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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.
3 March 2014
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FujiFilm "Only One" Photo Collection
17 January - 5 February 2014
FujiFilm Square
(Tokyo)
An exhibition of 101 works by 101 Japanese photographers. Chronologically they extend from Felice Beato's "Nagasaki, Nakashima River" of 1865 to Hiroh Kikai's "Celebrating Shichi-go-san" of 2001. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the decades of the 1960s and 1970s form a zenith of sorts.
Toward a Design Museum Japan
25 October 2013 - 9 February 2014
21_21 DESIGN SIGHT
(Tokyo)
Designer and museum director Issey Miyake and Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Masanori Aoyagi launched the Society for a Design Museum Japan in the fall of 2012 with a public symposium on the state of design museums in this country. This recent show picked up where the symposium left off, reviewing the exhibitions presented by 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT since it opened in 2007 as well as contemplating the role of design museums in the 21st century.
The "shiseido art egg vol. 8" Exhibition: Shunsuke Kano
10 January - 2 February 2014
Shiseido Gallery
(Tokyo)
The eighth installment of this year's "shiseido art egg" program, which introduces up-and-coming young artists, is devoted to 3D artist Kano, whose work comes close to defying description. In a high-ceilinged gallery, small objects combine to form a very large one that exudes an aura of infinite expansion. Kano's talent for matching materials, scale, and a certain street sense makes him an artist worth watching.
Manabu Numata: Tracing the Surface 2
10 - 22 January 2014
Shinjuku Gankagarou
(Tokyo)
In these 107 photo-portraits, men and women stare at the camera with only the whites of their eyes visible. Rolling one's eyes back is a phenomenon that occurs in the course of transporting oneself from the day-to-day to the extraordinary, the non-quotidian. Numata has his models act out this state of suspension between two worlds; the "surface" of the title is presumably that interface or boundary. The subjects' pupil-less eyes appear to be scrutinizing us as we cross back and forth over our own interface with the extreme information space that is Tokyo.
Michiko Kon: Recent Works
8 January - 1 March 2014
Photo Gallery International
(Tokyo)

Kon's trademark style is to photograph objects she has constructed of food -- fish, fowl, fruit, vegetables. The objects are bizarre, but real in a curiously tangible way. These new works seem almost natural; the confidence Kon has gained over the years in her vision and her craft seems to manifest itself in a gently whimsical mood.
Ryusuke Kido
7 - 28 January 2014
LIXIL Gallery
(Tokyo)
"Light switches" made out of various colors of incense are arranged on a square table. On another table lies a pistol composed of ashes. Nearby, blocks of incense are stacked like buildings in a city. Kido's installation reeks of transience -- the inevitable return of the sturdiest objects to ashes and dust.
The tiger runs around and becomes butter.
7 - 28 January 2014
Koganecho Site-A Gallery
(Kanagawa)
Situated under the Keikyu Railway tracks in Yokohama's Koganecho district, Site-A recently featured four thirty-ish artists: Takuma Ikeda, Koichiro Kobayashi, Yuko Saka, and Kazuaki Yamane. Among them, Yamane's work stood out for his scrutiny of the gray area between value and worthlessness in a consumer society. One work consisted simply of a dollar bill pinned to the wall with a seal saying "$9.99" affixed to it. We've all seen "art" in this vein before, but it was gratifying to be reminded of that particular vein again.

Yutokutaishi Akiyama
9 - 25 January 2014
Gallery-58
(Tokyo)
Dada-pop artist, photographer, and former Tokyo gubernatorial candidate Akiyama (b. 1935) was feted in this museum-scale retrospective with a potpourri of stuff: his art school entrance exam certificate, his graduation piece, posters from his late-seventies political campaigns, his tin-toy sculptures, photos by the Leica Alliance (the cohort of camera-wielding artists of which he was a founding member), and more recent tin engravings -- some 250 works in all. The gallery's timing was impeccable, as the show coincided with the runup to this year's election for the Tokyo governorship.
Kota Kishi: Rubbish and Photography
20 January - 2 February 2014
photographers' gallery/ Kula Photo Gallery
(Tokyo)
Kishi has devoted the last few years to works that force photographs and physical objects into uneasy couplings. He is particularly enamored with rubble, as in his Barracks (2012) series, for which he mounted photos on slabs of scrap wood or plastic picked up at the sites of demolished buildings, and Things in There (2013), featuring images of objects encountered in towns devastated by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. For this show he brought a printer to the gallery, printed copies of images (including new works) from Barracks onto straw paper, and bound them into photo-collection books, which he sold on-site.
Kengo Nakamura: Ourselves in Today's World
14 January - 1 February 2014
Megumi Ogita Gallery
(Tokyo)
The English title of this show is somewhat prosaic; the Japanese title, which roughly translates as "Heart-Text Correspondence," better reflects what Nakamura is getting at here. His motifs are emoticons, which cover his canvases in abstract compositions that recall Klee and Kandinsky in their use of color and pattern. But his media of choice are the traditional pigments, paper, and techniques of Nihonga. In the sense that emoticons are devised to convey the texter's feelings to the textee as directly as possible, these works are indeed about striving for a correspondence between symbol and content.
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