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Picks is a monthly sampling of Japan's art scene, offering short reviews of 20 exhibitions at museums and galleries throughout Japan over the past two or three months, with an emphasis on contemporary art by young artists. |
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1 September 2007 |
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| Nobuyoshi Araki: 67 Shooting Back |
| 25 May - 23 June 2007 |
Taka Ishii Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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| Celebrating Araki's 67th birthday, this solo retrospective features 100 of the notorious photographer's works, both old and new, including several never displayed before. When Araki exclaims that "all women are beautiful," he means it; his photos of older women are particularly evocative. In all his work one senses Araki's intense emotional engagement with his subjects. |
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| Takao Inoue: Noah's Ark |
| 26 June - 8 July 2007 |
Gallery Maronie
(Kyoto) |
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| Inoue is known for his installations built with traditional Japanese paper (washi). The gallery is strewn with what appear to be discarded construction materials, old wooden tools and graveposts, but on closer examination these prove to be made entirely of shredded advertising flyers. "Noah's Ark" in this instance refers to the gallery, floating atop a deluge of mass consumption. |
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| Sho Kazakura, Shintaro Tanaka, Tatsumi Yoshino: Drawings |
| 4 - 23 June 2007 |
Gallery-58
(Tokyo) |
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| All born between 1936 and 1940, these artists upended the Japanese art world when they founded the Neo-Dadaism Organizers group in 1960. This show brings together drawings, in very different styles, by three elder statesmen of Japan's avant-garde. |
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| Nobuko Tsuchiya: once upon a time, in a distant place, there was a parking fish project |
| 18 May - 30 June 2007 |
SCAI THE BATHHOUSE
(Tokyo) |
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| Born in Yokohama but a London resident since 2000, Tsuchiya makes her works out of seemingly haphazard assemblages of common objects and scrap materials. Like abandoned robots or experiments still underway, her creations prompt surprising sensations of familiarity and nostalgia, as if arousing collectively shared human memories. |
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| The Photograph: What You See and What You Don't |
| 29 May - 17 June 2007 |
The University Art Museum - Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music
(Tokyo) |
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| Held in the Chinretsukan Gallery of the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and featuring works by 19 Japanese photographers, past and present, this exhibition purports to offer a space that will elicit the power of photographic art to express what cannot be said in words, and to show what cannot be seen as well as what can. |
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| Flemish Paintings of the 17th Century from the National Gallery in Prague |
| 9 June - 22 July 2007 |
Bunkamura The Museum
(Tokyo) |
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| The names Rubens and Breughel represent two great currents of Flemish art in the 17th century. While Rubens epitomized Baroque painting with his dynamic style, the Breughels were known for lively pastoral scenes as well as brilliantly detailed still lifes. Of these 70 works on loan from a legendary collection in Prague, over 50 are appearing in Japan for the first time.
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| Nobuaki Takekawa |
| 26 May - 30 June 2007 |
Ota Fine Arts
(Tokyo) |
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| Takekawa's works grapple with the laws and concepts of reality through a variety of strategies, among them devising a drawing machine that produces layers of endless lines, and producing drawings of maps that consist only of lines. |
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| Sakan Kan-no: trans. |
| 1 - 30 June 2007 |
weissfeld
(Tokyo) |
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| Kan-no creates precisely delineated abstracts with acrylics painted on a urethane-coated canvas that shines like the surface of a polished car. These new works are even more sharply defined and detailed, further accenting the buoyancy and depth of his textures. |
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| Pamela Rosenkranz |
| 18 May - 23 June 2007 |
Taro Nasu
(Tokyo) |
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Swiss-born Rosenkranz recently completed an artist residency in New York but is now based in Zurich. Her work attempts to gain a philosophical foothold in the world around us through the medium of familiar objects. She draws freely from linguistics and semiotics in her relentless search for an equilibrium between knowledge and aesthetics.
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| Mineki Murata: "No Coments" |
| 24 June 2007 |
BankART Studio NYK
(Kanagawa) |
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| For this event at BankART Sakura-so, a new arts center in Yokohama, Murata stood with his back to the audience and performed on a narrow path between the building and the river. Intermittently painting and stopping, occasionally throwing himself against the window of the Sakura-so that separated artist from audience, he left a white t-shirt randomly painted in green, red and black as a relic of his performance. |
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