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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.
1 July 2011
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The Five Hundred Arhats
29 April - 3 July 2011
Edo-Tokyo Museum
 (Tokyo)
Originally scheduled to open March 15, this much-anticipated show was delayed six weeks by the March 11 earthquake. In an unprecedented display of all 100 scrolls in the series painted by late-Edo era artist Kano Kazunobu (1816-63) for Tokyo's Zojoji temple, one can practically smell the brimstone wafting from these images of Buddhist hells, replete with karmic fires, hungry ghosts, and bloody corpses. Kano painted it all in loving detail and vivid colors, with some quaint experiments with Western-style perspective and shadowing thrown in for good measure. To see all 100 paintings in one place (and in a very well-arranged installation) is quite simply mind-boggling.

Ryo Ohwada: FORM -- Scenery Seen through Bonsai
21 May - 13 July 2011
The Omiya Bonsai Art Museum
(Saitama)
Bonsai is the art of reproducing pines, junipers and other trees in miniature form, more or less to scale, in a tray or pot. In one sense, a bonsai work is a kind of three-dimensional photograph. Ohwada has taken this conceit and run with it in an intriguing effort to reproduce the fine details of bonsai "forms" with his digital camera. This is augmented by his experimentation with the collage-like process of "stitching" together images of the plants shot from different angles.
Noi Shigemasa: Creative Works 1978-2011
26 April - 3 July 2011
Nakanoshima Design Museum "de sign de"
(Osaka)
This opening exhibition at "de sign de," a new museum in downtown Osaka, features an installation by locally based "spatial designer" Noi. As the show's Japanese subtitle (which translates as "from outside to inside/from inside to outside") suggests, the bamboo and other trees with which Noi has filled the gallery break down the distinction between indoors and outdoors to the extent that the two environments sometimes seem reversed. Perhaps topological play of this sort is precisely what interior design is all about.
The Splendor of Japanese Export Crafts

29 April - 3 July 2011
Tobacco & Salt Museum
(Tokyo)
This collection of lacquerware, ceramics and other examples of what the show's subtitle calls "Exquisite Craftsmanship that Amazed the World" is curiously different from the traditional crafts typically displayed in Japanese museums. These are decorative works produced for export, mostly during the Meiji to early Showa periods. While they are indeed Japanese crafts, they were not made for Japanese consumption. The techniques may be traditional, but the flavor they exude is, after all, oddly foreign.
Hideyuki Nakayama: Little Big House

27 April - 8 May 2011
AXIS Gallery
(Tokyo)
Nakayama's first solo exhibition in his home country, this one features architectural models atop small tablecloth-covered desks scattered around the room. The architect's short descriptions, which obfuscate more than clarify, are clearly the product of a soaring imagination. Apropos of Nakayama's interest in rethinking the functions of structures ("the roof of a gas station looks like a table"), the tables and cloths themselves reflect an exquisite design sensibility.
Artists at Twenty

16 April - 12 June 2011
The Hiratsuka Museum of Art
(Kanagawa)
"Twenty" here is shorthand for the period between the late teens and early twenties when most artists make their debut. The show brings together works created by a dozen or so Japanese artists born in the Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras. Standouts are Yayoi Kusama, who was painting polka dots from the very git-go; Tadanori Yokoo, who made his debut as a graphic designer at 19; Yasumasa Morimura, whose fishing village scenes are eerily reminiscent of the tsunami-devastated towns of Tohoku; and enfant terrible Makoto Aida, who referred to his own folding-screen manga works as "s**t pictures" but also acknowledged that "one's maiden effort contains everything."
Kyoji Takubo: Landscape Art

26 February - 8 May 2011
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
(Tokyo)
Introducing multimedia artist Takubo's self-styled "landscape art" productions of recent years, the show displays these forays into architecture on a grand 1/1 scale, to dynamic effect. Highlights include "Absolute Scene," his collaboration with Ryoji Suzuki; a new "Tokyo version" of "Chapel of the Apple Trees," his restoration of an old French chapel, with the museum atrium providing space for the cast-metal floor he was unable to include in the original production; and his latest project, a refurbishment of the area around the venerable shrine on Mt. Kotohira in Shikoku.

Takashi Homma: between the books [Mushroom…]

2 - 15 May 2011
LimArt
(Tokyo)
Photographer Homma has taken what can only be described as loving portraits of fungi. Each mushroom gets to pose by itself against a white background, with earth and dead leaves still clinging to its mycelia. Shot with meticulous care at artistic angles, Homma's subjects reek of primeval lifeforce -- yet they are cute. Until now this reviewer's favorite Homma series was "Tokyo Willie," which appeared in the magazine S&M Sniper in the 1990s. But these mushrooms are truly his masterwork to date.

Ayaco Nakamura: Silence

7 May - 5 June 2011
B Gallery
(Tokyo)
Much of the "Silence" series focuses on natural phenomena -- clouds, flowers, schools of fish, ripples in water, birds flying -- but there are also shots of stuffed animals, an old couple on a sightseeing cruise, a sleeping woman. Nakamura's portrait of a newborn baby betrays no hint of its cries or struggles; the scene seems cloaked in a specimen-like silence. The image is a jarring departure from the upbeat, even bubbly style we have come to associate with Nakamura's photography.
Masanori Hata + Saori Hatama
29 April - 4 June 2011
artdish
(Tokyo)
Hata has created an artificial person, Saori Hatama, a lovely young girl who is a photo-composite of various faces and body parts (some of which appear distinctly male). The resulting images are not merely disturbing, but downright nausea-inducing. Ryuta Aoyagi's accompanying text describes the effect well: "you can't retreat, but you can't come near. She does no harm, and cannot be harmed. That probably causes discomfort. That surely causes discomfort..."
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