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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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| KG+ Select 2019: Sangsun Bae - Moonbow |
| 12 April - 12 May 2019 |
Former Junpu Elementary School
(Kyoto) |
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| Korea-born, Japan-based artist Sangsun Bae was chosen to hold a solo show at KG+, an open-entry art festival held concurrently with the invitational photography festival Kyotographie 2019. It introduced her recent Moonbow series, the fruit of three years of research into the little-known history of the South Korean city of Daejon under the Japanese occupation from the early 1900s until the end of World War II, including the lives of the Japanese dwelling there. Her brilliantly conceived installation was perfectly suited to its venue, a classroom in a now-closed elementary school. |
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| Bone Music |
| 27 April - 12 May 2019 |
Ba-Tsu Art Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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| The flyer for this show featured a used X-ray photo recycled as a phonograph record. Such disks were actually made and played in the Soviet Union between the 1940s and 1960s as a medium for sharing banned music. Western culture was censored in the USSR during the Cold War, but fans of jazz or rock and roll hit upon the idea of recording the music on disks made of X-ray film discarded by hospitals. Known as "bone music," these records, which still bore the images of human skeletons, were bought and sold by music lovers in secret. The show is a lesson in how oppression can breed ingenious means of resistance. |
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| The 10th Gelatin Silver Session |
| 26 April - 6 May 2019 |
Axis Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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| The Gelatin Silver Session (GSS) series began in 2006 when Tamotsu Fujii, Taishi Hirokawa, Itaru Hirama, and Mikiya Takimoto exchanged negatives and printed them according to their respective tastes. For this year's installment, which we are told is the final one, 50 participating photographers presented previously unreleased silver halide prints along with their comments on the theme of "Photographs We Want to Preserve for 100 Years." |
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| Tokyo Independent 2019 |
| 18 April - 5 May 2019 |
Tokyo University of the Arts Chinretsukan Gallery
(Tokyo) |
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| This purportedly independent, unjuried, open-entry exhibition is touted as a revival of the Yomiuri Independent, a seminal contemporary art event in postwar Japan. But why now? Apparently because the last Yomiuri Independent was held in 1963, the year before the first Tokyo Olympics, and 2019 is the year before the second Olympics. Though contemporary-art competitions have proliferated in Japan's post-bubble years, not a few young artists express disdain for their fussy requirements. This one claims to welcome the participation of such misfits. |
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| KG+ 2019: Kai Maetani - Kapsel |
| 5 - 21 April 2019 |
Finch Arts
(Kyoto) |
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| Since 2012 Maetani has been shooting his Kapsel series of self-portraits in the buff. All of them show him sitting in the sterile environment of a capsule hotel and staring at the camera, remote shutter release in his hand. The lens captures the surreal space that extends behind the oval window of the capsule. Through this process of self-examination, Maetani not only scrutinizes his inner life, but also reveals, for better or worse, the larger social environment that surrounds him. |
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| Yoh Aoki: should, it suits, pleasant |
| 18 - 30 April 2019 |
Alt_Medium
(Tokyo) |
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| Through his camera lens, Aoki seeks to capture the instant when an everyday occurrence suddenly feels slightly discomfiting, when the familiar morphs into the unfamiliar. Images that may appear drab and trivial at first glance reward us upon closer inspection with a vicarious sharing of Aoki's delight in pressing the shutter upon encountering such moments. His pictures draw us into a poignant personal reality, a unique way of seeing the world. |
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| Kazuto Miura: Land |
| 11 - 23 April 2019 |
Gallery Saikousha
(Saitama) |
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| When I heard that Miura was spending time in the Tohoku region photographing areas devastated by the earthquake and tsunami of 2011, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. A classmate and close friend of the late photographer Shigeo Gocho at Kuwasawa Design School, Miura shared Gocho's coolly detached approach to portrayals of familiar people and places. However, the series at Gallery Saikousha, which he began shooting in April 2011 and continued over the course of two or three visits a year to coastal locales in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures, has all the more impact because Miura's stance has not changed one bit. |
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