Nonprofit Organization

NPOs are the teams that plan and run art projects

Akio Hayashi

Developing mechanisms that will create new value for society

The Relight Project, of which I’m director is opening an adult education university called the Relight Committee this year. Its mission is to cultivate “social sculptors.” Our aim is to instill in each and every participant the ability to think for themselves by learning about art’s relationship to society and role therein, so that they go on to create new value in their respective fields (workplaces and homes). Artistic techniques and approaches are positioned as a tool for this, so the participants don’t need any knowledge of art.

We’re also organizing Relight Days, a once-a-year art event in which we light up Counter Void, a public artwork that was turned off after the Great East Japan Earthquake struck. This initiative poses questions to society through the prism of art, using it as a device to prevent memories of the disaster fading.

About two years have passed since I began my activities in Tokyo. I feel that organizing art projects in a big city holds tremendous potential, but at the same time, I’ve come to see the difficulties involved as well. It’s harder to grasp the impact in terms of feedback than in a provincial city. We need to forge good partnerships with government and private sector companies, so that we can devise better approaches from the team-building stage.

Tokyo attracts an almost unlimited pool of talent and has many places for showcasing their output. That’s exactly why I think that creating opportunities for people to increase “cultural capital” in a variety of locations will make the whole of society happier. I plan to continue developing mechanisms for this.