), A View from the Moon (Mainichi Newspapers), Beppu (ABI+P3), and Spaceship of Words as Media (ABI+P3、co-authored with Chihiro Minato). Among others, Serizawa translated Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Chikumashobo), Erich Jantsch’s The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution (Kousakusha, co-translated with Mie Uchida), and Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (Hayakawa Publishing) into Japanese.