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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.
Note: Most of Japan's museums and galleries have reopened, but conditions and anti-coronavirus precautions vary. If you are planning a visit, please check the venue's website beforehand. |
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| KCUA Transmit Program 2020 |
| 4 April - 26 July 2020 |
@KCUA
(Kyoto) |
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| This annual show introduces young artists who have received degrees from Kyoto City University of Arts within the last three years. The four artists featured this year offer works pivoting around two motifs, "physicality" and "referencing art history." Touching on such themes as the exploitation of the body behind the artwork-as-product, and the fullness of life in the face of death, they trace the (dis)continuum between death and life. In this context Yuka Nishihisamatsu's ceramic objects, with their scattering of decorative elements of the sort that adorn the body or apparel, begin to resemble "absent bodies."
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| Tokyo / Mika Ninagawa |
| 12 - 29 June 2020 |
Parco Museum Tokyo
(Tokyo) |
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| This is the first show to open at the museum in Parco's recently remodeled flagship store since the corona-induced shutdown. Photographer Ninagawa rose to the occasion with a strong set of images, including some new work. In the accompanying text she wrote, "I always thought that someday I would have to face Tokyo head-on with my camera." Most of these shots were taken with Fujifilm's disposable Utsurun Desu model, which seems to be perfectly suited to Ninagawa's m.o. The result is a vivid rendering of "the world in a 2.3-meter radius" -- one in which the borderline between reality and fiction is blurred. |
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| I'm Here Project / Atsushi Watanabe: "Monument of Recovery"
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| 1 June - 26 July 2020 |
BankART SILK
(Kanagawa) |
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| Part of Watanabe's I'm Here Project, which gives voice to people (commonly known as hikikomori) who have isolated themselves from society, this show presented concrete "monuments" created by hikikomori in the course of conversations with the artist, in which they explored the reasons they became shut-ins. The monuments on display have been smashed with a hammer, then repaired using the traditional kintsugi technique of mending cracked pottery with seams of gold-powdered lacquer. Thus the scars remain visible. Though the objects are restored to their original shape, the golden seams make the cracks even more conspicuous, confronting the viewer with traces of both destruction and recovery.
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| Uniqlo Architecture |
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Uniqlo Park
Uniqlo Tokyo
(Kanagawa, Tokyo) |
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| This year has seen an intriguing confluence of the Uniqlo brand and architecture. First, there was the opening of the Uniqlo Park Yokohama Bayside store, for which architect Sou Fujimoto developed the basic concept and supervised the design. The structure rises gradually at a diagonal, with a slide, bouldering course and other amusements scattered across the slope. Then Uniqlo Tokyo opened in June, occupying the Marrionnier Gate Ginza2 building. This has been dramatically renovated by Herzog & de Meuron, who cut into walls and floor slabs, subtracting from the original footprint and opening up pleasant spaces both outside and inside, the latter via a multistory atrium. |
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| Tokyo 2020 Corona Spring |
| 11 - 28 June 2020 |
Fugensha
(Tokyo) |
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| With the lifting of the government's emergency declaration in response to the coronavirus, galleries and museums are busy resuming exhibitions that were temporarily interrupted or postponed. One of the first venues to directly address the pandemic was the gallery Fugensha with this show of works and messages by a group of photographers looking back at the "Corona Spring." Of course it's too early to tell what effect that season will have on the world of photography -- but it can't be all negative. For many photographers the shutdown has been an opportunity to stop, take a breather, and contemplate what to do next. |
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Ryuzaburo Shikiba: Mirrors of Cerebral Ventricles |
19 May - 26 July 2020 |
Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art
(Hiroshima) |
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| A look at the life and work of psychiatrist and writer Ryuzaburo Shikiba (1898-1965), known for popularizing the works of artists ranging from Vincent van Gogh to Kiyoshi Yamashita. The exhibition has three sections: "Art and Medicine," about his younger days; "Art and Destiny," introducing his work in the fields of fine art and literature; and "Art and Life," focusing on his association with the Mingei folk-art movement. Due to Shikiba's protean and peripatetic interests, though, it's hard to get a coherent sense of his achievements from this show, which may be best enjoyed as a reflection of Shikiba's own cluttered brain. |
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| The 135th Anniversary of Birth of Ryushi Kawabata |
| 12 May - 21 June 2020 |
Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum
(Hiroshima) |
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| Though Kawabata (1895-1966) is counted among the "Big Three" Nihonga painters of the 20th century, he was capable of creating works beyond the pale of the genre. This retrospective trumpets that attribute with the subtitle "Shocking Japanese Painting," to which a blurb on the flyer adds, "Scale, concept, way of life -- all outside the box!" Take, for example, his bizarre war painting Mt. Xianglu, in which he filled the foreground with a Japanese fighter flying over the fabled Chinese peak. Over seven meters long, the plane is nearly life-size and threatens to block the scenery -- except that the fuselage and wings are transparent so you can see the terrain below. |
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| Kana Ohtsuki: 2020 Tokyo Sightseeing |
| 29 May - 7 June 2020 |
Jinbocho Garou
(Tokyo) |
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| Kyoto-based artist/photographer Ohtsuki uses a film camera to shoot pictures of her two younger sisters. In mid-March they donned masks and traveled to Tokyo, where they strolled around Asakusa, Ikebukuro, and Ginza. These seemingly casual snapshots exude a tension the sisters could not conceal from each other; their surroundings, too, were "unsettled even as they maintained an appearance of calm," in Ohtsuki's words. In time this series may come to be appreciated as a personal documentary of the mood pervading the age of corona.
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