Art can sometimes be surprisingly serious and po-faced, almost as if it were seen as a kind of substitute religion. Luckily, none of this pomposity attaches itself to the work of Sasae Ono, one of Japan’s most talented artists in the 20th-century, and the ...

Sometimes it seems that hands have a mind of their own. They remember where the keys are on a keyboard and which brushstroke in a Chinese character comes next, without too much conscious input from the brain. The instinctive way they work can also ...

The easiest way to describe this exhibition is “The meeting of two Mets,” with the Metropolitan Museum of Art Tokyo serving as a venue for 133 works from its much more renowned New York version, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, known simply as “The ...

When an artist feels compelled to incorporate words and poetry into many of his artworks, we get a sense that he may have taken up the wrong profession. This feeling of being unsettled in his art is something that comes up again and again ...

Paris in its heyday — between one set of Germans marching in (1871) and another (1940) — is one of those fabled cities that exists forever in the human consciousness; one that is often prefixed with the word “gay,” in its earlier and truer ...

There is an unseen hand behind The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art’s latest exhibition, “The Angel of History.” On the surface, this is an eclectic, almost random mix of avant-garde photography that spans the last 80 years and includes the work of Man Ray, ...

The Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum is deceptive in more ways than one. Not only is it a lot younger than it looks — it was built in 2009 as a recreation of a Meiji Era building — but the interior doesn’t quite match the exterior. ...

“China” has always been something of a simplification. This is because it is an idea that has been used to encapsulate a vast heterogeneous portion of the World’s population. With current relations with Japan tense, the idea of China as a monolithic giant with ...

Liechtenstein is the kind of place that philatelists and tax lawyers know best. Although an insignificant dot on the map, it has its own set of stamps and its small size allows it to offer tax advantages to thousands of holding companies. The latest ...

There is an idea common today that almost anything can be “art.” This probably has something to do with a certain Frenchman who exhibited a urinal as an “artwork” many moons ago; not to mention more recent absurdities. But, despite the looseness of the ...

With the typical “white box” museum, everything depends on the contents of the exhibition, but with the Mingeikan (The Japan Folk Crafts Museum), the museum itself is very much part of the experience. This is clear from the moment you slide open the entrance ...

Nineteenth century Russia is far better known for its composers and writers than for its artists. While the likes of Tchaikovsky, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy have a global resonance, the most famous Russian painters of the period remain internationally obscure. But this state of affairs ...