Curated by Éric Mézil, Director, Collection Lambert en Avignon This summer of 2004 will see the Collection Lambert's sights set on Asia with an exhibition entirely dedicated to Japanese artists. Under the sign of the rising sun, the museum will be transformed into spaces of creativity and experimentation. After the exhibition Akimahen! which was produced for the festivities of Lille 2004, Cultural Capital of Europe, the city of Avignon (European cultural capital in 2000) will propose this last stage of a Japanese trilogy which began in 1998. After three years of travels between Japan and France, Éric Mézil, resident curator at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto in 1995, proposed the exhibition project Donai Yanen! Et Maintenant! - Contemporary art iin Japan, at the ENSBA (École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris) in Paris. This exhibition was the occasion to discover a young, yet unknown generation of Japanese artists, most of whom have since become represented by galleries and in museums in Japan. The second part of the exhibition trilogy, Akimahen! a mix of contemporary Japanese contemporary art was presented at the Maison Folie of Wazemmes in Lille in May and June of this year. Ejjjjanaiika! Yes Future! presented here in Avignon, is the final stage of the Lille exhibition. "Eijanaika!" is the cry for unification and optimism lanced by the Japanese at the beginning of the Meiji period in 1867, on the occasion of the opening of Japan to the western world. After having borrowed his previous exhibition titles from the Kansai dialect, Éric Mézil has chosen this founding, enthusiastic new title to signify that Japanese contemporary art cannot simply be reduced to the work of reigning Tokyo artists. Above all, this title reflects a previously unknown reality - the reality of a young generation who dreams of an end to a passive attitude, an end to the hypocrisy and amnesia in the face of history and a succession of governments and parents educated according to the principle that the collective always comes before the individual. Eijanaika! Yes Future! places the spotlight on extremely contemporary and often lesser-known artistic practises, very much in keeping with the reality of Japan today.