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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.
15 January 2014
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Yasumasa Morimura: Las Meninas Renacen de Noche
28 December - 25 December 2013
Shiseido Gallery
(Tokyo)
Morimura's latest foray into artistic impersonation is this series of 17 photos, titled in English In Praise of Velazquez: Handmaidens Reborn in the Night. It is a multifaceted homage to the titular Velazquez masterpiece, known for its complex composition and the riddles long associated with the artist's subjects and his objectives. Morimura's idiosyncratically imaginative take on the painting only adds to the mystery surrounding it.
Hi-Red Center: The Documents of "Direct Action"
9 November - 23 December 2013
Nagoya City Art Museum
(Aichi)
Formed in the early 1960s, the short-lived but influential guerilla-artist collective Hi-Red Center celebrates its 50th birthday with a retrospective including works by core members -- notably Genpei Akasegawa (b. 1937), Natsuyuki Nakanishi (b. 1935), and Jiro Takamatsu (1936-98) -- as well as printed materials and photos of the numerous happenings they staged throughout Olympics-era Tokyo. Dadaist agents-provocateurs who sought to stir up the status quo with "direct-action art," HRC won a following overseas as well as domestically.
Taro Mizutani: New Journal
1 - 23 November 2013
Gallery 916 small
(Tokyo)
Mizutani introduces three recent yet quite disparate photo series. White Out features 18 shots of blank billboards and other curiosities along California highways; New Wilderness offers ten mystical land- and waterscapes, displayed in pairs; and UNDERCOVER consists of portraits of young people sporting T-shirts, emblematic of Mizutani's main gig as a fashion photographer.
Kanji Wakae: Domain of Mirror -- Downfall & Turnover
28 September - 2 November 2013
Yumiko Chiba Associates
(Tokyo)
Since the 1970s Wakae has taken a multimedia approach to his exploration of the "gap between awareness and sense perception." Here he introduces a new series of paintings, photographs, and installations. The show provides intriguing glimpses of the mindset of someone attempting to elucidate his relationship with the world through art.
Kazutomo Tashiro / When hamayuris are in bloom: 2013 spring
6 - 24 November 2013
photographers' gallery / Kula Photo Gallery
(Tokyo)

Since April 2011 Tashiro has been snapping portraits of people in the tsunami-devastated parts of northeastern Japan and displaying them in periodic exhibitions. Recently the subjects of his hamayuri series passed the 1,200 mark. This latest offering is concurrent with the publication of a book of the photos. At least as revealing as the images are their captions, written by the photographer, in which his sincerity, and guileless honesty, shine through.
Delta: The feel of possibilities
22 - 26 November 2013
BankART studio NYK
(Kanagawa)
Twenty-nine third-year students in the Department of Intermedia Art at Tokyo University of the Arts presented their works at BankART's massive converted-warehouse gallery on the Yokohama waterfront. A standout was Kyoko Hamaguchi's Delivery Service: a stack of express-delivery boxes by the entrance emitting a variety of sounds. The artist explained that the parcels, rigged with transmission devices, were being brought to the site by delivery truck on a daily basis.
150 Years of Modern Japanese Music
11 October - 23 December 2013
Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery
(Tokyo)
Divided into four sections -- "From the Late Shogunate to the Meiji Era," "Taisho Modernism and Music," "War in the Showa Era and Music," and "From the Postwar Era to the 21st Century" -- this ambitious show covered the past century-and-a-half of music in Japan. Replete with instruments, scores, concert programs, record albums, pictures, and correspondence, it afforded plenty of visual as well as aural stimuli.

Koji Shiroshita Exhibition
7 - 18 November 2013
la galerie
(Osaka)
Shiroshita produces his drawings on Kent paper with India ink and a G-pen. The iterations and aggregations of countless straight lines suggest fragments of some sort, but also bring to mind aerial views of vast cityscapes. Using as they do the same simple materials and technique, the works at first glance appear to be of a piece, but closer examination reveals subtle differences in style and substance.
Issei Nishimura / Tokyo Wonder Wall 2013
7 - 28 November 2013
Tokyo Metropolitan City Hall
(Tokyo)
This small solo show of ten works, including some new ones, highlights an artist lately garnering attention as a rising star among contemporary Japanese painters. Nishimura refuses to confine himself to a particular style or technique, producing human and animal figures, landscapes, abstracts, and still lifes with equal aplomb. The common thread running through his works is their unaffected articulation of the artist's inner life.
Naho Yokoya: Kagamishi, Blue, Bird
28 September - 2 November 2013
Hagiwara Projects
(Tokyo)
Of her mixed-media installations, which make prolific use of mirrors, tree branches, and an eerie blue light, the artist says she is attempting to discern the self that is reflected at the boundary between dissimilar entities, between this world and the underworld -- and thereby affirm the relationship between self and other, and the human essence, that lie beyond that boundary.
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