When I visited “The Splendor of the Khitan Dynasty” at the University Art Museum, Tokyo, I got a funny feeling that Japan somehow wanted to preserve good diplomatic relations with this mighty Empire. This makes perfectly good sense given this state’s great military strength ...

The first exhibition at the newly renovated Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art (TMMA) was always going to be an important one. After a two-year closure to let the builders in, it wouldn’t have sufficed to just have a run-of-the-mill exhibition. Something special was required, ...

It is becoming increasingly common for Japanese art museums to host exhibitions bearing the names of famous overseas art venues. If the source institution is famous enough, this will give a show of otherwise disparate works of art instant glamour and an identity. The ...

A good portion of Japan’s summer is dedicated to honoring the dead. Memorial services in early August remember lives lost to the atomic bombings of 1945, while the Bon holidays pay respect to familial ancestors. The Mori Arts Center Gallery in Tokyo is also ...

The Renaissance and in particular Giorgio Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists” (1550) played a key role in elevating the lowly artist — formerly regarded as a mere craftsman — into something far grander and godlike. Nowadays some art collectors seem to want the opposite, ...

The Arab Spring may not be all it’s cracked up to be. There are clearly problems with a large swath of nations, formerly under various forms of authoritarian regimes, switching relatively quickly to “democracy,” at least as it is understood in the West. But ...

In today’s complex world, in which we are routinely overburdened with data, intuition and a visceral response to imagery is increasingly trumping rational discourse, according to Thomas Demand. But this is something the German artist, whose work is the subject of a major solo ...

One of the features of Europe’s interwoven network of royal families was that it led to a great deal of cultural transference between the different states. In order to avoid marrying beneath themselves, royals were tempted to look abroad for spouses, with the result ...

There’s something counter-intuitive about photographic artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. While most artists are happy to achieve a distinctive style and enjoy the rewards that this brings, Sugimoto is forever reinventing the wheel by developing, then abandoning, one style after another. “I’m always trying to come ...

Echoing the Pan-Asian theme of this year’s Art Fair Tokyo, which was held earlier this month, Shibuya’s shop-based Diesel Gallery is hosting a free exhibition of the visually striking work of Chen Man, a young Chinese artist. The 32-year-old Beijing-based native of Inner Mongolia ...