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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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Kanzo Shibata: Visiting Forest |
| 2 - 26 June 2008 |
INAX Gallery 2
(Tokyo) |
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| A recent graduate of Tokyo University of Fine Arts, Shibata is already gaining notoriety for his huge reliefs: panels of white polystyrene foam carved (with a hot needle) into fine, contour-like lines that evoke vast forests, mountains and melting snow. This exhibit consists of one such gallery-filling piece, 2.5 meters high and 4 meters long. |
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| Suzy Amakane: Pop Jack! |
| 3 - 25 June 2008 |
Gallery 360°
(Tokyo) |
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Comix-inspired Japanese illustrator Amakane offers parodies of pop art: in a painting credited to "Katsushika Hockney" (Hokusai + David), a naked man gazes at a distant Mt. Fuji from a swimming pool. Since pop art itself is a parody of consumer culture, it doesn't seem so far-fetched to parody pop art in turn.
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Takahito Kimura: Forest Play |
| 14 June - 15 July 2008 |
Sumida Riverside Hall Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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| True to its title, this installation offers a variety of ways to play with the forest. The first room contains a display of items collected on a forest floor, ranging from deer horns to old beer cans. Other areas feature piles of cedar needles and dead leaves to walk through, or sunlight playing through trees, leaves, and star-shaped holes. The smell of the trees and the sound and feel of the leaves under one's feet provide a multi-sensory, woodsy experience. |
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| Eri Kodera: Big Make-Believe |
| 17 - 29 June 2008 |
Gallery Yuragi
(Kyoto) |
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| Situated in a quiet neighborhood near Kyoto's Silver Pavilion, this gallery was once a traditional Japanese home, complete with garden and sunken hearth. Kodera's installation is a perfect match. A landscape with an intruding life-size hand sets the theme of playing with space and scale; other works include a diorama with tiny horses and deer grazing on hills made of crabshells, and a snowy mountain made out of a futon coverlet. |
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GIRLISH BLENDS |
| 17 - 29 June 2008 |
gallery ni modo
(Tokyo) |
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This group show introduces six young women artists who graduated from art school this year. The gender specificity extends to the works themselves, which are all self-consciously "girlish," even those by artists like Takako Okumura whose work to date would not be considered particularly feminine.
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The Springtime of Russian Avant-Garde: From Chagall to Malevich |
| 21 June - 17 August 2008 |
Bunkamura the Museum
(Tokyo) |
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| This first Japanese show of works from the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, which opened in 1999, is short on big names like Kandinsky but does introduce numerous artists less well known in Japan (ten works each by Malevich and Pirosmani alone). An exhibit comparing these early 20th-century artists with works by their 19th-century predecessors, or the socialist realists who followed, would have demonstrated just how pioneering they were. |
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Takashi Tomikura |
| 23 - 28 June 2008 |
O Gallery Eyes
(Osaka) |
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| These new paintings differ subtly from Tomikura's previous work. For one thing, he is using oils instead of acrylics now, and more black than before. His blend of landscape backgrounds with foreground figures -- animals, plants -- into a single seamless world is not just entertaining visually, but reveals things otherwise hidden in the scenery, hinting at untold stories. |
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Yoshimi Miyamoto: A View of Departing Flowers |
| 24 June - 5 July 2008 |
galerie 16
(Kyoto) |
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| Miyamoto's monochromatic paintings depict flowers that have been pressed and stripped of their color. Monochrome flowers are nothing new, but such a thorough removal of the subject's color and form -- and aroma, one imagines -- is unusual. Miyamoto says that she wants to view flowers in the manner of an X-ray that reveals everything under the skin, but there is also a delicate beauty in the way her light shines softly through the petals. |
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France Meets Japan: Ukiyo-e Influence on French Ceramics |
| 1 July - 3 August 2008 |
Tokyo National Museum
(Tokyo) |
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| In late 19th-century France, the popularity of dinnerware decorated with motifs from ukiyo-e artists like Hokusai and Hiroshige helped spark the Japonisme boom. This show, a joint project with Paris's Musee d'Orsay, displays ceramic tableware sets alongside the original works that inspired their designs. |
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Chiharu Shiota: Breath of the Spirit |
| 1 July - 15 September 2008 |
The National Museum of Art, Osaka
(Osaka) |
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| Osaka-born, Berlin-based Shiota spent a year and a half collection over 2,000 pairs of worn shoes. As one descends the gallery escalator to the basement exhibit space, the spectacle of all those shoes tied to long strands of red yarn is stunning. Also featured are other works by the prolific Shiota: huge mud-stained dresses, rows of metal beds, and performance videos. The cumulative effect is violent: a forced confrontation with life and death. |
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