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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. |
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| Yuki Kumagai: Unevenly Dyed |
| 4 - 21 February 2013 |
Guardian Garden
(Tokyo) |
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| Consisting of seemingly random photos of various sizes arrayed on the walls, this installation achieved its avowed purpose of expressing "uncertainty." But the artist's manifesto makes it sound too easy: "By photographing hovering anonymous images, I hope to prove the existence of unreasonable things that are beyond control." If that's all he aims for, he could have simply scattered some torn fragments of snapshots on the gallery floor. |
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| Risaku Suzuki: Cézanne à l'Atelier |
| 9 February - 27 March 2013 |
Gallery Koyanagi
(Tokyo) |
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| Suzuki has previously explored Cezanne's world with his series of photos of Mont Sainte-Victoire, published in book form in 2004. The current series also includes shots of the fabled peak, but the focus is more on the interior of Cézanne's Provence studio and particularly the play of sunlight there. Suzuki has always been a sensitive, rigorous captor of the form and texture of light, and these images amply testify to his talents. |
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| Sakiko Nomura: NUDE/A ROOM/FLOWERS |
| 8 February - 24 March 2013 |
BLD Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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| The 56 prints that lined the gallery walls were enlarged to fairly substantial size. A quick look around suggested that Nomura has expanded her subject matter as well. In addition to her trademark male nudes, this recent series includes women, children, interiors, and landscapes. Among the monochrome images there were even a few color prints that didn't appear out of place at all. Whether scrutinizing subjects or colors, Nomura possesses a firm, steady eye. |
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| Ryoichi Suzuki: Sightseeing |
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Emon Photo Gallery
(Tokyo)
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| When you turn the pages of a book, you can sometimes see text or images bleeding through from the other side of the page. Photographer Suzuki's "Sightseeing" series turns that phenomenon into art, creating hazy images of animals and natural scenery by backlighting the pages of illustrated books. The effect is something like multiple exposures. As demonstrated by his comment, "The furthest page in the world is the back of the page we are on," Suzuki is as adept at articulating his conception with words as he is with a camera. |
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| 16th Japan Media Arts Festival |
| 13 - 24 February 2013 |
The National Art Center, Tokyo
(Tokyo)
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| Amid the crowds that filled the venue, it was impossible to have a leisurely look at all the entries. One standout, however, was Italy-born, London-based Quayola's New Face Award-winning submission in the Art category. Titled Strata #4, the video installation digitized works by Rubens and Van Dyck and transformed them into accretions of polygons. Also astonishing for their level of artistry were the architecture-like drawings of Belgian master cartoonist Francois Schuiten, co-creator of Les Cités Obscures, which won the Manga category Grand Prize. |
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| DOMANI: The Art of Tomorrow 2013 |
| 12 January - 3 February 2013 |
The National Art Center, Tokyo
(Tokyo) |
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| This 12-person show ostensibly presented "The Achievements of the Japanese Government Overseas Study Program for Artists provided by the Agency for Cultural Affairs." But with study years and countries scrambled together, as well as a hodgepodge of genres -- painting, sculpture, photography, crafts, animation -- there was no organizing principle to be found. Some works were created overseas while others were "results of the program" produced after the artist returned home. This might be more accurately described as a joint exhibition by artists selected by the Agency. |
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| The Design World of Ikko Tanaka |
| 12 January - 20 March 2013 |
Nara Prefectural Museum of Art
(Nara) |
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| Commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of graphic designer Tanaka (1930-2002), this retrospective did not stint on famous works like his Sankei Kanze Noh poster series, but the real treats were Tanaka's efforts in the realm of "art." Standouts reflecting Tanaka's experimental bent ranged from graphics made of rope, to works with Kanji characters as their motifs, to geometric abstractions of flowers and faces. In Tanaka's own words, "Graphic art turns the inside of my head, contaminated as it is by design, immaculately white." |
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| A Requiem, Two Years After |
| 5 February - 20 March 2013 |
The Museum of Modern Art, Ibaraki
(Ibaraki) |
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| The title refers, of course, to the two years that have passed since the disaster of March 11, 2011, an event that forced a reassessment of the relationship between humanity and nature. Located in Mito, just south of Fukushima, the museum examined how that relationship has been taken up by modern and contemporary artists -- 16 in all, including Usen Ogawa, Taikan Yokoyama, Tsune Nakamura, Heihachi Hashimoto, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, Tatsuo Kawaguchi, Hidenori Majima, and Tomoko Yoneda. |
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| Old Lifestyles, Today's Lifestyle |
| 26 January - 31 March 2013 |
Kawasaki City Museum
(Kanagawa) |
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| Traditional utensils and consumer appliances donated by Kawasaki citizens provided the core of this exhibition tracing the history of tools and furniture used in everyday life. The inclusion of early personal computers and word processors spoke to Kawasaki's position as the industrial hub of the greater Tokyo area. A side-exhibit on the theme of travel looked at changes in travelers' accoutrements from the days of journeying by foot to the railroad era and later. Displays ranged from the earthen pots in which train station lunches were once sold, to shrine and temple seal-stamp booklets, to cameras, to the cell-phone games played by bored kids on long family car trips. |
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| Fieldwork from Periphery |
| 18 January - 2 February 2013 |
Galerie Aube
(Kyoto) |
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| Centered around photographer Tadashi Ono's late-2000s series Fieldwork from Periphery, shot in the housing tracts of suburban Paris, this show brought together four more artists (Yukio Fujimoto, Sakae Ozawa, Torao Nakagawa, and Motoi Yamamoto) whose work reflects a concern with perimeters and boundaries. News of riots and films like the 1995 La Haine have given these neighborhoods a reputation as dangerous places overrun by immigrant youth gangs. Ono's images, however, do not portray his subjects in so bleak a manner. |
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