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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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1 December 2015 |
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| Hiroshi Mikami: QUAUGLYPH |
| 18 September - 15 November 2015 |
Sagacho Archives
(Tokyo) |
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| Stone sculptor Mikami uses a camera to capture the instant when sparks fly as he strikes a stone with a hammer. He then composes glyphic characters, or "quauglyphs," based on the shapes of the sparks. This show introduced his photos of quauglyphs alongside an installation of the stones he used to make them. To Mikami, whose art consists of transforming stone into something altogether different, no doubt these photographs are themselves a form of stone sculpture. |
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| Nobuaki Onishi: Itself |
| 10 October - 7 November 2015 |
MA2 Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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| Scattered about the room are a tree branch, two halves of a skull, a lotus flower, a fatsia plant. All are plaster-cast reproductions made of resin, painted white or with a mirror finish. Onishi's craft is sublime as always; this time, however, his objects are more conceptual, without the "I can't believe it's fake" trickiness of previous work. |
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| Yusuke Asai: Where Does Painting Come From? |
| 3 October - 7 November 2015 |
Arataniurano
(Tokyo) |
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| The gallery walls are covered floor to ceiling with drawings in chalk or other white media on a black background. Asai's unique ornamental patterns of plants and animals are never boring. But how, the viewer begins to wonder, does one sell this sort of work? A closer look, however, reveals ten tableau-like paintings affixed here and there to the larger mural. Asai applies the same perfectionist devotion to both formats, salable and unsalable. |
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| Le Corbusier and Japan: With a Focus on the Three Apprentices Who Built the National Museum of Western Art |
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21 July - 8 November 2015 |
National Archives of Modern Architecture
(Tokyo) |
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| Introducing modernist architecture's master, Le Corbusier (1887-1965), and examining the profound influence he has exerted on contemporary Japanese architecture, this show was an opportunity to view in one place original documents and digital archives of three architects who studied with him: Kunio Maekawa, Junzo Sakakura, and Takamasa Yoshizaka. Providing a sense of how more contemporary practitioners have responded to his legacy are photographs of Le Corbusier's work shot by Arata Isozaki, Yukio Futagawa, and Fumihiko Maki, as well as sketches by Tadao Ando. |
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| Tsuzuki Art Project 2015: Newtown Loves Ghost |
| 4 October - 1 November 2015 |
Otsuka/Saikachido Relics Park
(Kanagawa) |
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| The Tsuzuki Art Project temporarily took over Otsuka/Saikachido Relics Park, which sits next to the Kohoku New Town business district in suburban Yokohama. Making use of the ancient pit dwellings on display in the park, participating artists responded to this year's theme of "relics and art" by building cardboard houses inside the restored dwellings, creating a Zen-like rock garden out of papier-mache, and constructing an observation platform. |
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Takashi Ito Film Exhibition |
29 October - 1 November 2015 |
Lumen Gallery
(Kyoto) |
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| Takashi Ito (b. 1956) is Japan's premier experimental filmmaker. This event offered screenings of 23 of his works, which fell into two main categories: frame-by-frame animations produced with a still camera in the 1980s and early 1990s, and longer works from the 1990s to the present that construct an absurd psychological world from images of real human figures. A concurrent exhibition of Ito's photographic materials and equipment at Gallery Main next door testified to the exhaustive handwork required to produce Ito's magical films. |
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| Kouseki Ono: The Artist Who Creates New Meanings of Printing |
| 17 October - 15 November 2015 |
Galerie Ashiya Schule
(Hyogo) |
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| Ono's tour-de-force, the 33-panel Hundred Layers of Colors, is just that: the product of a hundred or more layers of silkscreen ink. Closer scrutiny reveals that the surfaces of the panels consist of tight, meticulously laid out rows of tiny 1-centimeter protuberances: pillars of multicolored layers of ink. As you move around, viewing the works from different angles, colors appear that were not visible from head-on. The effect of these ever-shifting hues is hypnotic. |
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| Sawako Tanizawa + Kaori Fujino: Unnamed |
| 23 October - 1 November 2015 |
Kunst Arzt
(Kyoto) |
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| In this intrepid multimedia collaboration, prizewinning novelist Kaori Fujino wrote a short story about a series of doll-like ceramic figures created by artist Sawako Tanizawa. With empty cavities substituting for eyes, nose, and mouth, these objects look like something children might make while playing with clay. But their expressions, at once humorous and creepy, fuel an unfolding narrative tailored to each figure in turn. |
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