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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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MOT Annual 2010: Neo-Ornamentalism from Japanese Contemporary Art
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| 6 February - 11 April 2010 |
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
(Tokyo) |
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| No sooner did the "Power of Decoration" exhibition end at the Crafts Gallery of the National Museum of Modern Art than we have this year's MOT Annual group show devoting itself to the same theme. The only artist represented at both venues is Katsuyo Aoki, who appears to be in great demand these days. Other noteworthy participants -- most of whose works border on the monomaniacal -- are Tomoko Shioyasu, who cuts up large sheets of paper into intricate patterns, Junichi Mori, who creates brilliant wood carvings that resemble fine netting, and Motoi Yamamoto, who builds labyrinths out of salt crystals on the gallery floor. |
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| Tatsuo Miyajima: That Person and Ideology |
| 4 February - 11 April 2010 |
BLD Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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| Coinciding with the publication of Miyajima's new book, this retrospective traces his career from his early years as a performance artist through his debut at the 1988 Venice Biennale to his more recent, widely acclaimed work with digital counters and diodes. It is hard to believe that the intense, skinny young fellow in his student days is the relaxed, benign-looking gentleman we see today. |
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Galleria Borghese |
| 1 January - 4 April 2010 |
Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum
(Tokyo) |
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| The collection amassed by Italy's Cardinal Borghese (1576-1633) is, not surprisingly, heavy on religious imagery. But even when you think you've seen them all before, these paintings manage to bemuse and even titillate: St. Anthony preaching to the fish, St. Francis receiving his stigmata, old men sneaking a look at another man's wife in the nude. Highlights of the show include the lovely mosaics of Marcello Provenzale and Archita Ricci's portrait of Japan's first foreign envoy, Tsunenaga Hasekura, who visited Rome in 1615 for an audience with the Pope. |
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Takehiko Inoue: Last Manga Show, Revisited - Osaka Edition |
| 2 January - 14 March 2010 |
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Suntory Museum
(Osaka) |
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| Manga artist Inoue's epic Vagabond series about the warrior Miyamoto Musashi is rivaled in popularity only by his earlier Slam Dunk, credited with triggering a basketball boom in Japan. This show offers over 140 ink and pencil drawings of all sizes depicting the Miyamoto tale, including some dramatic 3D displays of climactic scenes. If anything, the show refreshes with its foregrounding of the differences, not similarities, between manga and “fine” art. |
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| Junko Ikawa: Babel |
| 1 - 6 February 2010 |
iGallery
(Tokyo) |
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| Ikawa's monochrome prints show what appear to be fragments of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Tower of Babel piled haphazardly atop one another. One's first guess is that these are the product of digital processing, but according to the photographer they are real shots of collages she assembled of hundreds of copies of the painting. |
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| Emi Anrakuji: CHASM |
| 12 January - 20 February 2010 |
Gallery Past Rays
(Kanagawa) |
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| A female figure is hazily visible through a slot of some sort. We find ourselves peeping in on a woman who, seemingly unaware of the camera's gaze, is in the process of undressing and taking a bath. If these photos were the work of a real peeping Tom, they would be illegal. In this case, however, the photographer herself is the model and she is shooting self-portraits (or self-nudes, so to speak), the protagonist in her own drama. |
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| Rebecca Horn - Rebellion in Silence: Dialogue between Raven and Whale |
| 31 October 2009 - 14 February 2010 |
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
(Tokyo) |
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| Known for performances that involve the wearing of monumental costumes of feathers and fabric, German artist Horn creates kinetic sculptures whose movements remind one of crabs, squid, sea lilies and other aquatic creatures. Another association that comes to mind is the monster in the film Alien. |
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| Cyber Arts Japan |
| 2 February - 22 March 2010 |
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
(Tokyo) |
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| Ostensibly celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Ars Electronica media art festival held annually in Linz, Austria, Cyber Arts Japan is "a special media art exhibition focusing particularly on art and technology in Japan." But what is this chilly wind that blows through the show? It exudes the same forlorn, nostalgic air as that 30th-year retrospective of Expo 70, the Osaka world's fair, which at the time seemed to offer a glimpse into such a bright future. |
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| Miwa Yanagi: Lullaby |
29 January - 21 March 2010
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Rat Hole Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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| Yanagi's latest opus in a year of attention- and accolade-grabbing installations, this one features her familiar images of old and young women in a masked performance on video. The sequence begins in a distorted, miniaturized room with a fireplace, next to which a little old woman in black cradles a larger young girl in white, resting the girl's head in her lap and singing a lullaby. Suddenly the girl wakes up and starts grappling fiercely with the old lady. By the end, the younger woman is cradling the older one and singing her a lullaby. As the brief scenario loops endlessly, the two trade roles back and forth into eternity. |
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| Towards the Essence 2009-2010 |
| 1 - 7 February 2010 |
Toki Art Space
(Tokyo) |
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| This collaborative exhibition of contemporary Polish and Japanese photographers began with exchanges between Jerzy Olek and Akira Komoto. Also featured are works by Witold Wegrzyn and Yuri Nagawara. Olek's tall, narrow compositions look a lot like Japanese hanging scrolls, and indeed the images thereon were shot in the ancient capitals of Kyoto and Nara. However, they remind one most of film rolls or videotape, and like those media Olek's work allows for the expression of time passing, suggesting that this is a format with numerous unexplored possibilities. |
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