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Picks is a monthly sampling of Japan's art scene, offering short reviews of exhibitions at museums and galleries in recent weeks, with an emphasis on contemporary art by young artists. |
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| Seiji Honda: World of Illusional Light |
| 18 February - 1 March 2008 |
Oto Gallery
(Osaka) |
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| The Hokkaido-based artist spends six months of the year on a tuna longline research vessel; these watercolors were painted while he was at sea. His unsettling images range from surreal self-portraits to bizarre parasite-like creatures as well as realistic portrayals of actual marine life. |
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| Chi Peng: Open Studio |
| 7 - 9 March 2008 |
ZAIM
(Kanagawa) |
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| An artist in residence in Yokohama for one month with the city's ZAIM arts project, Beijing-based Chi Peng is only twenty. Highlighting this show are computer-graphic prints based on the "Journey to the West" epic. Young artists working with themes from their country's classical traditions, as Chi does, are a rarity in Japan these days. |
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Aiko Tezuka |
| 14 February - 11 March 2008 |
Dai-ichi Life Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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Tezuka is best known for her textile-based works, created by removing specific threads from tapestries or embroidered fabrics and creating new shapes with them or new weavings and embroideries. Here she augments her fabric works with paintings that employ pleat patterns as a motif.
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| POST |
| 1 - 14 March 2008 |
ZAIM
(Kanagawa)
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| Snaking lines and dot patterns in a palette of white, gray and black define Yanagisawa's paintings. Six works consist of layered arrangements of fir tree silhouettes: variations on the same motif, realized through the ingenious use of stencils atop a computer-generated outline. |
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| Alexandre Imai: Seeing Through the Present |
| 10 - 15 March 2008 |
Galerie Paris
(Kanagawa) |
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| It is hard to believe that Imai, an enfant-terrible who rocked Japan's art world twenty years ago, is now fifty. His paintings can be broadly categorized into two types: abstract drippings, and figurative works of paint daubed on straight from the tube. In a word, they look childish; perhaps the show's title is meant to suggest that Imai still views the world through a child's eyes? |
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| "The Ship Rides on the Mountain" |
| 15 March 2008 |
The Film School of Tokyo
(Osaka) |
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| This documentary chronicles the "Story to Build a Ship" project by PH Studio, a group of artists, architects and photographers who worked with inhabitants of a mountain community about to be submerged by a dam to build a ship out of timber from surrounding forests. As the waters rose the ship would float up, eventually depositing the trees on a mountaintop. The joint effort by artists and local citizens, culminating in the image of the floating ship, make for an extremely moving story. |
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| Shohei Furukawa |
| 17 - 22 March 2008 |
O Gallery eyes
(Osaka) |
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| Furukawa's oils consist of thin layers of color that evoke the thickness of air. Light that softly spreads from the sun or from a light bulb illuminates ambiguous images that resemble fragments of memory, an effort to recall everyday occurrences. There is something comfortably real about these abstractions. |
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| Masako Nakahira: The world turns over |
| 11 - 23 March 2008 |
neutron gallery
(Kyoto) |
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| This long-awaited offering of new works, Nakahira's first solo show since her participation in Kyoto Art Map in 2006, features images reflected on the surface of water against a background of simple color fields. The result is the exquisite depiction of mundane scenes that we tend to overlook in our daily lives. |
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| Hiroshi Nomura: Products with Eyes |
| 14 - 26 March 2008 |
Logos Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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Photographer Nomura is known for his "EYE Series" of objects with eyeball symbols affixed to them. Here he extends his eye fixation to drinking glasses, sofas, good-luck charms and more, then offers these "Eyeball Goods" for sale.
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| Kaoru Hirano: Sullen |
| 15 - 26 March 2008 |
Yokohama Museum of Art
(Kanagawa) |
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| As an "artist-in-museum," Hirano has built an installation of motifs from Yokohama's harborside Minato Mirai district: water carried from the bay, shadows made by illuminating a model of the local ferris wheel, clothes with warehouse-inspired redbrick patterns. But her most shockingly beautiful works are a series of five-meter high dresses and baby clothes hung in the museum's Grand Gallery. |
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