Toshiko Okanoue burst onto the Tokyo art scene as a young woman in the 1950s when her photo collages came to the attention of Shuzo Takiguchi, a leading figure in Japan's Surrealism movement. Although Okanoue's work features the fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtapositions that characterize Surrealism, the similarities were accidental: at the time, she knew nothing of the international effort to liberate the imagination by tapping the unconscious mind, or indeed that collage was an established medium already used for decades by avant-garde artists in Europe. Okanoue hit upon photo collage as a means of self-expression independently, through her own explorations with scissors, glue and images clipped from imported magazines. more...
Breaking the Mold: Unique Images from the Days of Edo
J.M. Hammond
Mavericks, by definition, don't easily fit into categories, even if mainstream Japanese art history is written around schools and styles. During the Edo period (1603-1867), in particular, a number of artists known for their eccentric personal styles made a name for themselves, but in subsequent eras were overlooked -- until fairly recently. more...
A Cosmos in the Trivial: Hiroko Tsuchida at the Hiratsuka Museum of Art
Alan Gleason
Hiroko Tsuchida describes her work as conceptual art, but that is not how it first struck me. Her choice of materials and her methods of making art from them are so impactful that one need not know what they represent, or what message they are meant to convey, to appreciate them on a visceral level. So I was surprised to find, after viewing Where's a will, there's a way, her current exhibition at the Hiratsuka Museum of Art, that she had written detailed, often very poetic, descriptions of what each work was about. more...
