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Picks is a monthly sampling of Japan's art scene, offering short reviews of exhibitions at museums and galleries in recent weeks, with an emphasis on contemporary art by young artists.
17 January 2011
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Tomoko Nagai: Winter Wind and Konko
17 December 2010 - 5 February 2011
Tomio Koyama Gallery Kyoto, TKG Editions Kyoto
(Kyoto)
Bears, cats, deer, young girls and various imaginary creatures appear as colorful motifs scattered throughout Nagai's paintings of fanciful worlds. The artist, who says she never makes preliminary sketches, chooses to work with pastels, color pencils, watercolors or oils according to her subject. Held concurrently in two different venues at the Koyama gallery building in Kyoto, the show includes wall paintings and installations.

Takahiro Iwasaki: Phenotypic Remodeling
22 October - 4 December 2010
ARATANIURANO
(Tokyo)
This solo show includes works typical of Iwasaki's oeuvre, such as his 10-cm-high power pylons made out of threads unraveled from blankets, as well as new pieces in which he has constructed signs from the logos cut out of McDonald's hamburger wrappers or convenience store uniforms. Other works involve place names written on tree branches; Iwasaki sought out road maps in configurations resembling the lay of the branches and affixed the names of the matching locations.
Mimi Yokoo: Painting
18 October - 13 November 2010
Nantenshi Gallery
(Tokyo)
This is Mimi Yokoo's first show at the Nantenshi since 2007. Framed in white boxes and festooned with food models, figures, syrup bottles and the like, her depictions of food -- her favorite motif -- are more objects than paintings. Yokoo's pointillistic style reveals a level of technique superior to that of her famous father Tadanori.
Yume Akasaka: Miniature garden

25 October - 6 November 2010
ASK? art space kimura
(Tokyo)
Appropriately enough for an artist whose name, Yume, is a homonym for "dream," Akasaka produces truly dreamlike animations, created from still photos, in which bird, fish and butterfly images flit whitely across the walls of the darkened gallery. Particularly masterful is her use of two basement walls that form a right angle, across which her images change as they shift from wall to wall -- a contemporary version of the "Metamorphoses" myths.
Ken Matsuyama: Vanity Fake

23 October - 27 November 2010
Galerie Sho Contemporary Art
(Tokyo)
Three major works make up this show; all are portraits of cutely erotic young women, posed before different backgrounds. One piece, on wood instead of canvas, places the subject against a carved floral background that resembles a woodblock print, but the flower pattern is also carved into the girl's exposed body, like a tattoo. The other two paintings have more abstract backgrounds -- one in drip-painting style ala Morris Louis, the other an expressionist composition, as if scraped on with a painting knife in the style of Gerhard Richter.
Naoko Takahashi: Does scenery cling to me?

1 - 7 November 2010
PLACE M
(Tokyo)
Takahashi's snapshots testify eloquently to her heightened cognitive powers. Snapshot photography requires not only quick reflexes, but the strength of conviction to shoot NOW. Though still young (she was born in 1984), Takahashi clearly possesses a snapshooter's instincts. The result is a body of increasingly profound and stimulating work that subtly oozes both humor and malice.
Takako Hojo: Spiral Light Sprinkle

2 - 28 November 2010
Art Front Gallery
(Tokyo)
Hojo's recent paintings have been noteworthy for her fluid renderings of verdant landscapes, but this time she scatters white and pink flowers across the canvas. Or it might be more accurate to say that the stippling effect of her brushwork merely resembles flowers. Hojo started out painting abstracts, so perhaps she is simply reverting to form. Whatever the case, the process of evolution (or fluctuation) we see in her work is enjoyable in itself.

Ai Kitahara: Building for One

23 October - 14 November 2010
Gallery Simon
(Kanagawa)
This solo show in Yokohama by Paris-based Kitahara features drawings and sculptures she created while in residence at a former psychiatric hospital in Orleans, France. Pen and pencil line drawings of the rooms depict the hospital interior in monochrome, with colors visible only through the windows. Inspired by the fact that the hospital was once crammed with patients, her work "Building for One" represents the space occupied by one person as a sphere in which circles intersect one another at right angles.

Saburo Aso

9 November - 19 December 2010
The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
(Tokyo)
Even as he kept one foot in the establishment world of "Western-style" Japanese painting and official group exhibitions, Aso (1913-2000) was part of a new breed of pre- and postwar artists who contributed to the evolution of contemporary art in Japan. Though of the last generation devoted to the expression of an individual "attitude toward life," the fact that he continued painting long after the war makes him more difficult for academics to pigeonhole as a modernist than, say, Ai-Mitsu, a less fortunate colleague who died right after the war.
Taiji Matsue: survey of time
23 October - 20 November 2010
Taro Nasu
(Tokyo)
This show brings together 15 still photographs from Matsue's earliest work, the 1987 series "TRANSIT," and seven video works from his latest project, "survey of time." The 35-mm streetscape snapshots of "TRANSIT," which marked his debut as a solo exhibitor, betray his adoration of Daido Moriyama. The more recent "survey of time" is an ambitious, challenging work that reverses the roles of still and video photography, reexamining the process of "seeing" things.
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