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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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| Akiko Isobe: Dinner |
| 9 May - 7 June 2015 |
G/P gallery
(Tokyo) |
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| As a commercial photographer, Isobe (b. 1977) does a lot of studio work, and it shows in her progressive technical growth. The works in this show are colorful and poppish, providing plenty of eye candy. But Isobe's forte is her tricky juxtaposition of human figures with various objects, and one can sense here how much she enjoys the trial-and-error process of putting them together. |
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| Shunsuke Imai, Kenjiro Okazaki, Oyama Enrico Isamu Letter |
| 9 May - 6 June 2015 |
Takuro Someya Contemporary Art
(Tokyo) |
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| An excellent joint show featuring three very different painters. Okazaki arranges sets of small canvases thickly slathered with paint; according to his own unique system, Imai composes color fields that resemble various types of fluttering flags; while Oyama employs graffiti-like strokes in his work. |
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| Hiromi Tsuchida: Counting Grains of Sand |
| 24 April - 7 June 2015 |
Gallery Tanto Tempo
(Hyogo) |
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| For his monochromatic "Counting Grains of Sand" series, Tsuchida snapped pictures of large groups of people in various locales around Japan. Taken between 1976 and 1989, they spanned the years from the end of the "rapid economic growth" period to the death of the Showa emperor. In the more recent series "New: Counting the Grains of Sand," his subjects are scattered, keeping their distance from one another. The images are colorful, yet somehow bleak and hollow. The contrast between the two series starkly emblemizes the deterioration of Japanese society. |
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| Kazuo Okazaki: Supplements |
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27 April - 14 June 2015 |
Galerie Ashiya Schule
(Hyogo) |
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| "Supplements" is an artistic concept that sculptor Okazaki (b. 1930) developed in the 1960s. His creations typically reverse the front and back or interior and exterior of everyday objects. Representative of this approach is Hisashi ("Eaves"), for which Okazaki took the eaves normally attached to the outer wall of a Japanese house and placed them on the gallery's inner wall, thus stripping them of their original function and slyly inverting exterior and interior space. His small, seemingly innocuous objects conceal a bold attack on the concept of space and on the artistic system itself. |
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| Yoshimi Ikemoto: Shops of the Early Modern Era |
| 20 May - 2 June 2015 |
Nikon Salon
(Tokyo) |
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| Since 1983 Ikemoto (b. 1944) has devoted himself to photographing small shops and their owners. One can almost feel the textures of the tools and objects filling these crowded spaces, but the real charm lies in the often curmudgeonly personas of the shopkeepers. As a type they are on the wane: people proud of their work, who organize their immediate environment according to their own predilections. These are truly people of the 20th century, and images like Ikemoto's may be the last we see of them. |
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| Sou Fujimoto: Futures of the Future |
| 17 April - 13 June 2015 |
Toto Gallery MA
(Tokyo) |
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| A vast array of models spreads out in orderly formation across the room. What appeals most are not the models of building projects, but the numerous odd objects that appear to be deformations of everyday items, made out of crushed wads of paper and the like. Just as an artist creates art from the quotidian, Fujimoto appears capable of creating architectural structures out of the most unassuming materials. |
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Lost "number" Update part 1 |
28 May - 3 June 2015 |
Espace Biblio
(Tokyo) |
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| From 1972 to 1975, photography students at Tokyo Zokei University published 11 issues of a mini-magazine titled number. While their campus was closed by student barricades, they held their own seminars at Yutaka Takanashi's office in Nogizaka. A small photocopied pamphlet (it was offset-printed from Issue 8 on), the magazine is like a series of snapshots of the lives, work, and surrounding reality of young photographers of the day. |
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| Iori Yoshimoto: Exalt Your Tears and Smile |
| 4 - 24 May 2015 |
Site-A Gallery
(Kanagawa) |
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| This was the final Yokohama show for Yoshimoto, who has been an artist in residence in the city's Koganecho art district since 2012. On display were 15 of her near-monochrome landscape paintings. Yoshimoto rarely uses canvas, instead stretching cotton cloth across panels and applying acrylic, graphite, sumi ink, and pigments in a style reminiscent of Nihonga. |
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| Modern Japanese Society and Painting: Representations of War |
| 11 April - 7 June 2015 |
Itabashi Art Museum
(Tokyo) |
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| The Itabashi has assembled, from its own collection, this sampling of war-related paintings from the period surrounding World War II -- primarily the 1930s to the 1960s. Over half are surrealist works by the likes of Iwami Furusawa and Kikuji Yamashita. The relationship between surrealism and war sounds like a topic ripe with possibilities. What it calls for, however, is a more incisive examination of how artists who migrated from surrealism to war painting integrated these two seemingly disparate concepts. |
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