About

Gendai was founded as a not-for-profit public art gallery in 2000 to promote excellence in contemporary art and design with an emphasis on work made by Canadian and international artists of Japanese ancestry (and beyond that, by the broader East Asian community.) In 2009 the mandate of Gendai was shifted to cultivate dialogue through contemporary art, focusing on experimental collaborations with contemporary artists and organizations for the production and dissemination of artwork from East Asian perspectives. Gendai’s original location was in Toronto’s Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre (JCCC) in the suburb of Don Mills. As of September 2011, Gendai embarked on a new stage in its development by opening a satellite space at Bloor and Lansdowne in Toronto, referred to as the Gendai workstation. With this new space, Gendai plans to divide its activities and programming into two parts. Gendai workstation will focus on more experimental content and foster research into models for public art galleries that, like the Gendai, operate from a basis of ethnic identity. With this extension, Gendai workstation posits itself as an alternative research platform with an audience that consists of Toronto’s downtown art community and academic and other research-oriented institutions from different disciplines that share similar concerns. At the JCCC, the Gendai will focus on developing an art education programme that is specifically designed for the JCCC community with the goal to enhance the knowledge and understanding of contemporary art and the close relationship between art and everyday life.

As a whole, Gendai is committed to a multi-disciplinary program encompassing contemporary art, design, performing arts, literature and architecture. Through the work of exemplary artists, Gendai will present frameworks within which historical and cross-cultural connections are made to enhance the public understanding of its physical, cultural, social and political environment. In line with this new direction, Gendai will expand the curatorial emphasis beyond current Japanese Contemporary art to embrace broader geographic and cultural perspectives. By collaborating with different communities and multidisciplinary organizations, Gendai will experiment with and produce mechanisms to engage audiences in diverse ways. To be an intellectual resource and provide thought leadership, Gendai will seek to research and address issues relevant not only to the racial constituency of East Asians living in Canada, but also aiming to become a globally-conscious gallery that provides a broader context for re-examining existing cultural and political identity positions.