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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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| Toshiyuki Yamada: Ten no Kasanari (Piling Dots) |
| 8 - 13 March 2011 |
Gallery Suzuki
(Kyoto) |
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| Yamada's paintings are just as his title suggests: an infinitude of overlapping dots. At first look, these aggregations of minutely rendered, multicolored points threaten to provoke something like nausea, but closer inspection reveals a richness of expressive, rhythmical patterns. More profound than such visual impressions, however, is the way these pointillistic color fields spark imaginative flights through space and time to a place where art, and the world, strive to assume form out of chaos. Yamada's art draws us into a state of mind that is curiously soothing and contemplative. |
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| VOCA: The Vision of Contemporary Art 2011 |
| 14 - 30 March 2011 |
The Ueno Royal Museum
(Tokyo) |
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| The annual VOCA exhibition showcases two-dimensional works by under-forty Japanese artists recommended by a nationwide panel of curators and journalists. This year's show was the 18th since it began in 1994. Of the 36 participants this year, six received prizes, with the top VOCA Award going to Reika Nakayama. Most of the prizewinning work was narrative and figurative, with collage techniques and human and animal motifs prevalent. Coincidentally or not, all six prizewinners this year were women, a trend that continues from last year. |
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| Hiroshi Katayama |
| 21 - 26 March 2011 |
O Gallery Eyes
(Osaka) |
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| Katayama's paintings initially seem to consist of vague, fuzzy images of -- what, we can't really tell. Given time, however, they morph, mysteriously, into the most quotidian of scenes: a curtain, a sofa, light from a window penetrating a darkened room -- all suffused with a wash of otherworldly blue. The tranquility of these settings contrasts nicely with the surprise we experience as they gradually reveal themselves to us. |
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| Looking for a Book |
| 28 February - 26 March 2011 |
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Gallery Hosokawa
(Osaka) |
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| An ambitious exhibition crammed into a small space, this show on the theme of books featured paintings, sculptures, videos and installations by five artists: Michio Fukuoka, Yukio Fujimoto, Yuko Kanamori, Yumiko Morisue, and Seiichi Shibata. All the works on display evinced sensitive, unique sensibilities and unfettered creative imaginations, but Kanamori's exquisite video work stood out for its playful yet poignant tweaking of our notions of memory. |
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| Sayo Nagase: Water Tower |
| 25 March - 14 April 2011 |
Nidi Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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| Photographer Nagase is best known for her work for fashion and music magazines; lately, however, she has taken the art-world plunge and begun to exhibit in a gallery setting. This solo show of 20 pieces at Nidi, which recently moved from Aoyama to Shibuya, provides a stimulating introduction to her recent work. Nagase herself says that over the past two years, she has sought to separate her "self" from her works and let the objects she photographs (like the water tower in this series) stand on their own. |
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| A Conversation . . . about Abstract Objects |
| 19 March - 24 April 2011 |
MUZZ
(Kyoto) |
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| The conversation in question involves six artists: Mathieu Mercier, Takaaki Izumi, Yuki Kimura, Soshi Matsunobe, Kazu Oshiro, and Koki Tanaka, whose works nominally share elements of minimalism, pop, and conceptualism. Efforts to unify this group show under a single theme notwithstanding, it was more interesting to examine each of these works on its own terms while mulling over the questions posed in the exhibition blurb: At what point does an object become an abstract concept? Can an object merge with its own underlying concept? |
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| Satoko Matsui: Phantom hides on the wall |
| 8 - 27 March 2011 |
gallery neutron kyoto
(Kyoto) |
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| This show of new works by Matsui demonstrates just how hard she is to pin down. Her work seems to be part painting, part collage -- or neither, featuring motifs that border on the figurative -- but not quite. The images in these recent pieces lend themselves to more concrete associations than her earlier work, yet they, too, are ultimately abstract. The unsettling aftertaste that lingers after viewing them is testimony to the success of Matsui's strategy. |
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| Ohata Kiminari Exhibition 2011 |
| 8 - 13 March 2011 |
gallery morning kyoto
(Kyoto) |
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| This is Ohata's first solo show since returning from a sojourn at Vienna's University of Applied Arts. His light- and color-saturated paintings of forests and jungles, plants, animals and human figures are at once transparent and robust, possessing a temporal depth that prompts us to envision what might be the subsequent chapters of an unfolding narrative. |
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| Yoshikazu Miki: Silent |
| 1 - 6 March 2011 |
Akarui Heya
(Tokyo) |
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| The nonprofit, artist-run contemporary art gallery Akarui Heya (Bright Room) closed March 20 as planned after a scheduled two-year run. One of its last shows was this one by photographer Miki, highlighting 12 medium-large color landscape prints shot with a 6x9 camera and pinned at regular intervals along the walls. Stylistically they are a dramatic departure from Miki's previous monochrome landscapes and portraits. Miki himself says that this is only the second time he has developed color prints in a darkroom, but their coloring reflects the sure hand of a professional. |
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| Takahashi Mariko / Night Birds |
| 5 March - 22 April 2011 |
photographers' gallery
(Tokyo) |
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| This series by photographers' gallery member Takahashi has as its subject the dead bodies of birds, whose feathers, she explains, are used to make lures for fly fishing. These corpses with their eerily colorful plumage appear to be suspended in midair, adding an element of compositional instability to the already discomfiting subject matter. |
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