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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.
1 December 2011
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Naoya Hatakeyama: Natural Stories
1 October - 4 December 2011
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
(Tokyo)
Photographer Hatakeyama is best known for series like Blast and Terrils in which the invasion of natural environments by man-made forces -- notably coal and limestone mining -- yields perversely sublime landscapes. This exhibition further addresses the reverse phenomenon experienced by his hometown of Rikuzentakata, where a violent force of nature -- the tsunami of March 11 -- devastated a man-made environment. The different stages of debris cleanup visible here are inadvertent markers for the passage of time while Hatakeyama shot the series.

Benesse Art Site: Naoshima, Teshima, Inujima
Ongoing
Benesse Art Site Naoshima
(Kagawa)
Sprawling across several islands in the Seto Inland Sea, the Benesse company's massive art and architecture project is impossible to take in at a glance, but this reviewer recently had a chance to visit the three main venues on Naoshima, Inujima, and Teshima. It is nearly two decades since the Tadao Ando-designed Benesse House Museum opened on Naoshima in 1992. On the same island, the Art House Project began in 1998 with Tatsuo Miyajima's Kadoya, the first of several empty homes to be restored for art installation purposes, providing a template for similar efforts around Japan like the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale.
Ways of Worldmaking
4 October - 11 December 2011
The National Museum of Art, Osaka
(Osaka)
This show introduces nine artists and art units who represent a new generation's attempts to "make the world" in previously unexplored ways. To older critics like this reviewer it can be a cruel experience to have one's preconceived notions of "installation" or "media art" upended in so ruthless a manner. The prevailing message seems to be, "Deal with it!" Featured are exonemo, Paramodel, Kengo Kito, Teppei Kaneuji, Ryota Kuwakubo, Junko Kido, Masanori Handa, Yasuaki Onishi, and Zon Ito+Ryoko Aoki.
Nakanoshima Collections

4 October - 11 December 2011
The National Museum of Art, Osaka
(Osaka)
While controversy rages in Osaka over whether or not to merge the city and the prefecture, two museums that will soon be neighbors in the downtown Nakanoshima district are cooperating on an exhibition. The new Osaka City Museum of Modern Art is being built next to the National Museum of Art, Osaka, which is hosting this joint show of 20th-century Western art. While the City Museum collection leans toward School of Paris artists like Modigliani, Laurencin, and Yuzo Saeki, the National's offering of Kandinsky, Duchamp, Frize, Ozbolt, Makoto Aida and Mika Kato is decidedly more contemporary.
Nishino Travelers: Where Is Your Destination?

22 October - 25 December 2011
Art Area B1, Naniwabashi Station
(Osaka)
"Vol. 1" of a Railway Art Festival that aims to bring artists and trains together in a variety of ways, this inaugural show features artist Tatsu Nishino, who has lots of fun with the railroad motif. Highlights include a standalone front door through which visitors are invited to board and exit trains, and a 30-meter long hand-drawn guide to the Keihan Electric Railway, in whose Naniwabashi Station this art space resides. Trains and artists go way back -- at least as far as Turner and Monet -- so this festival's theme would seem to have plenty of potential.
So Shimada: Side B Neighborhood

24 November - 6 December 2011
spectrum gallery
(Osaka)
Thanks in part to his ample use of cartoon techniques like effects lines, exclamations, and simplified geometric backgrounds, Shimada's wacky world brims with speed and vitality. His hodgepodge imagery contrasts intriguingly with the venue itself, a gallery located on the second floor of a restored Meiji-era row house in Osaka. Somehow, the idiosyncratic elements of the art and its ambience play off against each other quite nicely.
Japan-Belgium Print Exchange Exhibition

18 November - 11 December 2011
Kyoto City University of Arts Art Gallery
(Kyoto)
This is the second installment of an exhibition that opened this past spring. Whereas Part 1 focused on small-size works, Part 2 is a more ambitious endeavor that showcases new work by a veritable army of printmakers -- 51 artists from Belgium and the Kansai region. The diversity of techniques and modes of expression on parade is downright dizzying. The current show opened with a lecture at the host university by celebrated lithographer Ingrid Ledent.

Ring of Water

30 October 2011
Yamamoto Nohgakudo
(Osaka)
For the past year, Osaka's oldest Noh theater, Yamamoto Nohgakudo, has been collaborating with LED lighting designer Takayuki Fujimoto on a series of innovative productions that cater to novice Noh-goers. The latest, the "new Noh" composition Ring of Water, began in the early evening with an introduction by shite (lead actor) Akihiro Yamamoto and was followed by a Q&A period -- a program rather unusual for the Noh tradition even today.

Takashi Kunitani: Mars

18 October - 6 November 2011
Gallery PARC
(Kyoto)
Kunitani has frequently created installations of neon tubing that achieve a powerful impact with their vivid colors and curiously static corralling of light. Each of these shows has also interacted with its ambience in refreshingly different ways. This one took place in a second-floor gallery with large windows overlooking Sanjo, one of Kyoto's busiest commercial streets. The glass walls and the polished floor reflected the light from some thirty red neon tubes scattered at random across the space.
Ryoko Suzuki's Solo Exhibition: Magnolia
1 - 29 October 2011
CAI02
(Hokkaido)
Suzuki is best known for provocative images of pin-up doll figures on which she has superimposed her own head. In this series, however, both heads and bodies are those of flesh-and-blood human beings. At first glance they appear to be nude self-portraits, but the incongruous musculature, body hair, and occasional penis reveal that the figures from the neck down are actually male. Might the next step be to mermaids and centaurs?
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