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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.

16 May 2016

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Imamura Ryousuke: Falling Objects

8 - 20 March 2016

Art Space Niji
(Kyoto)

On display are: a blue plastic bucket containing an iPhone; a potted daphne plant; a white curtain; and seven paintings. The images of everyday minutia that play back on the iPhone resonate with these tranquil paintings, which portray white magnolias and scenes of snow turning to rain. The scent of the daphne permeates the room, unifying the entire space. Truly an exhibition for all the senses.

Masayasu Mitsuke

27 February - 9 April 2016

Ota Fine Arts
(Tokyo)

Mitsuke is a master of aka-e, the iron-oxide-based red enamel paintings applied to Kutani porcelain. Originating in Song-dynasty China, the style first gained a foothold in Japan in Imari and Kyoto, then spread to Kutani in present-day Ishikawa Prefecture. Mitsuke also paints traditional figures of people, birds, and flowers, but his real forte is the painstaking line drawing of exquisite geometric patterns that call to mind Arabesque mosaics or even computer graphics.

Daido Moriyama: Terayama

5 February - 27 March 2016

Poster Hari's Gallery
(Tokyo)

These two fabled mavericks -- photographer Moriyama (b.1938) and playwright/filmmaker Shuji Terayama (1935-83) -- mutually inspired each other from the sixties on. The show centers around a photo series Moriyama printed up to accompany Terayama's essay collection Life on the Wrong Side of Town: Sports Edition (1972). It also commemorates the publication of a new Moriyama photo book, Terayama, in which the images are juxtaposed in collage-like fashion with fragments of Terayama's prose on such topics as boxing, sumo, horse and bicycle racing, and dogfights.

Introduction to Archives XIII: Tokyo Biennale '70, Revisited

22 February - 25 March 2016

Keio University Art Center
(Tokyo)

The 10th International Art Exhibition of Japan, better known as Tokyo Biennale '70, is legendary in the annals of contemporary art in Japan. Instead of the usual paintings and sculptures, general commissioner Yusuke Nakahara devoted most of the space to site-specific installations, still an unfamiliar concept at the time. For this very reason little is known about the actual layout of the exhibition, a mystery this show attempts to solve through a detailed analysis of photographic records and other materials.

Nao Tsuda: Grassland Tears

20 February - 26 March 2016

Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film
(Tokyo)

Tsuda has been snapping a series of images related to prehistoric Jomon culture in northeastern Japan since well before the March 2011 earthquake devastated the region. This exhibition offers an array of four landscapes and ten photos of excavated Jomon-era relics. The landscapes reveal that Tsuda has an uncanny nose for sniffing out sites redolent of Jomon life and culture.

Yusuke Nishimura: The Folk

3 March - 2 April 2016

IMA Gallery
(Tokyo)

Nishimura started out in film production, then switched to photography, working mostly for magazines and advertising agencies. Three years ago, however, he saw a folk-entertainment performance at Tokyo's Meiji Shrine that changed his life. The power of the performance overwhelmed him, then inspired him to begin traveling all over Japan, photographing local practitioners of traditional dances and the like from Hokkaido to Okinawa. His images fairly burst with the spontaneous energy of old Japanese folkways.

Shingo Tanaka: meltrans

4 - 27 March 2016

eN arts
(Kyoto)

Tanaka takes burnable materials like paper and wood, exposes them to flame, then "paints" with the charred remains. In these new works he melts plastic supermarket shopping bags of various colors and uses the resulting liquefied globs to produce three-dimensional, abstract-expressionist works.

Soyoka Mouri

12 - 17 March 2016

Gallery Shimada Deux
(Hyogo)

Mouri employs pigment, earth, and meticulous pencil-drawn lines to depict rhizomes -- plant stems that grow underground. Perhaps rhizomes symbolize things that are invisible yet essential to humanity, like the world of the subconscious. Her work exudes an energy that seems to have built up inside her to the point of criticality and is just on the verge of exploding above the surface.

Takashi Sasaoka: TIMES2016

12 - 26 March 2016

CAS (Contemporary Art and Spirits)
(Osaka)

Sasaoka used two projectors to screen a panorama-size video of scenery shot from a speeding car. Viewers were astonished to hear the artist explain that the projectors were actually showing the same video side by side, but staggered in time. On a second viewing, one could see that the two sequences were indeed the same video. The effect was to give viewers a glimpse of a different perception of time -- two "times," actually -- from what we normally experience.

Made in Occupied Japan 1947-1952

26 March - 17 April 2016

Setagaya Culture Life Information Center
(Tokyo)

From 1947, when the Allied Powers occupying postwar Japan reopened the country to private trade, until 1952, when the Occupation ended, the Allied GHQ required that all Japanese exports be stamped "Made in Occupied Japan." The scarcity of such items has made them coveted by collectors, particularly in the U.S. and Canada. This show displays some 200 small ceramic ornaments -- the "novelties" for which Japan became known during this period.

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