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.
2 April 2012
| 1 | 2 |
Ay-O: Over the Rainbow Once More
4 February - 6 May 2012
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
(Tokyo)
Japan-born Ay-O (1931-) moved to New York in the fifties, joined the Fluxus movement, produced happenings, and created the installations known as environments. The rainbow, his trademark motif, has graced paintings, prints, installations, and a 300-meter banner flying from the Eiffel Tower. Viewing this retrospective, one can't help but see Ay-O as a venerable fixture in the contemporary art pantheon, not the youthful mischief-maker of yesteryear.

Atsuko Tanaka: The Art of Connecting
4 February - 6 May 2012
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
(Tokyo)
In the early days of the avant-garde Gutai movement, Tanaka (1932-2005) made her mark with "Electric Dress," a garment of colorfully painted light bulbs and fluorescent tubes. Later, however, she stopped doing performances and installations and concentrated exclusively on painting equally colorful abstracts. Her best-known works consist of lines snaking among bright circles of red, blue and yellow; this exhibition reveals that the paintings are in fact an extrapolation from her wiring diagrams for the Electric Dress. Though Tanaka is no longer with us, her circles and lines continue spinning and writhing in real time.
Yoshihiko Ueda: Materia
10 February - 10 April 2012
Gallery 916
(Tokyo)
Photographer Ueda has opened a 600-square-meter gallery in Tokyo's dockside warehouse district. The inaugural exhibition consists of 20 large new prints by Ueda, hung at distant intervals on the stark walls of this cavernous space. The "Materia" images, of trees in the rain forests of Yakushima (an island south of Kyushu), were taken shortly after the March 11, 2011 earthquake, but they represent a continuation of his series from the early 1990s of shots of a similar rain forest on the west coast of the United States, later published in his book Quinault.
The History of Towers

21 February - 6 May 2012
Edo-Tokyo Museum
(Tokyo)
The Tower of Babel, the Eiffel Tower, Asakusa's Ryounkaku, Osaka's Tsutenkaku, Tokyo Tower . . . Dramatically titled "The Tower" in Japanese, this exhibition nonetheless seems to be lacking something. For dramatic poignance or sheer height, the destroyed World Trade Center and Dubai's Burj Khalifa come to mind. But, that's right, they aren't really towers. The point of the show, of course, is to introduce and contextualize the world's (currently) tallest tower, Tokyo Sky Tree, scheduled to open to the public in May.
Akira Yamaguchi: TOKIORE(I)MIX

11 February - 13 May 2012
Maison Hermes: Le Forum
(Tokyo)
Yamaguchi's installation incorporates the unsightliest urban sight of all, the telephone pole, into mock-traditional "Japanese"-style paintings and objects. Most impressively, he converts columns in the Hermes exhibit space into full-sized phone poles with quirky Japanese touches. As an architectural proposition the idea actually has some merit.
Shimon Minamikawa: Mirror, Music, Multimedia

17 February - 1 April 2012
NADiff Gallery
(Tokyo)
A chair, table, and bicycle are scattered around the gallery; on the wall are pictures by the artist, posters, a mirror. For some reason there is also a bottle rack, homage perhaps to the famous readymade by Marcel Duchamp. Initially it looks like any other disorganized mess, but then it becomes apparent that Minamikawa put a lot of thought into the layout. It is, in fact, a surprisingly comfortable space to hang out in.
Sachigusa Yasuda: AERIAL

13 January - 29 February 2012
Base Gallery
(Tokyo)
Yasuda's photo collages are compiled on a computer from as many as 300 to 500 images shot from the tops of skyscrapers. The resulting cityscapes are concentrically arranged panoramas of highrise buildings that stick up into the sky on all sides like a forest of gargantuan needles. The effect is stunning, and testifies to the consummate skills Yasuda wields to give form to her concept.

Kuniyoshi: Spectacular Ukiyo-e Imagination

17 December 2011 - 12 February 2012
Mori Arts Center Gallery
(Tokyo)
A show of 421 works by the same artist sounds like a bit too much of a good thing, but these were divided into two exhibition periods of some 200 works each. Even so, the heavily-touted event was so crowded that one had to crane over countless heads to get even a distant glimpse of Kuniyoshi's ouevre, most of which consists of small, finely-detailed woodcuts. Ukiyo-e were meant to be held in the hand for leisurely viewing close-up; Edo-era artists like Kuniyoshi certainly didn't have huge museum galleries in mind when they made them.

Shigeru Kurihara: 1973-1992 Okinawa

6 - 19 February 2012
Sokyusha
(Tokyo)
This photo series demonstrates why Okinawa in the seventies, just after its reversion to Japan, was such an attractive subject for photographers. The entire island emits shimmering waves of life force which the inhabitants deeply inhale, then vent with every fiber of their being. Their joie de vivre is something one would have been hard put to find on the Japanese mainland in those days, and Kurihara's camerawork makes the most of it. His scenes of Okinawan crowds exude a preternatural vitality.
Naoyuki Hata: Pelletron new no.4
6 - 23 February 2012
Guardian Garden
(Tokyo)
Hata began taking pictures while working as a professional beautician, then honed his craft in the workshop of Takashi Homma. After winning the Grand Prize of the 4th 1_WALL competition in 2011, he began exhibiting as a full-time photographer. Currently he is attending art school in the Netherlands. In this series he scrutinizes the undulations and entanglements of the cords, tubes and wiring connected to the Pelletron, an electrostatic particle accelerator.
| 1 | 2 |