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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 March 2016

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Kensaku Kakimoto: Translator

16 - 31 January 2016

Hillside Forum
(Tokyo)

Best known as a director of television commercials, Kakimoto is also a peripatetic still photographer. This show was like a travelogue of images -- the Mongol plains, a highway across the Great Salt Lake, the frozen sea of Iceland, a rocket launch in Kazakh, a makeshift theme park produced by artists in Weston-super-Mare, UK. The jarring shifts in setting do in fact recall the discontinuous, rapid-fire cuts of a TV ad or music video.

Daido Moriyama: Daido in Color

15 December 2015 - 30 January 2016

AM
(Tokyo)

A legend for his high-contrast street shots in black and white, Moriyama (b. 1938) has also been shooting in color from the outset. This exhibition featured over 150 color images by a man who has said: "The feeling I get from color is that it's pop, it's clear, it's junk -- in a good sense, it's flimsy."

Maeko Sato: Love Letter Under the Desk (Longing for the Mail)

9 - 30 January 2016

Asahi Art Square
(Tokyo)

Huge wads of crumpled-up paper fill a two-story-high space. The curious title suggests a growing pile of half-written love letters, tossed under a desk and never mailed. Sato's installation appears to be a magnified reconstruction of this scene.

Shiro Takatani: ST/LL

23 - 24 January 2016

Biwako Hall Center for the Performing Arts
(Shiga)

There's no recognizable storyline, but the flawlessly executed blend of image, sound and lighting links fragmentary scenes in a sequence that evokes a beautiful daydream. An ethereal touch is provided by the thin sheet of water that covers the stage. Faintly echoing splashes and infinitely expanding ripples awaken us to the lucid dream concocted by Takatani.

The Copy Travelers: Hot Stove League 2016

15 January - 1 February 2016

Division
(Kyoto)

The Copy Travelers are three Kyoto-based artists who wreak havoc with such weapons as copiers, scanners, and cameras. Working, they say, by the watchwords "Copy, Collage, and Collective," they slice, dice, shred, superimpose, and skew material much as a dance club DJ scratches records to improvise noise-laden soundscapes. Using blurs, wrinkles, reflected light and shadows to distort information, they wield the copier to churn out noisy new images in rapid succession.

Yoshiyuki Okuyama: Bacon Ice Cream

22 January - 7 February 2016

Parco Museum
(Tokyo)

Only 25, Okuyama has already made his mark as an advertising and fashion photographer. Seemingly effortless in his ability to capture, then release, all manner of color, form, and light, he displays a rock-solid confidence beyond his years. Like his photos, his installations and exhibitions always contain elements of surprise and trickery. No wonder the industry views him as their great young hope. A retrospective of the past five years of Okuyama's output, this show celebrated the publication of his new photo collection by the same title.

Yasushi Yamabe Works: Shifts of a Changing Landscape

25 - 30 January 2016

Gallery Q
(Tokyo)

In the 1980s Yamabe was active in such Kansai-based projects as the "Yes Art" movement and "Fujiyama Geisha," a joint exhibition by Kyoto and Tokyo art schools. Here he presents a series of landscapes that shift over time in an incremental process that is at least as fascinating as the individual works themselves.

Yasuyoshi Botan: gone before flower

10 January - 6 February 2016

ArtCourt Gallery
(Osaka)

Line drawings in pencil and borderless planes of color jostle with one another in a show that depicts a complex, ambiguous, fluctuating world with no center. The last gallery is dominated by an installation of monumental works: a mountainous object of roughly assembled timber, a huge dragon motif, and a large painting of textile-like color patterns.

Yoshiko Naragino

11 - 23 January 2016

Art Salon Yamaki
(Osaka)

Ceramic artist Naragino has made a splash with tall, cylindrical, totem-pole-like objects covered by vivid ornamentation in relief. This time she confined her presentation to more conventionally shaped but no less colorful and playfully ornate dishes and cups. A celebration of life courses through all her work. Though these pieces are most likely made for viewing, one gets the urge to serve a meal on them.

Syria - The Lost Home - Yusuke Suzuki

9 - 24 January 2016

Artzone
(Kyoto)

This solo show by New York-based photojournalist Suzuki included photos and videos taken when he visited the war zone of Syria in 2013, and photos of Syrian refugees on the island of Lesbos in 2015. The images confront us with the question of what we can do about the plight of these refugees and the tragedy of Syria. The first step, at least, is to learn about it, for which reason one hopes this exhibition will make a nationwide tour.

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