Masuo Ikeda’s polymath abilities in the arts — ranging from printmaking to writing and ceramics — is mirrored in his diverse depictions of feminine eroticism. Posed provocatively in Ikeda’s works are his versions of Venus, virgins, brides, generic types and femme fatales, the Madonna ...

Nothing has changed since Aristotle noted a couple of thousand years ago that “it is not possible without considerable disgust to look upon the blood, flesh and similar parts of which the human body is constructed.” Much here in “Skin of/in Contemporary Art,” at ...

After the end of the Opium War in China in 1842, Shanghai opened itself to trade with the outside world. A little after that, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-64, which took place in southern China and Nanjing, funneled into the metropolis artists and scholars ...

“Place” and “presence” were two of the core concerns of Minimalism, the last thread of Modernism before it collapsed into Postmodernism’s stylistic confusion in the 1970s. Yet those two fundamental ideas are oddly inapplicable to Seung Keun Moon and Tadashi Yagi, both of whom ...

Regardless of one’s own relationship to religion, many of us are disposed to believe we can transcend the present world, rising above it to another super-reality, to a surreal world. A striking visual corollary to that idea is made by painter Hiroshi Asada’s “Landscape ...

Settling down into Yukio Fujimoto’s “Ears with Chair” (1990) and adjusting the two long tubes on either side to your ears, the drone of the electronic organs on the surrounding walls both intensifies and hollows out. The hushed voices of mingling spectators magnify, as ...

An array of recent exhibitions in Kyoto and Osaka offers an engaging cross section of contemporary art practice in western Japan. Fifty-two year-old Masahito Katayama’s most ambitious recent work, the 1,000-piece “Membrane” (2004), which took just shy of a year to complete, is showing ...

In 18th- and 19th-century Japan, the presence of female artists in painting circles slowly increased until in the 20th century, social reforms allowed them access to secondary education and vocational schools as well as art training, patronage and chances to compete in national exhibitions. ...

Finding their personal voice, something an artist can call their own, is a sublime achievement. The nihonga (Japanese-style) painter Insho Domoto (1891-1975) channeled the voices of at least a dozen others to forge his own unique one and create an exhaustive and encyclopedic body ...

In the summer of 1924, fresh out of art school in Japan and settling into the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris, Yuzo Saeki (1898-1928) was taken by his classmate Katsuzo Satomi to have his work critiqued by the Fauvist painter, anarchist and ...

In the drive to modernize Japanese art in the 19th century, artists frequently attempted to create a fusion of Eastern and Western styles of painting. But what at first sight seemed to be radical combinations of the two, now actually appear to be more ...

Kyoto National Museum Closes in 11 days Originally of Taoist origin but happily settled within Japanese Buddhism, “Immortals” are associated with the new year because they represent longevity, prosperity and resolutions. Kyoto National Museum’s auspicious exhibition, “The World of Immortals,” presents 30 works that ...