 |
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. |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
| Satomi Sakuma: In a Landscape |
| 20 April - 26 May 2013 |
Poetic Scape
(Tokyo) |
|
| Sakuma creates photographic compositions in which she breaks scenery down into color fields, producing abstract patterns. In her latest series, she goes further by distorting parts of images, creating a sense of depth and otherwise playing with a variety of visual effects. In all her work, she avows that she "shoots straight, according to standard photographic conventions." She appears to set up camera angles that yield clever juxtapositions of actual images and their reflection in water or mirrors. |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
| Hiroshi Mizuta: Daily Work |
| 7 - 19 May 2013 |
Gallery Keifu
(Kyoto) |
|
| Mizuta's motifs are familiar and mundane -- a water surface reflecting a child dangling from an iron bar, a swimming child's foot viewed from below as it kicks the water, a bicycle seen from directly overhead. With their variegated colors and an ambiguity of composition, in which overlapping fragments of objects and scenery challenge our attempts to determine distance and scale or distinguish foreground from background, his paintings invite the viewer into a whimsical world of his own devise. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
| Soshi Matsunobe: Shelves |
| 25 April - 19 May 2013 |
Laboratory
(Kyoto) |
|
| Matsunobe employs a minimalist expressive palette in installations that scrutinize the presence and function of objects. His current work, a display of "experimental shelves," purports to address the question, "When you strip a functional object of its function, what remains?" Several wooden shelf structures occupy the gallery space, all attractive assemblies with varying quirks: box-like shelves boarded up on all six sides, shelves in which all the dividers are at a slant, shelves linked together like a wire puzzle, and so on. |
|
|
|
 |
|
| Kazutomo Tashiro -- When hamayuris are in bloom: 2012 winter |
|
|
photographers' gallery / Kula Photo Gallery
(Tokyo)
|
|
| Tashiro began taking the photos in his hamayuri (a lily native to northern Japan) series in April 2011, just after the earthquake and tsunami had struck the Tohoku region. Since then he has not deviated from his straightforward approach: wandering through devastated towns, calling out to people he encounters, posing them in the center of the frame. The images are accompanied only by their location and date, but a concurrently published portfolio book adds comments by the photographer as well as conversations with his subjects. The delicate interrelating of text and image is another constant in Tashiro's work. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
| Yuko Ota: Beloved Gods |
10 May - 16 June 2013
|
unseal contemporary
(Tokyo)
|
|
Ota paints scenes in which extremely everyday objects -- laundry hung out to dry, cups on a dinner table -- frame a collection of rather disturbing-looking dolls. Her style is photorealistic and her motifs owe something to Pop Art, but visible brushstrokes and expressive nuances that only the human hand can produce mark her as a true painter.
|
|
|
|
|
| Hirofumi Yugen: The First Meal Is the Beginning of Death |
| 10 May - 7 June 2013 |
gallery t
(Tokyo) |
|
| Yugen assembles models of human skeletons from the leftover bones of Kentucky Fried Chicken meals. This installation included both an earlier work -- a skeleton standing in a chicken bucket -- and a new piece -- a skeleton brandishing a bone in one hand, eerily reminiscent of the ape-man in the prologue of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
| Lieko Shiga: Blind Date |
| 8 March - 30 June 2013 |
books & cafe magellan
(Miyagi) |
|
| Shiga shot these photos while working as an artist in residence in Bangkok in 2009. Observing the motorbiker's paradise that is Bangkok, Shiga was struck, she says, by the notion that "with so many people riding bikes, there must be lovers who died when a rider put her hands over her boyfriend's eyes as a joke." Shiga's forte lies in giving physical form to her fantasies. For this series she snapped 100 bike-riding couples from close range, "riding alongside them for five minutes." |
|
|
|
 |
|
| Kumiko Muroi: It searches |
| 11 May - 8 June 2013 |
Gallery MoMo Projects
(Tokyo) |
|
| This show featured some 200 small watercolors on paper, most of them painted in a gray-tinged purple that can only be described as "Muroi-color." Semi-abstract images, blurry and indeterminate, hinted at faces, bodies, animals, flowers, or landscapes. Two or three of them looked like mushroom clouds, but that might be accidental. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
| Yuji Hamada: Pulsar + Primal Mountain |
| 5 May - 29 June 2013 |
Photo Gallery International
(Tokyo) |
|
| Photographer Hamada's latest exhibition consisted of the two titular series. In Pulsar he attempts to make light visible, using the smoke effect to give form to beams of light striking familiar scenes. For Primal Mountain he constructed imaginary mountains out of silver foil or the like and shot them against a backdrop of sky. |
|
|
 |
|
| Shohachi Kimura 120th Anniversary |
| 23 March - 19 May 2013 |
Tokyo Station Gallery
(Tokyo) |
|
| Born into a family of restaurateurs, Kimura (1893-1958) grew up in the eighth branch of the famed Tokyo hotpot chain Iroha and later ran the front counter at the tenth branch in Asakusa. From around 1920 he began painting scenes of the city he knew so well, ranging in subject from Iroha's shops to Asakusa's Sensoji temple to the Shinjuku train terminal. His depictions -- realistic but not entirely faithful reproductions of the cityscape -- constitute an invaluable chronicle of life in prewar Tokyo. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
