Beauty and Profundity: The Transformational Ink Paintings of Toko Shinoda
Jennifer Pastore
Maybe it was all a 107-year dream. That was the lifespan of Toko Shinoda (1913-2021), a widely celebrated Japanese artist who worked primarily in calligraphy and abstract ink painting. Her retrospective currently at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery spotlights the evolution of her expression over nearly seven decades with some 115 works and several other displays. more...
Back to the Future: A Museum Morphs from Meiji to Modernist
Colin Smith
To see the universe in a tea bowl: this image, familiar from the intertwined worlds of Zen Buddhism and the tea ceremony, becomes remarkably literal when you gaze into Tea Bowl, Yohen Tenmoku, from Southern Song dynasty (12th-13th century) China, one of the stars of the Fujita Museum's collection. Tenmoku is the Japanese reading of Tianmu, a mountain in China where this style of tea bowl originated. more...
Remembrance of Wars Past: Hikaru Fujii and Chikako Yamashiro at MOT
Alan Gleason
Hikaru Fujii and Chikako Yamashiro, co-recipients of the Tokyo Contemporary Art Award for 2020-2022, currently share a winners' exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT) with installations that address the lingering impact on Japan today of World War II and the subsequent U.S. occupation of the country. The thematic unity of the show is a coincidence, according to the organizers, Tokyo Arts and Space. more...
