The sculptor Michio Fukuoka, born in Sakai, Osaka Prefecture in 1936, spent the better part of his 60-year career struggling to make art freely while freeing himself from the need to make anything at all. This relentless existential dilemma led Fukuoka down many paths and through periods of activity and inactivity, culminating in his 2005 decision to become "a sculptor who no longer sculpts." Fortunately, the results of his efforts are still very much extant and can currently be seen in a wide-ranging retrospective at the National Museum of Art, Osaka. more...
Revelations: Wood Sculptor Takeki Fujito at the Sapporo Art Museum
Susan Rogers Chikuba
When Ainu woodcarver Takeki Fujito rests a hand on one of his finished works, he appears like a grandfather tousling the hair of a beloved child. Like many craftsmen he's not quick to speak. But as the ready spark in his eyes suggests, once the 83-year-old opens up his stories flow warmly, as full of life as the mythic yukar legends he heard at the knee of his grandmother and other elders from his childhood who knew and upheld the old ways. more...
Tekiya: Hitomi Watanabe's Study of a Subculture
Alan Gleason
Photographer Hitomi Watanabe employs a winning combination of guts and guilelessness to earn the trust of subjects ordinarily averse to being captured on film. Over the course of her half-century career she has gained access to student-occupied campus buildings, gatherings of festival peddlers with underworld connections, and, in a cross-species tour de force, wild monkeys. Tekiya, her current show at Zen Foto Gallery, revisits a series of candid shots of Japan's traditional peddlers, taken when she was not yet out of photography school. more...
