The fusion of East and West is a major theme in 20th-century art, even though, in important ways, the two don’t mix. What seems at one point to be their ostensible unification, appears in another as discordant. Such inconsonance lurks in the background at ...

The establishment of a museum in the name of an individual is always, to a degree, a memorializing issue in preparation for the inevitable. The inauguration of the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art in many ways heralds such, and Yokoo’s oeuvre has often ...

For an artist, expatriation can be a kind of death — because for an artist, it can mean estrangement from the contexts and locations that secure a place in the annals of history that tend to emphasize centers over peripheries. El Greco (1541-1614), “The ...

The late 19th and 20th centuries witnessed a series of flip-flops among scholars as to whether calligraphy could be considered a fine art. Compared to painting and sculpture, wrote painter Koyama Shotaro in 1882, calligraphy did not attain the level of an art based ...

Japan, as elsewhere, has never had a singular art world but a plurality of formations. This is as true of pre-modern art as it is for Modernism and contemporary art — think of Takashi Murakami, his “factory” Kaikai Kiki and Geisai the art fair ...

Shingo Tanaka (b. 1983) has installed his panels so seamlessly into Kyoto’s eN arts gallery that the works first appear to be done on the walls. Though having trained as an oil painter, the soft scumblings and wisps of smoke and licks of fire ...

“The Cosmos as Metaphor’ at Taka Ishii Gallery and Hotel Anteroom Kyoto is almost entirely engaging. Bringing together many diverse artists, the expectation is that the exhibition concept is spread wide. Indeed “Multi-dimensional and magical time spaces” along with “untouched civilizations” and “other mythologies” ...

“Real Japanesque: The Unique World of Japanese Contemporary Art” at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, is in many ways a trying exhibition. Its concept claims that Japanese artists born after the 1970s are attempting to create something entirely new and that they are ...

“Function Dysfunction” at the Tomio Koyama Gallery, Kyoto, brings together the ceramic works of three Americans: ceramicists Adam Silverman and Ani Kasten, and sculptor Alma Allen. Silverman, who felt that their works shared an aesthetic DNA, brought the three together, explaining that their pieces, ...

Makito Okada, in his solo show at the imura art gallery, Kyoto, is concerned with rehabilitating the 18th- and 19th-century preoccupation with the Romantic aesthetic concept of the sublime. Instead of man being seen as in harmony with the natural world, obtaining aesthetic delight ...

“Shoichi Ida, Prints (1941-2006)” focuses on works bequeathed to The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, by the artist’s studio and family. Though mostly forgotten today, Ida could count among his acquaintances such renowned artists as modernist painter Robert Rauschenberg and minimalist sculptor Carl ...