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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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My Favorites: Index of a Certain Collection
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| 24 March - 5 May 2010 |
The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto
(Kyoto) |
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| Some 300 works in the museum's "Non-Category" category -- those that cannot be defined as paintings, sculptures, photography, ceramics and so on -- are displayed with relevant curatorial materials. Indeed, the very existence of such a category is intriguing, given that museums depend on classification for their very existence. Of special note is the museum's evidently uncategorizable collection of Duchamp "readymades." |
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Art Fair Tokyo 2010
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| 2 - 4 April 2010 |
Tokyo International Forum
(Tokyo) |
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| Held every April since 2007 in the cavernous Forum, the fair prides itself on spanning the entire spectrum of Japanese art, old and new. As they did last year, the younger contemporary art dealers eschewed the hall proper, preferring to show their wares on temporary partitions in the lobby. Perhaps this was because they didn't feel like fraternizing with the antique galleries, or simply because it was cheaper outside. But for whatever reason, the antiques seemed more eye-catching this year than the contemporary work. |
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Taisuke Morishita: ART-CAPITALISM
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| 27 March - 10 April 2010 |
Satelites Art Lab
(Tokyo) |
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| Run by Ginza Art & Concept Laboratory, Satelites sits tucked away on a back street of Tokyo's Jinbocho bookstore district. Morishita's statements on art and commerce consist of large bar codes painted alongside reproductions of such works as Rembrandt's "Bathing Woman," Courbet's "The Origin of the World," Manet's "The Luncheon on the Grass," and Picasso's "Grand nu au fauteuil rouge." |
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Christo and Jeanne-Claude: LIFE=WORKS=PROJECTS
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| 13 February - 6 April 2010 |
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21_21 DESIGN SIGHT
(Tokyo) |
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| While this exhibition is not expressly described as a memorial to Jeanne-Claude, Christo's partner in life and work who passed away last November, it is clearly a labor of love by their friend Issey Miyake. One thing they shared, obviously, was a love of fabric. The show is a thorough retrospective, ranging from drawings by a young Christo in Bulgaria to his earliest work with Jeanne-Claude on small wrapped objects in Paris and New York, to the grandiose outdoor projects, both finished and unfinished, for which they are best known. |
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Junkichi Mukai
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| 28 April - 10 May 2010 |
Yokohama Takashimaya Gallery
(Kanagawa) |
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| Mukai (1901-95) is associated largely with his Western-style paintings of thatched-roof Japanese country houses, less so with his equally superb works chronicling Japan's war in Asia. The most famous of these, "Shadow," depicts the huge shadow of a warplane darkening the city of Suzhou, China. In contrast with both this and his pastoral postwar efforts, the show also offers expressionist studies and copies of Dürer, Corot, and Renoir painted by a young Mukai during his prewar Paris days. |
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Emerging Artist Support Program 2009
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| 6 March - 25 April 2010 |
Tokyo Wonder Site Hongo
(Tokyo) |
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| Set up to foster young curators, Wonder Site's program gave the three art units who won last year's competition a whole floor each to work with. The 11 Tama Art University students who make up OLTA turned their space into a bucolic installation, "OLTA's Rice Field." For "Deep Dig Dug,” Motoko Dobashi and Kaori Nakajima converted theirs into a "grotto" of wall paintings interspersed with works by three colleagues from Germany and Spain. Yosaku Kikuchi's "Meat Shop Spy" installation displayed the results of his "infiltration" of a small Tokyo butcher shop. |
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POLA Museum Annex Exhibition 2010
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| 1 - 25 April 2010 |
POLA Museum Annex
(Tokyo) |
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| All four artists in this group show received grants from the POLA Foundation for study overseas. Ryotaro Endo does selectively colored-in inkjet prints; Mizue Ogiso applies paint to plywood cutouts of trees and other objects; Lei Saito, currently in residency in Amsterdam, creates tabletop tableaux of party favors and dinner utensils; and Germany-based Sanae Uchida paints illustration-like works on Japanese themes. Most of the work seems purposefully bright and colorful in keeping with the exhibition's subtitle, "Festival." |
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Utagawa Kuniyoshi
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| 20 March - 9 May 2010 |
Fuchu Art Museum
(Tokyo) |
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| Kuniyoshi has a reputation for comic art: giant skeletons and other grotesqueries, or Arcimboldo-like tricks such as composing a facial portrait out of naked bodies. But much of his whimsy was a self-preserving response to the repressive Tempo Reforms of the Shogunate. If anything, Kuniyoshi epitomizes the creative obduracy with which late Edo-era ukiyo-e artists got around government censors. Still, even a retrospective of work as imaginative and variegated as Kuniyoshi's suffers from the ukiyo-e medium's inherent paucities of size, color and depth. |
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Backstage: Welcome to the Story
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| 13 April - 9 May 2010 |
Kyoto Art Center
(Kyoto) |
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| Two Kyoto-based set designers, Yasuhiko Okumura and Takahiro Shibata, built a stage set in the middle of the exhibition space and conducted open rehearsals for an actual performance using the set. With everything from sketches to models to prop lists to price estimates (!) on display in the gallery, one indeed felt privy to the goings-on backstage, behind the scenes of a real production. |
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Ryo Ohwada: Log
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| 22 - 28 April 2010 |
Canon Gallery Ginza
(Kyoto) |
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| In this series, photographer Ohwada records his day-to-day observations in a "log." Although the works share what might be Ohwada's primary theme of "beauty," one wishes for a stronger connection, as seen in his more conceptual series like "Type" (about text and numbers), "Banknotes" and "Wine Collection." |
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