Back Issue - 1 February 2019 -
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image image The Poetic Visions of Leiko Ikemura, at the National Art Center, Tokyo
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Susan Rogers Chikuba
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Sculptor, painter, illustrator, photographer, poet . . . Leiko Ikemura embraces it all. "Be the vessel. Don't refuse the material," she says. Her exhibition Our Planet - Earth & Stars at the National Art Center, Tokyo reveals an artist digging deep into the bony earth of things to spelunk the primal pulses of her own, and our collective, heart. more...

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image image The Wanderer: Taiji Matsue's Roaming Camera
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Christopher Stephens
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Art is a way of seeing, and the best art changes our way of looking at the world. The photographs of Taiji Matsue (born in Tokyo in 1963) are a case in point. For over 35 years, Matsue has crisscrossed the globe, capturing natural and urban landscapes in works that bear his unique stamp. Taiji Matsue: gazetteer (running through 24 February at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art) serves as the artist's first retrospective, assembling all of his major series, including an early but only recently released work dealing with the abandoned coal-mining island of Hashima (commonly known as Gunkanjima or "Battleship Island"). more...

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image image A Tree as Lovely as a Poem: Masao Yamamoto's Bonsai Photographs
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Alan Gleason
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Born in Aichi Prefecture in 1957, Masao Yamamoto began his artistic career as an oil painter, but for over 30 years now he has made his name as a photographer admired for his lyrical and meditative monochrome work. He likes to discuss his practice in terms of haiku and Zen, and there is certainly something satisfyingly shibui about the subdued flavor of his studies in black and white. But there is also a sizable dollop of humor and optical trickery. BONSAI, a new series currently showing at Tokyo's Mizuma Art Gallery, achieves a sublime balance between these dual impulses toward austerity and play. more...

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Recent Articles
FOCUS
The Poesy of Leiko Ikemura, at National Art Center, Tokyo
Susan Rogers Chikuba
1 February 2019
FOCUS
The Wanderer: Taiji Matsue's Roaming Camera
Christopher Stephens
1 February 2019
HERE/THERE
A Tree as Lovely as a Poem: Masao Yamamoto's Bonsai Photographs
Alan Gleason
1 February 2019
PICKS
A Thousand Wonders of Japanese Technology: A brief 150 year history of Japanese modernization
1 February 2019
FOCUS
Art Takes a Bath: Dogo Onsenart 2018
Colin Smith
17 December 2018
FOCUS
The Architecture of Tsuyoshi Tane: Searching for the Future by Digging into the Past
James Lambiasi
17 December 2018
HERE/THERE
Rumble in the Rubble: Chim↑Pom at Anomaly
Alan Gleason
17 December 2018
PICKS
The Breathing of Maps
17 December 2018
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