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...

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...