Back Issue - 3 August 2020 -
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image image Galleries Without Artworks and Then Some at Setagaya Art Museum
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Susan Rogers Chikuba
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A community haven now more than ever, Setagaya Art Museum, or Setabi as it is affectionately known, sits near the central greensward of Kinuta Park that's bordered by a cycling course and popular with picnicking families. The coronavirus-inspired Galleries Without Artworks event now underway in its first-floor galleries through 27 August -- free of charge, offbeat, ad-hoc, ultimately pragmatic, and surprisingly successful -- means children can roam inside the space with few of the usual restraints, just as they do on the park's vast 96-acre grounds. For those who do want to see some art, 122 new additions to the permanent collection are on show upstairs until 16 August, an eclectic mix of works and media from the early 1900s to the present. more...

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image image Float Like a Perhonen: The Fashion World of Akira Minagawa
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Christopher Stephens
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Launched in 1995 by the designer Akira Minagawa, minä perhonen initially concentrated on clothing and textiles, but after branching out into furniture and tableware, it has come to stand for an entire lifestyle. Commemorating the fashion brand's 25th anniversary, the TSUZUKU exhibition, first presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and currently on view at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art in Kobe, is divided into eight sections with titles like "Kaze [Wind]: Life and Design" and "Ne [Roots]: Drawings," illustrating various aspects of Minagawa's wide-ranging activities. more...

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image image Photo-Realism: Katsumi Sunamori at the Maruki Gallery
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Alan Gleason
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Katsumi Sunamori (1951-2009) is one of the unsung heroes of contemporary Japanese documentary photography. During his lifetime he was known, if at all, as a hired gun for the weekly scandal sheets. Though he published one prizewinning photo collection, his work was never exhibited in a museum. Now, a decade after his death at 57 from cancer, the show currently up at the Maruki Gallery in Saitama Prefecture offers some 100 of his riveting images of Osaka's skid row, post-bomb tenements in Hiroshima, and Okinawan bar districts, as well as the aftermath of a natural disaster, the eruption of Mount Unzen in Kyushu. more...

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