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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 September 2011
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Daido Moriyama: On the Road
28 June - 19 September 2011
The National Museum of Art, Osaka
(Osaka)
This retrospective has two parts: a close-up look at Moriyama's work today and a chronological tracing of the evolution of his style over the decades. Together they provide a well-rounded sense of his unique viewpoint and language as a photographer who works "on the road." Every detail of these compositions writhes, quivers, and quakes with a powerful, ever-vibrating life force.

Hamada Shoji Style
16 July - 25 September 2011
Shiodome Museum
(Tokyo)
Shoji Hamada (1894-1978) is renowned both as a ceramic artist and as a leader of the Mingei Movement. He is less well known as a modernist, but his collaborations with designers on numerous household items set the tone for a thoroughly modern lifestyle even as he pursued the ideal of a "slow life" in the small town of Mashiko. This show inspires interesting questions about the relation of art to the craftsmanship of everyday objects, and of modernism to Mingei.
Three powers of modern architecture in Osaka
23 July - 25 September 2011
Osaka Museum of History
(Osaka)
This highly entertaining exhibition introduces a whole panorama of structures, from the curious to the sublime, that have graced Osaka's skyline during the past century. They range from the Osaka Central Public Hall, a rococo affair whose design was picked in a contest (all the submissions are shown here); the artistically refined Sogo Department Store; the restored Osaka Castle; and a ukulele made from parts of a dismantled public bathhouse. On opening day, a robot dressed like the city's landmark Tsutenkaku Tower stole the show.
WHITE: Tadaaki Kuwayama Osaka Project

18 June - 19 September 2011
The National Museum of Art, Osaka
(Osaka)
This show occupies large spaces but deliberately does not fill them; Kuwayama uses only one wall of each gallery. Exhibitions that leave no wall uncovered seem self-indulgent by comparison, even mean-spirited: they exclude other works and deny the possibility of coexistence. Kuwayama's entirely white, yet subtly diverse, compositions line up in iterative rows that turn the blank walls surrounding them into works of art as well.
Karigurashi no Arrietty x Yohei Taneda

23 July - 25 September 2011
Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art
(Hyogo)
Award-winning film designer Taneda was art director for the 2010 Studio Ghibli animated film Arrietty, based on Mary Norton's novel The Borrowers (the Japanese title means "Arrietty the Borrower"). The exhibition boasts a full-sized film set, art from other Yoneda productions (including work with Quentin Tarantino), and assorted Ghibli anime paraphernalia. The high level of artisanship on display owes itself in part to the studio's devotion to hand-drawn animation. The Ghibli name ensures that the crowds on hand are impressive too.
Form in Art -- Touch and Sense the Piece: Keiko Masumoto

16 July - 6 November 2011
Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art
(Hyogo)
The Hyogo Museum holds an annual exhibition of art that can be touched as well as viewed. This year's edition introduces the ceramic art of Keiko Masumoto, who takes her inspiration from, then toys with, antique ceramic masterpieces. One of the show's delights is that it places Masumoto's whimsical variants alongside reproductions of the originals (courtesy of the Museum of Ceramic Art, Hyogo). If you go, be sure to put on one of the eye masks provided by the museum and try feeling your way through the exhibition.
NEXT -- TWS 10 YEARS!

7 July - 2 October 2011
Tokyo Wonder Site Shibuya
(Tokyo)
Celebrating the 10th anniversary of Tokyo Wonder Site, this show features some 20 young artists, among them Ichiro Endo, Daisuke Nagaoka+Chikara Matsumoto, Nobuhiko Terasawa, and the 11-person unit OLTA. Perhaps because they are overly conscious of the March 11 disaster, it's hard to tell what anyone here is trying to accomplish. The only work that resonates is OLTA's heart-like potato (or is it a potato-like heart?), which ostensibly has nothing to do with earthquakes or tsunamis. Then again, a beating heart buried potato-like in the ground would make the earth shake, wouldn't it . . .

Takashi Tomikura

18 - 30 July 2011
O Gallery eyes
(Osaka)
His inspiration for the work in this show, Tomikura says, is his childhood memory of lifting up flowerpots to find wiggly creatures dwelling underneath. These paintings and objects all depict a borderland rarely exposed to the human eye and hence all the more surprising when we do catch a glimpse of it. They also evoke boundaries in time, like the dreamlike state between sleeping and waking.

Dojima River Biennale 2011 -- Ecosophia: Art and Architecture

23 July - 21 August 2011
Dojima River Forum
(Osaka)
This, the second Dojima Biennale, was directed by Aomori Museum of Art curator Takayo Iida, who clearly had on her mind the disaster that recently befell her home region of Tohoku. With works by 16 artists and art units in a venue divided into "realms" of earth, water, and air under the theme of ecosophy (a neologism from ecology and philosophy), the show presented artistic and architectural visions of the earth from the perspectives of the natural, social, and psychological environments. That's a lot to chew on, but the dark interior proved to be an optimum environment in which to digest each exhibit in full.
Hiromi Onuma: Where Clouds Are Born
21 - 26 July 2011
Gendai Heights Gallery Den
(Tokyo)
A graduate of the Tohoku University of Art & Design in her native Yamagata, photographer Onuma has pursued her career close to home. These portrayals of smoke, fog and mist in mountain settings do indeed capture the places and moments "where clouds are born." Onuma's meticulous attention to the interplay of air currents and landscapes is matched by a well-executed installation that places ground-level shots close to the gallery floor and images of mountaintops up high on the wall.
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