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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 April 2013
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MINIMAL / POST MINIMAL
24 February - 7 April 2013
Utsunomiya Museum of Art
(Tochigi)
Bringing together the works of such artists as Kosai Hori, Toeko Tatsuno, Kazumi Nakamura, Shigeo Toya, and Toshikatsu Endo, this is among other things a tour-de-force effort by museum director Arata Tani, who made his debut as a critic in the 1970s. Efficiently arranging the artists by period, Tani does a masterful job of summarizing the minimalist and post-minimalist movements of the seventies, eighties, and nineties in Japan.

Naojiro Kobayashi and Yukiko Tomita
17 February - 7 April 2013
Nerima Art Museum
(Tokyo)
Kobayashi, a colorfully expressionistic painter active from the 1920s until his death in 1990 at age 93, never sold his work during his lifetime. This retrospective attempts to do justice to his oeuvre while juxtaposing it with paintings by his granddaughter Yukiko Tomita, exhibited concurrently in another gallery of the museum. Though their styles differ -- Tomita favors large close-ups of flowers and fruit -- they share a certain obstinacy that comes through their compositions.
JR: Could art change the world?
10 February - 2 June 2013
Watari-um
(Tokyo)
JR is a French street artist known for posting huge photo-portraits of people on outdoor surfaces -- staircases, billboards, rows of houses, building facades. The show covers his past work in Europe and the Mideast and culminates in a series of 400 photos he took over the past year and a half of residents of the disaster-stricken areas of northeastern Japan.
Cross Sections: Chronicle @ MoMAK 1963-2013

16 March - 6 May 2013
The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto
(Kyoto)
The museum celebrates its 50th anniversary by showcasing the craftworks that form the core of its collection. The focus is on the diversity and expressiveness of crafts as art. Part I highlights Japanese traditions, East-West cross-pollination, and design-related issues, while Part II presents a selection of masterpieces from the overall collection.
Eyes on the Street: Modernology and Beyond

26 January - 7 April 2013
Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art
(Hiroshima)
Starting with the Taisho-era "modernology" of Wajiro Kon and Kenkichi Yoshida, there has been a 20th-century artistic tradition in Japan of observing "life on the street." The exhibition convincingly treats this approach as an alternative to mainstream Modernism. It covers works by Taro Okamoto and Shohachi Kimura in the fifties, groups like Conpeito and Iryuhin Kenkyujo in the late sixties and early seventies, activities by the Roadway Observation Society, Shinro Otake, and Kyoichi Tsuzuki in the eighties, and such nineties and later movements as Team Made in Tokyo, Rogues' Gallery, and Motoyuki Shitamichi.
Documenting Meguro

16 February - 24 March 2013
Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo
(Tokyo)
Featuring just a fraction of the hoard of photos in the possession of the Meguro Ward Historical Archives, the focus of this show was the work of three amateur photographers who snapped shots of everyday life and ordinary people in Meguro from the fifties through the seventies. Categorized under such headings as Street Scenes, People at Stations, Working People, Under Construction, and Children at School, the 200 images formed a critical mass that powerfully evoked the vitality of the district in those days.
Arai Junichi: Tradition and Creation

12 January - 24 March 2013
Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery
(Tokyo)
Textile artist Arai (1932-) started out in his family's weaving business, but became known for his innovative work with fabrics in his collaborations with fashion designers in the seventies and eighties. Thoroughly covering the traditions, materials, and techniques Arai brings to his work, this retrospective sought to highlight the relationship between his theory and practice. The huge swaths of fabric laid out in one gallery and the spacious textile installations filling another gave the show something of the air of an architectural exhibition.

Emiko Aoki: Whispering Hope

12 January - 3 February 2013
Gallery Forgotten Dreams
(Tokyo)
Aoki is best known for paintings in which she covers most of the canvas with swaths of vermilion over a base of globular, bubble-like shapes. In this solo show she introduced some blue-green works as well. As with the red pieces, the cluster of "objects" at the bottom of the frame creates a landscape-like impression. The blue-green, however, makes the picture plane recede further, even more intensely conjuring up landscapes -- or seascapes -- or perhaps a world under water.
Kazuna Taguchi and Tadasuke Iwanaga: The Crimson Sun
26 January - 2 February 2013
ShugoArts
(Tokyo)
Two artists with utterly disparate styles collaborated on this joint show. Taguchi takes photographs of monochrome portraits she has painted, themselves based on photographs, thus blurring the line between the two media, while Iwanaga does bold, colorful, semi-abstract paintings in which brushstrokes figure prominently. This reviewer assumed that the artists would divide the gallery space between them, but instead they jumbled their presentations together. Even more surprisingly, the jumble seemed entirely natural.
Ken Sasaki: These/foolish/things
26 January - 23 February 2013
AOYAMA | MEGURO
(Tokyo)
At the center of this solo show were five still-life paintings of a yellow-green tennis ball imprinted with the domestic Bridgestone brand. Like yoga -- Western-style Japanese painting -- tennis is a Western import that the Japanese have made their own. Also presented were paintings of an enlarged railway route map and a chart depicting the history of modern Japanese art. In this way Sasaki takes "art-like" objects that are familiar to us and seeks to transform them into "art" through the process of painting them as they are.
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