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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 July 2015

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Yokoo Tadanori Cut & Paste

18 April - 20 July 2015

Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art
(Hyogo)

With "cut and paste" as its keywords, this show analyzes Yokoo's output as a painter from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. An intriguing argument is that, thanks to his background as a graphic designer and his personal experience with paste-up work, Yokoo was presciently aware that "cut and paste" could be an artistically important concept.

Hiroshi Mizuta: Interruption and Resumption; Seishu Niihira: windows upset

9 June - 18 July 2015

Artcourt Gallery
(Osaka)

Both born in the 1980s and based in Kyoto, Mizuta and Niihira are painters with dramatically divergent styles. Where Mizuta's work is personal and lyrical, Niihira's is hard, optical, digital. This double-solo show offers a rare and pleasurable opportunity to compare their contrasting worldviews.

Konohana's Eye #8 -- Makoto Morimura: Argleton -far from Konohana-

5 June - 20 July 2015

the three konohana
(Osaka)

Mixed media artist Morimura is known for works that use texts found in books, newspapers, maps and the like, which he erases with whiteout or excises with an X-acto knife. The theme common to these new compositions is the unreliability of information. By actively transforming the meaning of the information written on paper media, Morimura takes his art in a new direction.

Teiko Shiotani -- Pioneer of Artistic Photography in Japan

1 May - 31 July 2015

Fujifilm Square Photo History Museum
(Tokyo)

Heir to a Tottori shipping agent's fortune, Shiotani (1899-1988) handed the family business over to his younger brother and devoted his life to photography instead. Shoji Ueda, another famous Tottori-born photographer, frequently spoke of Shiotani as a god-like presence in his life. With his innovative camera angles and modernist touch, it is high time Shiotani got his due as Japan's "pioneer of artistic photography."

Images of a Foreign Land: The Yokohama Foreign Settlement in 1995

22 April - 12 July 2015

Yokohama Archives of History
(Kanagawa)

The setup for this historically edifying exhibition is that one has wandered into the world depicted by a 120-year-old English-language map of Yokohama's Foreign Settlement. The details the document provides of individual buildings, down to the number of stories in height, inspire admiration for the maps of the day. It is a pity that the intervening century of earthquakes, fire-bombings, and postwar development has extinguished nearly all traces of the early-modern European flavor of Meiji-era Yokohama.

Baseball and Railways: Visions of Stadiums Now Lost and Teams of Memories

7 April - 20 July 2015

Old Shimbashi Station
(Tokyo)

The reconstructed Shimbashi Station building, Japan's first railway terminal, contains a museum that is currently offering an exhaustive presentation of drawings, models, photos and other archival paraphernalia about the Tokyo and Osaka areas' earliest professional baseball parks . . . Musashino Green Park, Fujiidera Stadium, Osaka Stadium, and Nishinomiya Stadium, to name a few. Not only baseball fans but architecture buffs will enjoy this show.

Ikko Narahara: Japanesque Zen

11 May - 4 July 2015

Photo Gallery International
(Tokyo)

In an essay that appeared in his 1970 photo collection Japanesque, Narahara (b. 1931) wrote, "I had my first encounter with the country called Japan when I visited Europe." The images he assembled in his reconstructions of "Japan" after returning from Europe constitute a critical reinterpretation of Japanese traditional culture. Has anyone before or after Narahara done work like this?

Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper

23 May - 30 August 2015

Hara Museum of Contemporary Art
(Tokyo)

This retrospective, which arrives in Japan after first opening at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2003 and traveling through Europe and North America, features some 70 works Twombly (1928-2011) created between 1953 and 2002. Even as his style changed over the years, the drawing of lines was always fundamental to it.

Simple Forms: Contemplating Beauty

25 April - 5 July 2015

Mori Art Museum
(Tokyo)

This wide world of ours is full of lovely natural forms, as well as art that emulates those forms in a scientific way. Since the show is a joint production with Centre Pompidou-Metz and Fondation d'entreprise Hermès, a lot of the works are from France. But in this reviewer's humble opinion, the best piece on display is by Shinji Ohmaki. His installation billows lightly on puffs of wind, while the Tokyo skyline looms in the background -- an exquisite combination.

A Long Journey: The Works of Toshiko Okanoue

25 April - 14 June 2015

Librairie6
(Tokyo)

Okanoue (b. 1928) made her debut as an artist with a solo show at Gallery Takemiya in 1953. Between then and 1957, when she got married and put her career on indefinite hold, she streaked like a comet across Japan's art scene. Today, however, her photocollage works are enjoying renewed accolades. Although photocollage remains her hallmark technique, the most eye-catching work in the present show is the 1955 Woman, which she created from multiple exposures.

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