Meet our Guest with Yayoi Shionoiri

Photo credit: Munemasa Takahashi @munemas

For this story of Meet our Guest, we interviewed Yayoi Shionoiri, an art lawyer and the Executive Director of the Chris Burden Estate and the Nancy Rubins Studio, where she is responsible for stewarding Burden's art historical legacy and promoting Rubins's artistic practice.

Yayoi also serves as U.S. Alliance Partner to City Lights Law, a Japanese law firm that represents creators, innovators, and artists, and as an Outside Board Director to Startbahn, an art technology company that is seeking to bring greater reliability to transactions in the art ecosystem. She was recently featured in Art She Says' Power List: Top Female Attorney's in the Art World and The Art Gorgeous' 10 Trailblazing Women Working in Art Law. Find her on Instagram here and at her website here. 

Together with Guest Work Agency's Founder and Director, Alana Kushnir, Yayoi is excited to be collaborating on a periodic column for The Art Gorgeous called The Law Gorgeous: Your Art World Questions Answered by Us. Yayoi and Alana will also be featured in The Art Gorgeous' upcoming free Zoom event on current legal issues in the art world, which you can register for here.

You have had multiple roles in the art world ecosystem – from supporting artists to working in a museum to leading tech start-ups. How do these roles inform each other?

With a lot of hard work, as well as a pinch of luck, I have had the honour of working in different areas of the art world, including working directly for artists, as well as for institutional structures.  From a legal perspective, my roles have allowed me to build experience in various subject matter areas – within U.S. museums and foundations, an understanding of non-profit law is critical to ensure mission-driven operations, and with private individuals or entities, a nuanced and constantly changing understanding of the balance between art world standards and applicable legal frameworks is necessary.

"Art law" as we know it is not a singular body of law.  One needs to have fluency in a wide range of legal fields, bringing these areas of law together based upon who or what entity you are serving.  It continues to be a rewarding intellectual challenge to serve as a generalist in the field of art law, ensuring that my application of the current legal frameworks in the art world ecosystem supports the community, and perhaps even helps to eventually create new or revised standards that advance artistic practice.

When did you first know you wanted to work in the art industry, and why law?

Ever since I was young, I wanted to be in the art world.  I truly love the study of visual material culture, and my art historical training focused on Japanese art across time periods – whether a close reading of a 15th-century Japanese ink painting, thinking about Genpei Akasegawa's use of the legal framework as part of his artistic practice, or understanding contemporary Kawaii culture.

However, I did not know how to build a career in the art world.  Without any personal connections, I sought to gain a professional skill set that might make me more marketable in the art world – deciding to go to law school.  Yet, in retrospect, this path was uncertain, as there is no clear trajectory to becoming and staying an art lawyer (given the limited number of available jobs), and there have been many times where I thought I would have to give up on my dreams.

Looking through your work over the years, you've supported some incredible art organisations, including Artsy, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and artist studios — what's your biggest takeaway from each company?

That is very kind of you to say, thank you!  I think it is so important as a lawyer to understand and support your end client – what their goals are, what their risk tolerance is, and where their blind spots might be.  Those of us who are professionals in the art world have the benefit of getting to work with and serve incredibly creative individuals and organisations.  While the law exists to regulate behaviours, and the art world should not be beyond the law's reach, artists are the foundation of this community, so, art lawyers need to ensure that their creativity can flourish and be sustained.

I've read a couple of your art reviews, and it's so interesting to hear the perspective from a lawyer. When did you begin writing, and what have been some are your favourite shows to review?

Going through my old documents during this extended quarantine in the U.S., I found my personal statement for the law school applications that I wrote close to 20 years ago.  Rather than merely focusing on my desire to attend law school, I wrote about Tom Friedman's conceptual artworks and attempted to explain how copyright may or may not protect his artworks.

I enjoy writing about art, but I also find that it is truly difficult to maintain the dedicated time needed to keep up the thoughtful dissemination of high-quality content.  When there is no time for a detailed review, both my blog and Instagram feed serve as my record of the exhibitions, museum tours and studio visits that have touched me in some way.  Even now, my pilgrimage to Reborn Art Festival – an art festival that brings international artists to Ishinomaki, an area in Japan that was heavily affected by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami – brings me back to the intense emotions I felt seeing site-specific artwork in an area that was building back following a natural disaster of extreme proportions.

You and Alana are starting a periodic column about legal issues in the art world for The Art Gorgeous, can you explain some of the topics you'll be discussing and how important it is for individuals working in the art industry to have some knowledge of the law?

I am so delighted to collaborate with Alana across the kilometres and time zones.  The Art Gorgeous canvassed for questions and topics of interest to its community, and we already received some incredibly interesting questions and comments.  While we, unfortunately, will not be able to provide tailored advice, we hope to offer tips and guideposts for community members to think about as they work through their own situations.  Some of the topics will be legal (such as copyright), and others will be quasi-legal (such as how to negotiate a gallery-artist agreement).  We hope to provide an easy-to-understand starting point for more discussions about these types of legal issues that are central to artistic practice!

As you know, we run an art club, Guest Club, to introduce emerging collectors into the art world and its various guises. How can art law help the average art collector?

Congratulations to Guest Work Agency for continuing to lean into ingenuity, and taking Guest Club on-line during this tumultuous time!  I have noticed that many member associations and community groups that usually have a physical space or IRL events have taken to expanding their reach and community in the digital sphere.

For an art collector (and there are no "average" art collectors, as each person is unique in their collecting practice), I think it is important to gain a hybrid understanding of business practices and legal concepts in the way that artists market and sell their artworks.  For example, most artists will want to retain their copyright and other intellectual property underlying their artwork.  This means that while an art collector may have possession of the physical artwork, they do not, unless the artist agrees, have the legal right to use a photo of it in a for-sale catalogue – even if it is about their own collection.  In addition, I have seen more purchase contracts include restrictions on the resale of an artwork in order to maintain an orderly market for the artist.  Hopefully, Alana and I will get to discuss these and other issues during our upcoming Zoom event!

Register for The Art Gorgeous zoom event on Legal and Quasi-Legal Trends in the Art world, Thursday 11 February at 4pm EST/Friday 12 February at 8am AEDT here.