The word “feminist” has been stripped of the luster it had back in the 1970s, and few Japanese women are more aware of this than Michiko Kasahara. Widely regarded as one of Japan’s leading feminist curators, Kasahara was responsible for groundbreaking exhibitions such as ...

Japan is in the midst of a “Korea boom.” It seems that the smiling face of Bae Yong Joon is everywhere, and almost 10,000 (mostly) female fans greeted the superstar Korean actor when he arrived at Narita airport last November. Perhaps sparked by 2002′s ...

When we hearken back to the revolutionary 1960s, a decade increasingly “remembered” by people who in fact weren’t even alive at the time, the soundtrack that rings in our ears is, of course, rock ‘n’ roll. But during the period there was a parallel ...

It has been 91 years since Luigi Russolo published his manifesto “The Art of Noises,” in which the Italian Futurist implored, “We must break out of this narrow circle of pure musical sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise sounds.” Answering Russolo’s battle ...

The stories of her terrible childhood and of haunting hallucinations have created the widely accepted view that Yayoi Kusama’s art emerges from unimaginable suffering. It is difficult to find anything said about Kusama that does not dwell on her mental illness and she herself ...

Much has been made, in art and elsewhere, of the “East meets West” cliche. Here in Japan in the latter decades of the 19th century, the Meiji government sent boatloads of painters to Europe to study yoga (Western-style painting). They brought back oils and ...

Dear Reader, Let me start by saying that in more than 10 years spent visiting galleries and writing on art in Tokyo, I have never encountered anything more disturbing than the photographs of Slawomir Rumiak. It would be a grand understatement to say that ...

In this world, most people get to be teenagers for exactly seven years. And then there’s the artist Larry Clark. Born in Tulsa, Okla., in 1943, Clark has been living and reliving the teen experience for some six decades. His photograph books — including ...

I would estimate that for every artist sipping champagne at an opening reception — clad in Gaultier and coiffed with contrived insouciance — there are hundreds of other artists sitting alone in cheap apartments eating cold noodles. “Starving artist” may be a cliche, but ...

Bombarded as we are with the media’s sound bites and video clips, it is difficult to imagine a time when the task of recording and recounting the news of the world was assigned to artists and their paintings. For several centuries, historical painting was ...