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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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| Mark Rothko |
| 21 February - 7 June 2009 |
Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art
(Chiba) |
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| In 1958-59, Mark Rothko painted his Seagram Murals, a series commissioned for a restaurant in New York's Seagram Building. Rothko ultimately turned down the commission and the paintings were dispersed among museums in the U.S., U.K., and Japan. Here fifteen murals, half of the series, are reunited at the Kawamura Museum, which has provided an optimum setting for the dark, wine-red canvases. |
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| The 12th Taro Okamoto Award for Contemporary Art |
| 7 February - 5 April 2009 |
Taro Okamoto Museum of Art
(Kanagawa) |
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| Okamoto was perhaps the best known avant-garde artist in postwar Japan. In its 12th year, the "Taro" Award "aims to support and celebrate those artists who succeed the challenging spirit of Taro Okamoto manifested in the making of creative works with individual expression." The eponymous museum displays 21 works by this year's recipients, selected from 611 entries. |
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Arts & Crafts from Morris to Mingei |
| 24 January - 5 April 2009 |
Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum
(Tokyo) |
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| This exhibition brings together works from the Arts & Crafts movement launched by William Morris in late 19th-century England, whence it spread to Europe (notably with the Vienna Secession) and Japan (the Mingei movement). Yet the show reminds us that the articles produced by the movement were, after all, meant to be handled and used, not merely displayed in museums. |
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| Yoko Iritani: Mountain Home |
| 17 - 29 March 2009 |
neutron gallery
(Kyoto) |
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| Known mainly for her silkscreens, Iritani devotes this show to works in oil-based color pencil. Her motifs are the entranceway and garden of her childhood home, and indeed the sensation is one of viewing someone's most private memories. The vivid colors and use of blank space, producing a negative-like effect, provide room for one's own recollections to flow in, yet also make her images seem more real than photographs. |
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Junichi Ohta: My Father's Diary |
| 18 - 31 March 2009 |
Ginza Nikon Salon
(Tokyo) |
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| The prints laid out in the gallery are faithfully reproduced pages from the diary of the photographer's father, who wrote in it every day after his wife's death. With the onset of senile dementia two years before his own death, the entries change dramatically; words and phrases are incessantly repeated and the handwriting becomes a scrawl. The images inspire emotions of an intensity rarely provoked by more typical photo-documentaries. |
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VOCA 2009: The Vision of Contemporary Art |
| 15 - 30 March 2009 |
The Ueno Royal Museum
(Kanagawa) |
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| Now in its 16th year, the VOCA show has consistently showcased still-unknown but promising talent throughout Japan by inviting artists under forty, recommended by curators, journalists and art scholars around the country, to exhibit new two-dimensional works. Of the 35 artists featured this year, six are prizewinners; standouts include Kei Imazu and Yusuke Asai. |
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Isao Hiramachi: The Oya Stone Quarry |
| 15 - 30 March 2009 |
The Ueno Royal Museum
(Tokyo)
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| A prizewinner at VOCA 1999, Hiramachi has painted a vast panorama of the Oya quarry on huge sheets of fabric. While there is no denying the power and courage of his approach, the effect is almost too realistic. Granted that the original landscape has something unreal about it to begin with, one still misses the phantasmagoric quality of other Hiramachi work. |
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Masako Oguri: TOć»NUP |
| 3 - 31 March 2009 |
Gallery Tosei
(Tokyo) |
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| In 1999, Nagoya-born photographer Oguri moved to the mountain village of Tono in northern Honshu. On a visit inspired by ethnologist Kunio Yanagida's legendary Tales of Tono, she was enchanted by the people and customs she encountered there and simply stayed on. The scenes and faces in these photos exude a primordial life-force that leaps from Oguri's prints and threatens to rip away the armor covering our own urban hearts. |
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Hiraizumi: Pure Land in the Far North-east of Japan |
| 14 March - 19 April 2009 |
Setagaya Art Museum
(Tokyo) |
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| Located in northern Honshu, Hiraizumi flourished in the 11th and 12th centuries as a center of Pure Land Buddhist culture. Here some 200 Buddhist images and other treasures from Chusonji and neighboring temples are exhibited outside their homes for the first time. It is a thrill to see, close-up, such wonders as the eleven Buddhas from Chusonji's Golden Hall, or a mandala in which scriptures are written in the shape of a pagoda. |
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James Welling: Notes on Color |
| 5 February - 28 March 2009 |
Wako Works of Art
(Tokyo) |
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| Los Angeles-based photographer Welling brilliantly distills the essence of photographic history in a style that is somehow European. The current series focuses on architecture, specifically the modernism of the Philip Johnson school. The light and color of Welling's images gently massage the retinas, testimony to his genius at the processing stage.
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