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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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| Naoki Honjo: Scripted Las Vegas |
| 4 March - 12 April 2009 |
epSITE (Epson Imaging Gallery)
(Tokyo) |
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| Honjo employs tilt-shift lens photography with a 4x5 camera to create bird's-eye views of urban landscapes that look like miniature scale models. His theme here is Las Vegas, which he describes as the perfect artificial city, one that artlessly exposes the components of a modern metropolis: factories, roads, power plants, and of course casino/amusement parks. |
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| Ayako Kurihara: fiction/error |
| 27 March - 17 April 2009 |
Gallery Maki
(Tokyo) |
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| There once was a little half-frame camera, the Olympus Pen, that vertically divided each frame so you could get two shots in the space of one. In Kurihara's blow-ups of paired Olympus Pen photos, the two half-frames share casually incongruous relationships with one another -- overlapping due to insufficient winding, or coincidentally depicting contiguous views. |
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Setsuko Hayashida: Seasons in Miniature Gardens |
| 30 March - 16 April 2009 |
Guardian Garden
(Tokyo) |
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| A Hitotsubo Exhibition prizewinner in 2006, Hayashida's ongoing "Seasons in Miniature Gardens" photo series focuses on her mother's home (actually a Buddhist temple) in a small town near Nagasaki. Grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins go about their daily lives, and Hayashida's treatment of them and their world is similarly relaxed and unpretentious. |
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| The Kaleidoscopic Eye: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection |
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Mori Art Museum
(Tokyo) |
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| Founded in 2002, Vienna's Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation has assembled a collection that must be one of the most bizarre ever to be sent on tour. How, for example, does a work like Los Carpinteros's "Frozen Study of a Disaster" -- several hundred blasted fragments of block wall, suspended on wires from the ceiling -- get transported and mounted from venue to venue? |
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| Unforgettable Russia: Masterpieces from the State Tretyakov Gallery |
| 4 April - 7 June 2009 |
Bunkamura The Museum
(Tokyo) |
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| In the works on loan from this Moscow gallery -- primarily Russian paintings of the late 19th and early 20th century -- a plein-air realism dominates that recalls the Andrew Wyeth show at Bunkamura last year. If one skips over the Russian avant-garde of subsequent revolutionary years, there is a visible link to the socialist realism that followed. |
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| Nomachi's Sacred Lands |
| 28 March - 17 May 2009 |
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
(Tokyo) |
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| Photographer Kazuyoshi Nomachi roamed the globe in the 1980s and 1990s during the golden age of "visual magazines" in Japan. This retrospective centers on Nomachi's new "Ganga" series about religious rituals along the entire length of the holy river. As in other series by Nomachi on the theme of people at prayer, these images flow by in unhurried, stately procession, like the great river they portray. |
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| NUDE!! NO NUDE!? by KISHIN |
| 1 - 22 April 2009 |
NADiff A/P/A/R/T
(Tokyo) |
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| This retrospective of Kishin Shinoyama's nude photography occupies the entire NADiff A/P/A/R/T gallery complex in Ebisu. Shinoyama's nudes are relentlessly festive and cheerful, devoid of a sense of the obscene or even the erotic. Such a dogged yet carefree pursuit of Eros manages to excite and appall at the same time. |
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| Luxury in Fashion Reconsidered |
| 11 April - 24 May 2009 |
The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto
(Kyoto) |
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| The fourth in a series of fashion-themed exhibitions mounted by the museum every five years, this one explores the changing concept of "luxury" in fashion and the larger relationship of fashion to society. Though colorful and entertaining, the show reveals little we don't already know, and fails to hint at how "luxury" might be redefined in the future. |
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| Masako Yasuki: evaporating time, exposed scapes |
| 7 - 18 April 2009 |
Galerie 16
(Kyoto) |
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| Since her debut at this same gallery, Yasuki has devoted herself to painting "landscapes." Upon entering the exhibition space it is not immediately clear what her works depict, but as one gazes at them, forests and underwater seascapes suddenly come into focus. The sounds of wind and flowing water are nearly audible in these quietly dramatic works. |
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| Nobuaki Date: Building Conservation Project by Ukulelizing |
| 31 March - 12 April 2009 |
Art Space Niji
(Kyoto) |
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| Date's ongoing project involves making ukuleles out of materials from razed buildings. He then gives the ukuleles to the former occupants. There is something charming, even moving, about the connections thus fostered among complete strangers -- the artist, the viewers, and the tenants of these lost structures -- through the medium of a quaint musical instrument. |
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