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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 2016

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Rinko Kawauchi: The rain of blessing

20 May - 25 September 2016

Gallery 916
(Tokyo)

The titular series, the photographer's latest, is but one of four making up this show. The others represented here are the eyes, the ears (from a 2005 photo album), Search for the sun (from a 2015 solo show at Austria's Kunst Haus Wien), and The river embraced me (from a recent exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto). Kawauchi possesses powers of expression capable of drawing any type of subject matter into her own world.

Ryuji Miyamoto: Kowloon Walled City

20 May - 4 July 2016

Canon Gallery S
(Tokyo)

It's been 20 years since they tore down Hong Kong's notorious Walled City. Once viewed as a den of iniquity, a high-rise slum spawning countless urban legends, today it is largely forgotten. That makes Miyamoto's photographic record of the place, shot in the late 1980s and early 1990s, all the more precious. As he says in his notes for this exhibition, the Walled City was "a community of people driven into dire straits by the burden of a fraught history," and "a crystallization of the collective unconscious of the Chinese people."

AGC Studio Exhibition No.17: U-35 Young Architect Japan

21 April - 16 July 2016

AGC Studio
(Tokyo)

Subtitled "Diversity of Light in Glass Architecture," this show displays designs that feature new uses of glass, entered in Asahi Glass's annual under-35 competition by six young architects or architect teams. Grand Prize winner Fumiko Takahama has constructed a small pavilion of super-thin curved glass inside the exhibition space.

Movie Theaters: The Works of Satoshi Chuma, Projectionist-Photographer

12 April - 10 July 2016

The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
(Tokyo)

The museum's National Film Center presents some 100 images of historic small cinemas all over Japan, shot mostly in monochrome by Chuma, himself a projectionist. One can also see photos of the grand movie houses of the prewar era from the Center's own archive. Many of those venues had over a thousand seats, yet boasted modern, even avant-garde designs that belied their popular-culture function.

Seiichi Motohashi: Sense of Place

7 February - 5 July 2016

Izu Photo Museum
(Shizuoka)

Motohashi has spent his career veering close to documentary photography, only to catch us by surprise with sui generis work of stunning breadth and depth. This retrospective assembles some 200 photos of such subjects as Ueno Station, a coal mine, a slaughterhouse, a circus, and Chernobyl. Unifying the disparate series is Motohashi's palpable determination to capture the atmosphere of each place or occasion with all of his senses -- not only sight but sound, smell, taste, and touch.

Leonard Foujita: Art Bridging the East and the West

29 April - 3 July 2016

Nagoya City Art Museum
(Aichi)

Up to 20 or 30 years ago, Foujita was held in relatively low regard, if not outright contempt, in his homeland. Lately, though, young Japanese seem drawn first to his war paintings, learning only later that he once belonged to the Ecole de Paris. Few, one suspects, become enamored of his early milky-white nudes before viewing his wartime output. Nor is it well known that even during the war he was painting Millet-like landscapes and fairytale imagery, a fact hard to reconcile with his battle scenes. This exhibition commemorates the 130th anniversary of his birth.

Mika Ninagawa: Fashion Exclusive

23 April - 8 May 2016

Omotesando Hills Space O
(Tokyo)

Looking at the 85 fashion and advertising photos she has suspended from the ceiling, it becomes clear that Ninagawa has truly grasped, visualized, and disseminated the commercial gestalt of the 21st century to date. The function of this work is to give persuasive concrete form to corporate images, but it also holds up a well-polished mirror to our times. In Japan's visual world, at least, the 2000s were unquestionably the Mika Ninagawa Era.

Yajuro Takashima: Light and Darkness, Traces of a Soul

9 April - 5 June 2016

Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo
(Tokyo)

A Western-style oil painter of exquisite still lifes and landscapes, Kyushu-born Takashima (1890-1975) graduated from Tokyo Imperial University with honors, then defied family expectations by becoming an artist, and a reclusive one at that -- no art coterie affiliations, no family, no sales, and no recognition in his lifetime. He worked and died in obscurity, and only recently is getting his well-deserved due. The show commemorates the 40th anniversary of his death.

Rina Mizuno: The Line Between Painting and Drawing

13 April - 20 May 2016

Dai-ichi Life Gallery
(Tokyo)

Mizuno uses thick Lichtenstein-like brushstrokes to depict flowing water and tree trunks, fills her canvases with finely drawn floral patterns and stripes, and adds the occasional building or article of furniture for good measure. Her ornamental approach to painting shares something with Nihonga that straddle the boundary between the figurative and the abstract. Above all, her colors are gorgeous.

Art Fair Tokyo 2016

12 - 14 May 2016

Tokyo International Forum Hall E
(Tokyo)

This was the annual fair's 11th year at the cavernous Tokyo International Forum, and the biggest to date: 157 participating galleries, including 19 from overseas. Of note was the establishment of a "100KIN" corner featuring works from various galleries priced under 1 million yen. The impetus was a recent but little-known change in Japan's tax laws that raised the limit on deduction of artworks as depreciable assets from 200,000 yen to 1 million. The galleries hope this will encourage more people to buy more art, of course.

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