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Picks is a monthly sampling of Japan's art scene, offering commentary by a variety of reviewers about exhibitions at museums and galleries in recent weeks, with an emphasis on contemporary art by young artists.
1 March 2013
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MINKA Japanese Traditional Houses: Yukio Futagawa and the Origins of His Architectural Photography, 1955
12 January - 24 March 2013
Shiodome Museum
(Tokyo)
Architectural photographer Futagawa got his start shooting pictures of the traditional rural dwellings known as minka in the mid-1950s. In hindsight, his images are the only record of many of these structures, which were lost shortly afterward to dam or road construction or the depopulation of their communities. Every house exudes a powerful presence rooted in the land it sits on, but the minka of Kamitaira and Etchu-katsura villages in Toyama Prefecture are especially impressive.

Artist File 2013: The NACT Annual Show of Contemporary Art
23 January - 1 April 2013
The National Art Center, Tokyo
(Tokyo)
This annual exhibition purports to avoid "any particular theme" in providing a solo-show venue for "relevant" artists from both Japan and elsewhere. This year's installment, the fifth, features five Japanese artists and three from abroad. Nalini Malani, from India, offers work that blends indigenous festiveness and sharp social critique while staunchly refusing to cater to current fashions.
Architecture. Possible here? "Home-for-All"
18 January - 23 March 2013
TOTO Gallery MA
(Tokyo)
Subtitled "Homecoming Exhibition of the Japan Pavilion from the 13th International Architecture Exhibition -- La Biennale di Venezia," this show brings home the "Home-for-All" exhibit at the pavilion, which won the Venice Biennale's Golden Lion prize. A concept developed and carried out by pavilion commissioner Toyo Ito and fellow architects Kumiko Inui, Sou Fujimoto, and Akihisa Hirata, the Home-for-All is a structure built to serve as a gathering place for people living in temporary housing in communities destroyed by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of March 2011. The show features numerous study models, plans, photos, and videos of a Home-for-All built in Rikuzentakada, Iwate Prefecture while the Biennale was in progress.
PATinKyoto: Print Art Triennale in Kyoto

23 February - 24 March 2013
Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art
(Kyoto)
Building, it declares, on Japan's preeminent position in the history of woodcut art, this new Kyoto-based triennale aims to showcase the "rich and diverse" world of contemporary Japanese woodblock prints. Not an open-call exhibition, the show introduces works selected by a committee of artists, critics, curators, scholars, and journalists.
"Stakeout Diary": Yukichi Watabe Photo Exhibition

2 February - 3 March 2013
Gallery Tanto Tempo
(Hyogo)
In 1958 photographer Watabe got permission to tail two detectives as they attempted to solve a grisly murder case. The resulting images form a fascinating documentary with a film-noir touch. This may prove to be a one-of-a-kind achievement, as police in Japan today hardly seem likely to give their blessing to this kind of reportage.
Yuna Tsuru: The Concentrate of Time and Recollection

12 January - 9 February 2013
Gallery MoMo Roppongi
(Tokyo)
Tsuru's paintings portray young women wreathed in flowers and ominously dark surroundings. The girls, who all wear kimono, appear to be of delicate health and a tad decadent in a romantic, Taisho-period way. It turns out that the artist has intentionally conflated imagery from the era of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 with the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011.
Yoshio Sekine: From Body to Signs

26 January - 23 February 2013
Tokyo Gallery
(Tokyo)
A founding member of the avant-garde Gutai art collective, Sekine is known best for his abstract paintings of abacus-like motifs. This retrospective also included early Informel-style abstracts as well as paintings of freight cars. In the transition suggested by the subtitle, Sekine appears to have moved from the body-centric work of his Informel period to a more Pop-Artish concern with the symbology of everyday objects.

Tomoko Sawada: SKIN

12 January - 24 February 2013
MEM
(Tokyo)
This series of 12 photographs focuses on the legs of women in miniskirts and high heels. Their subject, however, is not the limbs but the stockings that encase them. Sawada herself declares that stockings are the "armor of working women." Her works reexamine how women in stockings are viewed by society, and how they view themselves.
Yayoi Kusama: New Paintings II
8 December 2012 - 2 February 2013
Ota Fine Arts
(Tokyo)
For this show Kusama presented six large (human-height) square paintings on canvas, covered with polka-dot and jagged-line patterns in red and light blue on gold or silver backgrounds. Arguably a kind of Op-Art, these works incidentally appear to have been painted flat, rather than standing, since there are virtually no paint drips in evidence.
Hiroaki Morita: Exchange -- making/remark/object
14 December 2012 - 20 January 2013
NADiff Gallery
(Tokyo)
The gallery contains a bench, a transparent escalator panel, a wall hook from which hangs an umbrella stand key, something that looks like a tiny music stand . . . As for the floor, it is littered with sheets of paper bearing the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) logo and assorted trash. Morita participated in the concurrent MOT Annual show, and this exhibition may have been a companion or rejoinder to his exhibit there -- a kind of "replacement art," perhaps.
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