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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. |
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| Chihiro Kabata: Following the Shadow |
| 29 May - 21 June 2015 |
Art Front Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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| Kabata uses a ball pen to create her drawings, which are actually closer to paintings, sheets of paper buried in lines of ink. On the periphery the lines grow sparser, evoking wisps of hair, or at a further remove, clouds and waves. Her magnum opus is a 20-meter-long steel sheet covered with drawings. |
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| Natsuka Endo: Cutting Out Rivers |
| 3 - 15 June 2015 |
Yoyogi Art Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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| Endo paints pictures, in acrylic on paper, of people gathered in public spaces -- at concert venues, or the Takeshita Street exit of Harajuku Station, or the pyramids. One might say she paints the "air" of those places -- not what one actually sees there, but something invisible. |
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| Yu Hara, Nobuyuki Shimizu, Shunsuke Nouchi: "Raw Structurez" |
| 2 May - 13 June 2015 |
Harmas Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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| These three artists share an interest in revisiting the fundamentals of the picture plane. Shimizu uses paint to build up solid accretions, while Nouchi paints atop backgrounds made of scrap materials. Both are worth a look, but the standout here is Hara's work, which treats the canvas itself as an extension of the picture plane. |
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| Takashi Suzuki: Form-Philia |
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29 May - 12 July 2015 |
IMA Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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| Photographer Suzuki offers up a number of imaginative series: BAU, in which he piles up colorful sponges to form a variety of whimsical "structures"; the shadow-themed ARCA; and the new works of Fictum. For the latter he cuts images of buildings in Kyoto and other Japanese cities into fragments and rearranges them into fanciful "cityscape" montages. |
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| Nobuyoshi Araki: "KaoRi Through the Looking Glass: Photo-Mad Old Man A 2015.5.25 75th Birthday" |
| 25 May - 20 June 2015 |
Taka Ishii Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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Araki, the self-styled "mad old man" of Japanese photography, celebrates his birthday in the usual fashion with a solo show at Taka Ishii. Featured are a long row of 53 color prints, mainly of interior arrangements of various objects, and a parallel array of 119 monochrome images, taken with a compact camera and time-stamped, that make up his "personal diary." As suggested by the looking glass of the title, all the prints are mirror images, symbolizing, the photographer avers, his view these days of life from the "other side of the mirror." |
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| Sawako Goda: "There was neither the road nor the intention to leave, the tree of joy at the street corner where we met" |
| 26 May - 14 June 2015 |
Jiro Miura Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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| Goda presents a series of photographs of roses she has been shooting since 1994, as well as her oil paintings of flowers inspired by those images, which, she says, were not originally intended for public display. Regardless, photos and paintings alike are equally redolent of passion and carnality. |
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| Zeng Jianyong: The Lost Land |
| 6 June - 11 July 2015 |
Tokyo Gallery + BTAP
(Tokyo) |
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| In these ten ink-wash paintings on Chinese paper, Zeng depicts donkeys, cows, and other bucolic creatures in rather fairytale-like fashion. But the animals' bodies are half-skeletonized, definitely not the stuff of children's picture books. Could they represent a tacit critique of Chinese society? |
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Masaharu Sato: "1x1=1" |
18 April - 13 June 2015 |
imura Art Gallery
(Kyoto) |
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| Sato shoots digital photos of familiar people or surroundings, then messes with them on his computer to create animated or painted works of art. In this solo show of digital paintings he ups the weirdness quotient by repeating and serializing the same motifs in otherwise quotidian images. These are works that provoke the viewer to wonder why we feel that what we see in a photograph is real. |
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| Masakazu Fukuta: essence |
| 2 - 13 June 2015 |
The Third Gallery Aya
(Osaka) |
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| To date multimedia artist Fukuta has concentrated on rendering visible the process of creating video and photographic works in which multiple temporal axes are linked or layered together. For this show he displayed an installation in which images from a single-lens reflex camera were projected onto a wall, as well as a video depicting a camera interior through its lens, thus affording the viewer the vicarious experience of seeing "inside" the photographic process. |
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| Tani-Q: LAND e SCAPE |
| 2 - 14 June 2015 |
Gallery PARC
(Kyoto) |
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| Ceramist Tani-Q devotes himself to reviving the Koshigaraki style of pots and jars made in the ceramics mecca of Shigaraki, Shiga prefecture, during the 14th and 15th centuries. From vessels suspended at varying heights on the gallery wall, visitors could select those they liked and place flowers in them, decorate a virtual tea room, and so on. The show made viewers aware not only of the artist's single-minded dedication to Koshigaraki, but of the space inhabited and enlivened by his objects. |
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