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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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| Shomei Tomatsu |
| 23 April - 12 June 2011 |
Nagoya City Art Museum
(Aichi) |
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| This retrospective of iconic photographer Tomatsu (1930-) ranges from his 1950 debut series An Ironic Birth to his recent digital snapshots of Naha, Okinawa. With over 500 works chronologically displayed in eight sections, the show occupies the entire museum and comprehensively covers Tomatsu's entire oeuvre. |
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| Contemporary Woodcut Exhibition 2011 |
| 7 - 19 June 2011 |
gallery morning kyoto
(Kyoto) |
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| This group show introduces five woodcut artists -- four Japanese (Takako Ishikawa, Hiroko Tamura, Konomi Honda, Keiko Mikami) and one Belgian (Goedele Peeters). Particularly memorable are Ishikawa's watercolor woodcuts, with their soft hues, papery texture, and the lovely way her mountains and rivers blend into one another. Honda's unique "Endangered Species" series hints at an obsessive bent in its nostalgic portrayal of soon-to-be eliminated or superseded objects -- Tokyo Tower and the printed book to name two. |
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| Hanako Itsukage & Sayaka Terawaki: les signes |
| 20 - 25 June 2011 |
O Gallery eyes
(Osaka) |
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| Viewed close-up, Itsukage's oils reveal a dynamic brushstroke and thick layers of color, but also a dreamlike humidity, as if their light was bathed in mist. Terawaki's portraits of women as they appear in magazines or adult videos would seem to be utterly at odds with Itsukage's soft abstractions, but the two artists' works go surprisingly well together in this dual exhibition. |
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| Tatsumi Yoshino |
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Gallery-58
(Tokyo) |
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| Neo-Dadaists have produced plenty of grotesque imagery with the body as motif, but veteran sculptor Yoshino's dogs surely win the abstruse grotesquery sweepstakes. In this show he raises the bizarre bar even higher with some figures that have a dog's face but an elephant's head in back (or vice-versa). Not only are these heads a garish pink, as if a layer of skin had been stripped away, but they sit atop the naked bodies of young girls. It doesn't get much weirder than this, folks. |
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Mami Fukumura
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| 21 June - 3 July 2011 |
gallery morning kyoto
(Kyoto) |
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| Painter Fukumura's previous efforts have impressed with quotidian scenes and pastoral waterscapes that evoke a sense of déjà vu, of memory fragments only partially unearthed. In this show of new work she moves into uncharted territory with fantasy landscapes or scenes of beaches and forests that are clearly not of Japan. To our query, the artist replied that she found inspiration in photos clipped from foreign magazines. |
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| Hisashi Matsumoto: Beast Attack! |
| 1 June - 29 July 2011 |
BAMI gallery
(Kyoto) |
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| Matsumoto has made a name for himself with an oeuvre consisting entirely of self-portraits. In a departure from his more solipsistic past output, his alter egos serve here to convey a strident message about the bestialization of humanity at the altar of capitalism and market fundamentalism. The motifs are hardly subtle in their deadpan irony -- a parody of Leonardo's The Last Supper titled The First Supper is one example -- but the iterations of Matsumoto's visage never lose their intensity or edgy weirdness. |
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| Nobuo Shimose: KEKKAI VII |
| 22 June - 5 July 2011 |
Ginza Nikon Salon
(Tokyo) |
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| In this seventh installment of Shimose's long-running KEKKAI series at the Nikon Salon, he uses a 4 x 5 inch large-format camera to take meticulously composed shots of wild plants in the hills around his hometown of Hagi, Yamaguchi Prefecture. In Shimose's interpretation, kekkai, the boundary of a sacred area, represents "the border of a spatial domain invented by human beings." The series won the Ina Nobuo Award in 2005. |
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| Raita Ishikawa: NOISE/TERROR/SUBLIMINAL |
| 20 - 30 May 2011 |
parabolica-bis
(Tokyo) |
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| For the inhabitants of eastern Japan, no numbers carry more significance nowadays than those indicating radiation levels. Overnight, the sievert has become a universally recognized unit of measurement. Self-styled "art terrorist" Ishikawa's new installation includes, among other things, a row of radioactive rocks with a Geiger counter measuring their emissions. |
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| Shin Asakura: Maniacushionoid |
| 7 - 29 May 2011 |
space kujira
(Kanagawa) |
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| Asakura, who lives in quake-stricken Iwate Prefecture, entered his work in this year's VOCA2011 exhibition. In this solo show he offers a series of colored felt surfaces covered in patterns drawn with a fine-point black felt-tip pen. The results are spine-chilling in a gothic way, reminding one as they do of internal organs. Perhaps it is because Asakura has stuffed his felt objects like cushions so that their bulging, gently curving surfaces become powerfully tactile, even carnal. |
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| Minako Ishikawa: LINE blue |
| 14 May - 19 June 2011 |
Gallery Hirawata
(Kanagawa) |
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| In this solo exhibition Ishikawa, who also hails from Iwate, has used blue acrylic paint to apply one horizontal line atop another in endless repetition on a 2.4-meter-wide, 10-meter-long roll of canvas. Subtly varying the shade of blue with each line, she has produced a work of vividly exquisite gradations, as if one were gazing up at a vast blue sky. |
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