HOME > PICKS
Picks :

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 August 2011
| 1 | 2 |
Kohei Nawa: Synthesis
11 June - 28 August 2011
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
(Tokyo)
Nawa shuttles effortlessly between two- and three-dimensional media that range from painting to animation to sculpture, but always with his unique "cell" concept at their core. Divided by the artist into such categories as PRISM (stuffed animals in transparent, prism sheet-sealed boxes), BEADS (stuffed deer completely smothered in clear beads), and SCUM (epitomized by Villus, a grouping of toys and other everyday objects enveloped in polyurethane spray), Nawa's work are nothing if not intellectually stimulating.

sweet memory
20 July - 11 September 2011
Kyoto Art Center
(Kyoto)
Evocatively subtitled "even a prince in a fairy tale," this whimsical group show brings together four artists -- Chelin, Koshi Kawachi, Tomoko Hayashi, and Yuko Uryu -- whose shared motif is candy and other sweet edibles. Their aim, it appears, is to explore the intimate relationship between memory and the confections we consume for solace or pleasure. Truly, man does not live by bread alone. Numerous workshops (and, one hopes, bake sales) will be offered during the exhibition period.
Yuko Uryu: plate journey
26 July - 7 August 2011
Gallery PARC
(Kyoto)
Uryu's solo show also has edibles as its common motif, but her paintings of box lunches, desserts and the like, rendered with pale pastels and a precision of line, depict plates of food in various stages of consumption and disarray. These unsettling images give off a whiff of danger that sticks to the memory. Highlights include Koraku Bento, Mont Blanc, and biscuit.
WHITE: Tadaaki Kuwayama Osaka Project

18 June - 19 September 2011
The National Museum of Art, Osaka
(Osaka)
New York-based Kuwayama has divided the main gallery of the museum into three sections, each housing a series of pure white, flat-plane compositions of identical format and dimensions. The works are covered with washi (handmade Japanese paper), giving them a soft, evanescent glow. Of the 60 pieces shown, all are recent except for one he created in 1963.
Kozo Mio

25 May - 14 June 2011
Galerie Aube
(Kyoto)
With his hallucinatory airbrushed fantasies, the late Kozo Mio (1923-2000) was a dominant presence on the Japanese art scene in his day. Though Mio is best known to the public for his cover art on the popular weekly magazine Focus, this retrospective chooses to focus instead on paintings and sketches from the sixties on, offering the visitor some enlightening insights into Mio's production process as well as his subconscious.
Masahito Yamamoto: The messy room

23 May - 4 June 2011
Galerie Omotesando
(Tokyo)
This solo exhibition by photographer Yamamoto consists of two series. In "The last whisper" -- culled, he says, from "a vast store of negatives that have never seen the light of day" -- he blackens or otherwise defaces most of the print surface and inserts the results in old picture frames. In "Euclid's talk in sleep" he arranges toilet paper, tape, and other household items on a mirror positioned to reflect clouds in the sky.
Yu Ogata & Ichiro Ogata Ono - Namibia: Internal Sand Dunes

30 May - 11 June 2011
Gallery Seiho / Toki-no-Wasuremono
(Tokyo)
In this dual-venue exhibition, architectural photographers Ogata and Ogata Ono offer a fascinating series of images taken in 2006 in the desert of Namibia in southern Africa. Their subjects are the ruins of houses built by German settlers during the region's Diamond Rush a century ago. Built in the art-deco Sezession style popular in Europe at the time, these grand edifices now lie abandoned, their rooms full of drifting sand.

Hideo Suzuki: Gazing at Outlines

24 May - 4 June 2011
demi-sommeil
(Tokyo)
Veteran photographer Suzuki's theme in this show is legendary 1950s pinup model Bettie Page. Copying images culled from books and magazines, he arranges the prints in collages to which he has applied a number of tricks: offsetting green and red images to achieve a stereoscopic effect, highlighting the color scarlet, or blurring parts of the picture. The result imparts a sensation of drifting languidly in the space between reality and illusion.

Sakiko Nomura Exhibition 4

2 - 17 June 2011
photographers' gallery
(Tokyo)
Nomura is best known for her photographs of nude male figures who seem to be melting into the darkness of some private space. In her exhibitions at photographers' gallery, however, she alternates these images with landscapes, objects and random snapshots in an attempt, it appears, to construct a narrative of the artist's movements and emotional shifts. Somehow or other, the works assembled for this show do succeed in this objective.
Masato Seto: binran
3 - 26 June 2011
BLD Gallery
(Tokyo)
Photographer Seto's "binran" series was published by Little More in book form in 2008. Binran is the betel nut avidly chewed in Taiwan and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Seto's shots introduce the bizarre alternate universe of Taiwan's roadside "binran stands," gaudy neon-lit glass kiosks housing miniskirted young women who sit there on display, somewhat like goldfish in a large square bowl, as they await customers.
| 1 | 2 |