The Heisei era (1989-2019) ended just two years ago, but of course the past year-plus has turned 2019 into dimly remembered history, and it doesn't feel like too soon to look back at the era that was. This is what Bubbles/Debris: Art of the Heisei Period, an exhibition at the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art, endeavors to do. Heisei, like the current Reiwa and the earlier Meiji, Taisho, and Showa, refers to the reign of an emperor, in this case Emperor Akihito. Marking history by monarchs' reigns isn't unique to Japan (Victorian? Edwardian?) and no more artificial than talking about "the eighties" or any other decade -- but why Heisei now? more...

Architects express themselves through visual tools. Plan drawings organize spatial layouts, computer graphics render perspective views, and physical models show built form. Writers, on the other hand, conjure images and feelings by crafting words. The Collectors' Museum of Contemporary Art "WHAT" (which stands for Warehouse of Art Terrada) explores the nature of both forms of expression in its current exhibition, The Words for Architecture, by crossing the paths of writers and architects through the juxtaposition of houses and literary works. A special exhibition by the Archi-Depot Project, it introduces 15 house projects, each accompanied by a literary work devoted to expressing the essence of the dwelling itself. The creative act of building is represented by study models, sketches, blueprints, and videos, and this is reinterpreted for us though the expressive vision of writers. more...