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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 December 2016

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Azamino Contemporary Vol. 7: Not a Shred of Foreboding

7 - 30 October 2016

Yokohama Civic Art Gallery Azamino
(Kanagawa)

Taking its title from a line in the old RC Succession rock hit "Slow Ballad," this show featured works by young or youngish artists Hiroko Okada, Sachiko Kazama, Shingo Kanagawa, Hikaru Suzuki, and Kohei Sekigawa. In addition to the satirical woodcuts for which she is known, Kazama presented a new series on the theme of school bullying. Sekigawa's pencil drawings, all titled Figure, depicted birds, plants, monsters and what have you, but all in the shape of manmade objects.

TWS-Emerging 2016 (Part 4)

15 October - 13 November 2016

Tokyo Wonder Site Shibuya
(Tokyo)

This three-person show, introducing Yuki Murai, Emi Mizukami, and Shinako Sakurama, was part of the "Emerging" series that showcases young artists selected for the annual Tokyo Wonder Wall exhibition. Murai describes his oeuvre as an exploration of the "powerful medium of ‘rice-omelet' paints" -- i.e., colors mixed and mashed up just like eggs in an omelet. As one might expect, the results do not look especially painterly.

New "Artists Today" Exhibition 2016: Spaces of Creation; Mono-ha to the Art of Today

22 September - 9 October 2016

Yokohama Civic Art Gallery
(Kanagawa)

The gallery's "Artists Today" series, which ran for four decades from its opening in 1964, has resurfaced in a "New" incarnation. This inaugural show highlighted artists dealing in the relations between objects and other objects, space, and the body. A standout was Akiko Ikeuchi's work with yarn, which she stretches in swatches from wall to wall and lets sag nearly to the floor, inducing a sort of surface tension that is nearly unbearable to witness.

Sayo Nagase: Cut-Out

23 September - 8 October 2016

Gallery 360°
(Tokyo)

Inspired, she says, by Henri Matisse in his late period, artist-photographer Nagase currently devotes herself to the art of the cut-out. In these works she scissors paper into net-like meshes, which she photographs in juxtaposition with female models. Inkjet-printing the images on aluminum plates, she then covers them with transparent color filters. The resultant blurring of textures has the effect of simultaneously stimulating the senses of sight and touch.

Teiko Shiotani 1899-1988

20 August - 23 October 2016

Mitaka City Gallery of Art
(Tokyo)

One of Japan's prewar pioneers in art photography, Shiotani is best known for his scenes of people and places in his hometown of Akasaki, Tottori Prefecture. Here, however, the focus is on more innovative works such as the handcolored monochrome Still Life (1928), or Skeleton and Pickaxe (1935), a daring composition that looks like it might have been shot by a photographer in Mexico. Large-scale landscapes like 1957's Flock of Sparrows at Dusk prove that Shiotani's creative impulses survived the war intact.

Fukushima Photo Museum Project + Shibata

19 October - 4 November 2016

Kanemasu Shuzo Nigogura Gallery
(Niigata)

Organized by the Fukushima-based Hama-Naka-Aizu Cultural Project, this strong show of work by nine photographers took place in a converted sake storehouse in Shibata, in neighboring Niigata Prefecture. Toshiya Murakoshi's Fukushima 2015 and Tomoaki Akasaka's Living in Mountains (portraying endangered villages in Fukushima's remote Oku-Aizu region), in particular, should be taken on the road.

Kazuya Sakamoto: Between Breaths

30 September - 29 October 2016

Nichido Contemporary Art
(Tokyo)

Sakamoto's paintings of waterweeds are an intense tumult of green that resembles a jungle of tree branches, leaves and vines. Dominating the space is the mammoth Landscape Gardening. Smaller works like Day to Day evince the artist's intense awareness of the picture plane, while Imbalance is a knife-slathered tour de force of abstract expressionism.

Eriko Koga Exhibition

21 October - 26 November 2016

Emon Photo Gallery
(Tokyo)

Photographer Koga moved to Kyoto, married a Buddhist priest, and bore a child. Her new series Tryadhvan (a Sanskrit word expressing the "three times" of past, present and future) depicts her Kyoto life in black and white scenes that reference old temple photos and ultrasound scans of her child. With their soft, blurred focus, the images seem to float in a twilight world between dream and reality.

Roppongi Art Night 2016

21 - 23 October 2016

Roppongi Hills, Tokyo Midtown, other venues
(Tokyo)

A one-night event when it launched in 2009, the gala mid-Tokyo art bash just keeps growing. Among this year's most memorable installations: Kubo Gaetan's Smoothie, which appears to be just another indoor video shoot until the boxlike shack the camera is filming begins rotating, causing clothes and everyday objects to leap about; and Kurumi Wakaki's Beneath the Wheel, in which the artist herself runs in place for hours on end in a giant hamster wheel facing Roppongi Station.

Mien Nakao: Coming Ages

8 - 29 October 2016

Ns Art Project
(Osaka)

Nakao has taken her training in the conservation of historical artworks and applied those techniques to her own art. After listening to the owners of lovingly preserved old kimonos and folding fans tell their stories, Nakao creates replicas of the items and adds handwritten accounts of those personal recollections. This is history with a small "h" that springs from the heart.

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