I don't much care for those explanatory texts we call "artists' statements," because if an artist has to explain a work of art, then it simply isn't standing on its own. Artists who spell out what their art means (and, in doing so, establish parameters regarding how one should see it), only succeed in compromising the joy experienced in discovering art.
And so I've always appreciated the fact that, even though they are filled with symbolism and allegory, Tomoko Konoike does not explain her paintings. An artist who broke onto the scene at the relatively advanced age of 40, Konoike has over the past five years or so established herself as one of the leading creative forces in Japan. Drawing from an unparalleled imagination, and working with tremendous technique and on a grand scale, Konoike's room-filling installations have already appeared in Japan's best museums, and slowly but surely the rest of the world has been catching on.
The artist's new show is "The Planets Are Temporarily Hidden by Clouds," now at the Mizuma gallery in Naka-Meguro. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a 3-meter-long, mirror-covered wolf that Konoike constructed for a solo exhibition at the Ohara Museum of Art in Okayama Prefecture last April and May. Wolves are nothing new for Konoike; her work has frequently included references to feral canines, usually in concert with a small and surreal set of complementary subject matter that includes daggers, bees and schoolgirls' legs.