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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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Hisashi Matsumoto: Protozoa
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| 27 January - 1 February 2009 |
Art Space Niji
(Kyoto) |
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Matsumoto has exclusively painted self-portraits for the past seven years; those in this show are based on photos of himself taken at home in recent months. Matsumoto says that he uses himself as a subject not as a means of self-examination but to pursue a more transcendent form of self-portraiture that records traces of the self revealed in the figure's surroundings.
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| Tetsuya Ishida: Self-Portraits of Ourselves |
| 9 November - 28 December 2008 |
Nerima Art Museum
(Tokyo) |
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| This retrospective of the work of Ishida (1973-2005) is in a chronological sequence that gently unveils the evolution of his "self-portraiture." Ishida's surrealistic expressions of profound angst toward everyday life, and his tragically premature death, have garnered him an emotional following reflected in the comments set down in the visitors' notebook at this show. |
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Toshinao Yoshioka |
| 15 January - 8 February 2009 |
Gallery OUT of PLACE
(Nara) |
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| Yoshioka has earned acclaim for the innovative techniques he applies in his prints and sculptures, which share the theme of sounding an alarm for imperiled values in an increasingly uniform society. This exhibition focuses on photography and computer graphic imagery, media with which he has worked in recent years. |
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| Kiyoshi Yamashita: Locus of Wandering |
| 10 January - 22 February 2009 |
Itami City Museum of Art
(Hyogo) |
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| Nicknamed the "Japanese Van Gogh," the legendary Yamashita (1922-71) was a brilliant but troubled artist and a wanderer known as much for his travels around Japan wearing only a vest and a rucksack (another nickname was the "Naked General") as for his remarkable compositions of chigiri-e, a method of creating images from torn bits of colored paper. |
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Shinjin Gakai: Artists from "Ikebukuro Montparnasse" |
| 22 November 2008 - 12 January 2009 |
Itabashi Art Museum
(Tokyo) |
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| Shinjin Gakai (New People's Painting Society) was formed in 1943 by eight artists associated with the "Ikebukuro Montparnasse" art district in northwest Tokyo. This show features works shown at the three exhibitions the group managed to hold during the war years, as well as prewar and postwar works. All are noteworthy for their determined detachment from politics, with neither pro- nor anti-war themes in evidence. |
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Sen Yokotani: Record of Meditation
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| 7 January - 28 February 2009 |
gallery bauhaus
(Tokyo) |
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Formerly an advertising and editorial photographer, Yokotani has spent the last few years traveling around the world to refugee camps, war zones, deserts, mountains and isolated monasteries. These 45 monochrome prints represent Yokotani's meditations in the course of his journeys, not least, he says, on the question of whether his work is fundamentally journalistic or artistic in nature.
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Yutaka Takanashi: Field Notes of Light |
| 20 January - 8 March 2009 |
National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
(Tokyo)
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| This retrospective offers some 250 works by veteran photographer Takanashi (b. 1935), spanning his entire career to date. Takanashi's specialty is the snapshot; this show brings together images he has snapped throughout Japan, in city and countryside alike. A thread running throughout his work is a quest for the optimum visual expression of a literary sensibility. |
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Query Cruise Vol. 1 |
| November 2008 - March 2009 |
RAD room
(Kyoto) |
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| Founded by graduates of the Kyoto Institute of Technology, the group RAD (Research for Architecture and Design) has its own event space. Part of RAD's ongoing Query Cruise series on contemporary culture, this "volume" features lectures by Taro Igarashi on urban architecture, Morihiro Satow on visual culture, Yoshikazu Nango on sociology and Takehiro Ohya on the philosophy of law. |
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Ichiro Yuasa / Francois Pompon
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| 13 December 2008 - 5 April 2009 |
Gunma Museum of Art, Tatebayashi
(Gunma) |
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| The career of Yuasa (1868-1931), who spent time in Paris and studied plein-air painting, embodies the history of modern Western-style painting in Japan. This show focuses on watercolors and sketches from his European period. Yuasa's Montparnasse neighbor Pompon (1855-1933) was a sculptor influenced by Japanese crafts as well as Egyptian relief carvings who gradually divested his figures of all extraneous detail, as seen in the animal sculptures displayed here. |
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The Artists of the TARO Award 1 |
| 11 October 2008 - 12 January 2009 |
Taro Okamoto Museum of Art
(Kanagawa) |
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Since 1997, the Taro Okamoto Award for Contemporary Art has been given to artists whose work is deemed to reflect the liberated spirit of the late painter and sculptor. This show introduces new works by six past recipients of the award: Noriaki Imai, Rika Eguchi, Yoshiaki Kaihatsu, Sachiko Kazama, Koji Tanada, and Yasushi Yokoiyama.
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