出会いとその魅力

Ever since she was little, Hasegawa had a special skill of drawing things from memory. She read many books related to art, and she hoped to choose a career that had something to do with paintings. Influenced by her parents’ idea of education, however, she went on to study in the Law Faculty at Kyoto University. At first, she intended to work in the legal world while continuing to paint as a hobby, but she realised it was too difficult to keep up both. After graduating from university, she enrolled in Tokyo University of the Arts to start afresh. There, she discovered contemporary art, and she set her heart on becoming a curator to work with artists who live in the present.

In the beginning, she jumped right into curatorial work without understanding it completely, and she picked up various skills and pieces of knowledge on the job.

“A curator’s work is extremely wide-ranging,” Hasegawa explains. “Not only do we produce exhibitions, we also develop concepts for museums, publish books, and so on. We arrange all kinds of ways to display or output art-related materials. I believe our job is to form connections—to create spaces in which people can encounter art. For example, if you exhibited the works of Van Gogh and Katsushika Hokusai together, that meeting of two artists would generate a different meaning. The curator’s function is to make connections and spark off new meanings. In addition, we’re also responsible for communicating with the audience while having a shared sense of purpose or awareness of the issues at stake with the artists.”

The curator is a researcher, a traveller, a facilitator of new discoveries, and a producer, working with art as a foundational starting point. Hasegawa sees the curator’s role as consisting of diverse, interwoven layers.