"Video Is Victory of Vagina": The Radical Art of Shigeko Kubota
Christopher Stephens
Viva Video!: The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota, a traveling exhibition on view at the National Museum of Art, Osaka until 23 September, traces Shigeko Kubota's personal and professional journey through a host of photographs, documents, drawings, and videos in the first major retrospective of the groundbreaking female artist's career to be held in Japan in some 30 years. After briefly trying to make a name for herself in Tokyo, the Niigata-born Kubota (1937-2015) decided that her only hope for success as an artist was to relocate to New York. more...
Currents, Full Circles, and the Calling of Ainu Woodcarver Fujito Takek
Susan Rogers Chikuba
The full moon in August 2021 falls on what would have been the 87th birthday of wood sculptor Takeki Fujito (1934-2018). I'll be marking the occasion with a visit to Tokyo Station Gallery, where the artist's first show in the Kanto area is itself a kind of fulfillment, another ripening of a career that spanned seven decades from when he first started carving as a young boy. Though they are largely unknown outside of Hokkaido, Fujito's snapshot-real sculptures of bears, other animals, and his own ancestors brim with an energy it's hard to forget once encountered. more...
Specter over the Capital: Makoto Aida at Mizuma Art Gallery
Alan Gleason
If one word describes Makoto Aida's work, it is "subversive." The artist has made a name for himself with impishly perverse, politically ambiguous, expectation-sabotaging pieces that never fail to confound his critics and delight his fans. So it is no surprise that his solo show at Tokyo's Mizuma Art Gallery aims straight at the concurrent Tokyo Olympics -- but with what sort of message, it's hard to say. Several at once, it seems. The Mizuma show is a compact installation of just a few thematically linked pieces. The ambiguity begins with its title, given in English as "I can't stop the patriotism". more...
